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Fighting against Human Trafficking and the Sex Trade: An Interview with Teresa Ulloa Ziaurriz

Teresa Ulloa Ziaurriz has a degree in education from the Instituto Nacional de Pedagogia and a master's degree in education sciences from the London School of Education at the University of London, England. She is a graduate of the Law School at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. In 1997, she studied for a certificate in "Women's Human Rights and Development" in Brussels, Belgium, with funding from the European Economic Union and the International Federation of Human Rights. She also obtained a certificate in education and values, gender and law, and international humanitarian law at the Sorbonne in Paris. Most recently she obtained a certificate in public policy and public administration from New York University. She was a candidate for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize within the 1,000 Women for Peace Project. She has rescued more than 650 women and children from internal and international trafficking with sexual exploitation purposes. She is the founder and general coordinator of the Legal Collective "Companera" and "Defensoras Populares, A.C." As a legal representative of the victims, she has litigated more than 25,000 rape cases in which women and girls were the victims. She has also participated as an expert on violence and gender discrimination in three political asylum cases that included family violence before the Migration Courts in the United States and in one abduction case before the Federal Courts in New York that was the first to apply the Hague Conventions in favor of mother and children victims of family violence. HJHP How did you start working as an advocate for the victims of human trafficking? Ziaurriz I started working as a lawyer for union trades. One day, a group of women came to visit one of the unions [where] I was consulting asking [for] help because two little girls were raped by many men--a gang rape. The Solidarity, the union, gave these women from a very poor area in the metropolitan area of Mexico City ... assistance from a lawyer. And that lawyer was me. Since then, I've been working against sexual violence. I've been working in this area for forty years of my life. [This area of work] is very painful and deals a lot with power, patriarchy, and violence against women and girls. I became an expert, and I started designing [program] models to try to make it easier for [women] on these legal procedures. We put a lot of [the abusers] in jail. Things didn't change at all. So we decided we needed to do more interdisciplinary interventions, and we needed to not only take care of the victims [but also] do some prevention. We founded Popular Defenders, [an organization that trains citizen groups to work with victims of gender violence], and we started working on women's and girls' human rights. We start[ed] an education program for community leaders so they become promoters of their own rights and ... defend their rights, [defend] the other women, and [defend] the children's rights. In those years, it was not very clear what ... trafficking [was]. It's like [the] trade of human beings. It was trade for paid sex, and I have learned a lot since then: the damage, the consequences, but also [that] it's a multifactorial issue of organized crime. More and more it's being perpetuated by the drug cartels, at least in Latin America, in Mexico, in Central America, and in ... Argentina. It's difficult because some countries in our vision have this abolitionist scope, some others have legalized sex work, and some others punish the women, not the traffickers or the johns. It's difficult. I believe it was in 2003, our former regional director, who was based in Caracas, Venezuela, passed away because of breast cancer, and they asked me to take care of the region. I started working with twelve networks in twelve different countries and Mexico. Now we are in twenty-five countries. I still need to work on the English Caribbean region. …