Everything started with a simple candy. Karla Jacinto was stood up that day by her friends, who she was waiting for to go skating. She was 12 years old then and her only escape from her problems at home was street skating. She had no female friends, she only had two male friends and they didn't show up that day.
A boy with a box approached her and gave her a candy from a secret admirer, 10 years her senior. Three months later, her living nightmare began.
“I was abused from a very young age. I grew up in an incredibly violent household. My [pimp] approached me, and invited me to eat ice cream. I was very shy and I would've never opened up to anyone about what was happening to me at home,” recalled Karla.
The young man, little by little, earned her trust. He told her he also suffered from physical abuse at home. Karla, for the first time, felt that she could identify with someone and she opened up to him. “I told him everything I had bottled up inside my entire life. I vented and he was the first person to find out what was happening to me. We cried together, he told me he understood me, that he knew too well what I was going through and I thought, 'wow!'”
They saw each other again after a week. He offered her to go to Puebla because he was a “businessman” who had to go there on business. He called her “princess,” constantly wooed her with flowers and gifts and before too longer, Karla convinced her father to let her go to Puebla.
“We went to Puebla and Tlaxcala. He called his brother and he picked us up in a car that I thought was fabulous. We strolled around town and I met his cousins. They knew everything about me and they assured me that he loved me and wanted to pursue something serious with me. I always longed to have a family of my own, so when they told me those things I started to get my hopes up. I would get butterflies in my stomach.”
Karla got back home very late that night and after an argument with her mother, they kicked her out of her house and she moved to Tlaxcala with the young man. “I chose the opportunity that had just presented itself to me. For the first time in my life, someone offered me respect, love and compassion.”
The first three months were perfect. She was surrounded by love, romantic talks, clothes and shoes. But a short while later something seemed off to Karla about that house in Tlaxcala.
Women came and went every week and her now boyfriend assured her that they were all business people, just like his entire family. But shortly thereafter he told her the truth. “He confessed that his cousins were pimps and I didn't really know what that meant. He told me they watched over women who were prostitutes and he would ask me, 'what would happen if you worked in this business?' He would constantly ask me things like that and say he was just joking. But eventually, he told me I had to work, and I pictured myself washing dishes, cleaning homes. But no, he explained to me what I was going to do, how long I should last, what I had to do in the room, and he sent me to Puebla with another woman.”
Once in Puebla, she saw for the first time a “brothel runway,” where several women stood in a line behind a red curtain. “I was so scared.”
They didn't let her work because she was 12 years old, so they got her a fake I.D. Her first time was in Guadalajara.
“When I was with a man for the first time, he asked me why the guy who supposedly loved me was hurting me so much? Why would he let other men touch me if he said he wanted to start a family with me?”
Karla serviced 30 – 40 clients per day, both men and women. She worked 12 hours shifts during the week and even longer hours on weekends. She also took pain killers in order to endure the grueling days. “You feel dead after the first time. Young girls are considered fresh meat. They would insult me, hit me, spit on me, they wouldn't respect me and this was my life day in and day out. I lived this for four years,” said Karla.
During those four years, she worked in Guadalajara, Irapauto and then Puebla. Her boyfriend beat her with cables, chains and even nails. On one occasion, she was burned with an iron. At 14 she had aborted twice, once twins. And at 15, she had a daughter, who was taken from her for over a year.
“The authorities who are supposed to help us also paid to have sex with us. Not only that, but when they came, all clients had to leave so they could have us to themselves. Federal police officers while in uniform. They're supposed to help us, but no, they also just used us as if we were inatimate objects.”
She never built up the courage to leave because they threatened to kill her family. Then they threatened to kill her daughter.
One of her clients, the only one who ever treated her like a human being, helped her escape. He gave her money for her to use to convince her pimp to allow her to see daughter and go home. In order to leave, she had to do what she always feared: teach another girl to become a prostitute.
“He eventually returned my daugther to me and my client helped me take a taxi to the bus station so I could return to Mexico City.”
Karla was taken in by the Fundación Camino a Casa (which roughly translates to the Journey Back Home Foundation), where she's receiving psychological help and is learning how to be a mother, believe in herself and succeed in life despite her scaring, tumultuous and horrendous childhood.
