Editorial: Wipe out modern slavery

Ft. Myers News-Press, November 4, 2011

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, is taking on a noble cause by using his platform to call attention to human trafficking.

“It’s a much bigger problem than I think most people are aware of and Florida, unfortunately, plays a role,” said Rubio of West Miami.

The senator, elected in 2010, said human traffickers commit this crime against as many as 20,000 people a year in Florida.

Human trafficking is akin to modern-day slavery and has been documented numerous times in Southwest Florida — via unscrupulous people who force illegal immigrants and even kidnapped U.S. citizens into prostitution or farm labor.

The News-Press has reported on incidents in Southwest Florida for years, and our activism truly started in 2005 when authorities discovered a 13-year-old Guatemalan girl forced into domestic servitude and raped by her captors in Cape Coral.

Back then, we honored local heroes for spurring this campaign: Anna Rodriguez of the Florida Coalition Against Human Trafficking and Zonta International Sanibel-Captiva members Darla LeTourneau, Karen Pati and Nola Theiss (now of the Florida Human Trafficking Awareness Partnership).

Numerous other individuals from law enforcement, child welfare, social services, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, education and the community joined forces to keep watch in local task forces and projects.

Local representatives of the Statewide Task Force on Human Trafficking include Lee County Sheriff Mike Scott and Laura Germino of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, who became the first U.S. citizen to win a State Department award for her work against modern-day slavery.

It has been a challenge to identify and save victims.

Over the years a handful of cases have been prosecuted. The biggest recent case was the famed Navarrete case in which an Immokalee family enslaved 12 people forced to pick tomatoes in area fields. Family members went to federal prison in 2008.

Federal prosecutor Doug Molloy called it one of Southwest Florida’s “biggest, ugliest slavery cases ever.”

Earlier this year at the Imagine Solutions conference in Naples, former slave Somaly Mam addressed the audience about her work to help free 4,000 former slaves in her native Cambodia.

Rubio’s advocacy couldn’t come at a better time because finding illegal immigrants to testify against traffickers is a challenge.

According to an Associated Press report last month, the federal government has offered 5,000 special visas this year for victims to testify, but so far only 524 victims applied for them.

Much of this hesitancy has been attributed to a culture of fear created by a record number of deportations under the Obama administration.

The administration is simultaneously touting this achievement while encouraging illegal immigrants to cooperate with authorities.

No wonder people are reluctant to speak up.

A promised immigration reform would go a long way to solving this problem.

In the meantime, we encourage Rubio to continue his advocacy and help craft legislation that will help wipe out modernday slavery once and for all.