Two years after being captured, the trial begins against the members of a structure of trafficking in persons, which used two businesses that offered massages in zones 10 and 13 capital.
The investigations of the Prosecutor’s Office against Trafficking from the Public Ministry showed that the structure received at least Q8 million between 2019 and 2023, for allegedly sexually exploiting women at the headquarters of Oasis spa.
In 2023 the supposed members of the band were arrested, including two of the leaders: Silvia Lorena Jiménez Sánchez and Louis Estuardo Véliz Prera.
Jiménez, Véliz and three other people face trial for the crimes of human trafficking, money laundering and illicit association.
The investigations show that the structure would have forced women to provide sexual services at the Oasis Spa headquarters. Customers paid between Q300 and Q1 thousand for each sexual service.
Among the victims of that trafficking network there are minors and the Colombian Daniela Patiño Hnestrozawho, after denouncing them, was found dead in Mexico.
Victim of human trafficking
“Mom, this is no job, this is a white trafficking. They are asking me for a million pesos (Colombians) to pay the trip. They will kill me, I call the police,” said the texts that Daniela Patiño sent her mother in August 2019, when she arrived in Guatemala from Colombia.
On August 12, 2019, the young Colombian told her parents, Martha Hnestroza and Elkin Patiño, that her journey through the world would not end the trip she had made months ago to Israel, but now she would do it to Europe, because a friend of her had offered her safe job.
Four days later he undertook the trip, but he did not go to Spain, but ended in Guatemala.
Patiño assured his parents that he had been kidnapped and that if he did not pay the money they demanded they would not release it.
The parents gathered the money and sent it. Patiño replied a text message warning that he had delivered the money and then fled to Playa del Carmen, Quintana Roo, Mexico.
In July 2023, seven people linked to the network that is supposed to be behind their recruitment arrested in Guatemala; Two of them were already convicted.
The investigations suggest that Jiménez Sánchez and Véliz prera “attract, through deception, in various forms and media, women and adolescents to sexually exploit them in the Guatemalan capital.”
According to the Public Ministry, both sent women and adolescents to massage or sexual quotes in zones 10 and 13 of the country’s capital; In addition, they recruited foreigners, who took their passports and demanded money in exchange for freeing them, as in the case of Patiño, whose disappearance was reported in September 2019, and then was found without life.
The Public Ministry indicated that on May 13 the trial will continue against the five members of the Network of Trafficking in Persons.