MIAMI – Experts say the arrest of a Miami pharmacist is bringing new consideration to the superiority of child sex tourism in Colombia.
Authorities stated simply as Stefan Andres Correa stepped onto a Miami International Airport jet bridge to board a flight to Bogotá Friday, an outbound border seek published the 42-year-old — touring by myself — was once sporting about 9 mobile phones.
On a few of the ones units, federal brokers would uncover pictures and movies of Correa raping younger ladies and a dialog with a sex trafficker about his plans to victimize an 11-year-old woman, prosecutors allege.
Court paperwork state that in a graphic collection of textual content messages, Correa promised that each the trafficker and the lady would get $300,000 Colombian pesos — about $75 — and the lady would obtain an iPhone, so long as he was once allowed to rape her in Medellín.
He had identical conversations and made identical guarantees about any other woman of identical age, prosecutors allege.
“I don’t want her to say ‘no,’” they allege Correa texted the trafficker in Spanish, later telling him, “Please don’t interrupt, no matter what happens, OK?”
Investigators stated Correa instructed them he flew to Colombia on a lot of events to sexually abuse youngsters. Prosecutors stated that information display he traveled to Colombia kind of 45 occasions since 2022.
Medellín’s mayor sounded off on the platform X, previously referred to as Twitter, after the arrest, posting in phase: “These abuses against our children have been occurring with great intensity for years. We are not going to rest in this fight that has only just begun.”
Mayor Fico Gutiérrez added the English hashtag “#Don’tEvenTryIt.”
“Unfortunately since the ‘Cocaine Cowboy’ days back in the 80s there has been a war on children and that has led to the sexual exploitation of children,” lawyer Kristen Reynoso Jackwin, who has represented purchasers in federal investigations, instructed Local 10 News. “It is children as young as 12 years old and they are finding U.S. citizens with children in hotel rooms and it is horrific.”
Gutiérrez recently announced new measures to battle child sex tourism, together with seizing homes from homeowners that permit the sexual exploitation of minors.
Jackwin stated whilst she commends the mayor, extra must be accomplished.
“Because simply shutting them down, there are always other ways that they can open up new locations to continue to do this exploitation of children,” she stated.
Jackwin stated prosecuting circumstances isn’t the one goal defined in a partnership between the U.S. and Colombia, signed two years in the past, however defined it’s key to robustly combatting child sex tourism.
That partnership is named the U.S. – Colombia Child Protection Compact.
“You actually prosecute the offenders and that has been an issue, because a lot of these cases are not actually prosecuted,” Jackwin stated. “There are 200,000 children in Colombia that are affected by sex crimes every single year and a mere couple of thousand are actually prosecuted, so making more strides that the prosecution happens and these children are treated as victims as opposed to perpetrators of crimes themselves.”
The U.S. Embassy in Colombia has promoted joint measures with officers in the rustic to battle sex trafficking.
Medellín: The sinister aspect of an building up in world tourism
Local 10 News spoke with knowledgeable to provide an explanation for why Medellín has advanced a name for child sex trafficking.
Larry Gumbiner, a retired U.S. diplomat who spent two stints at America’s embassy in Bogotá, stated Colombia is “opening up to the world and, with that, you are seeing a lot of the underbelly of international tourism, which is the international sex tourist trade.”
Gumbiner now works at consulting company WestExec Advisors as its senior marketing consultant for Latin America and the Caribbean. He stated Colombia went via a long time of low tourism owing to inner battle between the rustic and guerilla teams.
Gumbiner stated when that in the end calmed down, “it kind of opened up a whole new country that had not been available to many tourists.”
“So you began to see, particularly in Medellín which was the epicenter of Pablo Escobar’s fiefdom — and it was a dangerous place to be for many years — finally became opened up to the world,” he stated.
As town has wiped clean up its symbol, cracking down on the drug business to draw vacationers, with that has come child sex vacationers, Gumbiner stated.
“It is a wonderful city, lots of attractions, great weather, attracting tourists and along with that, what we have seen, prostitution is legal in Colombia for adults, but prostitution among minors began to explode and with it developed a reputation as a place you can go, because it’s inexpensive for Americans,” he stated.
Gumbiner added that Gutiérrez is most probably weighing in on the problem now since the fresh top profile arrests of U.S. voters there has catapulted the problem into the court docket of public opinion.
“This has been building for many years in terms of Medellin and the growth of this industry,” Gumbiner stated. “It built into a crescendo when they found an American citizen with two underage girls in his hotel room. I think, finally, for the political system, it reached a breaking point where the mayor felt he had to do something.”
As for Correa’s case, the pharmacist, going through federal fees of tried sex trafficking of a minor and tried trip to have interaction in illicit sex habits, is scheduled to seem in Miami federal court docket Friday for a detention listening to.
If discovered accountable, he faces a compulsory minimal sentence of 15 years in jail with a most sentence of lifestyles in jail, in addition to as much as an entire life of supervised liberate.
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