The Supreme Court has confirmed the sentences of up to 27 and a half years in prison that the courts of Castilla-La Mancha imposed on two pimps for sexually exploiting four Colombian women, especially in several apartments in Talavera de la Reina. The judges have rejected the latest appeals of the two women prosecuted for recruiting the victims in their country, where they were already practicing prostitution, and then subjecting them to what the courts have defined as “wild sexual exploitation.”
Police officers came upon this pimp ring while investigating another similar group and interrogating a trafficking victim in Valladolid. They then discovered that two women based in Talavera had been recruiting women who were already working as prostitutes in their native Colombia for several years, getting them to fly to Spain and once in the city, informing them that they had a debt that, in some cases, reached 13,000 euros. .
A debt that, as is common in trafficking networks, the victims had to pay through prostitution, but not under the conditions in which they had been told it would take place. They had to be available all day, they did not choose their clients and they had to submit to any type of demand from their captors. Meanwhile, a significant portion of their profits had to go to the organization.
“I accepted out of necessity, but it was true exploitation,” said one of the victims during the trial at the Toledo Court, a court that went so far as to describe what happened as “wild sexual exploitation.” All of them were threatened so that they would continue handing over the money, one of them even after having escaped from the clutches of the group: “They are going to kill your children,” the accused even said to one of the women. The victims, the judges added, “did not have the slightest idea” of the subjugation they were going to suffer both in Talavera and in other cities to which they were eventually transferred.
The Supreme Court has just ruled on the case by confirming the sentences imposed in the second instance by the Superior Court of Justice of Castilla-La Mancha: 27 and a half years in prison for one of the women and 22 years for the other, in addition to various fines and the obligation to compensate the four victims with 6,000 euros each. At first, the Toledo Court imposed higher sentences, but the TSJ replaced some “abusive” prison sentences with financial fines.
The Criminal Chamber has rejected the appeals of the two convicted women, who throughout the judicial process tried to base their defense on the fact that the victims were already prostitutes in Colombia and that they knew that in Spain they were going to do the same and that the complaint was had executed to get the papers. “Each one is big and knows what she is doing,” said one of the pimps at the trial.
Without being able to decide about their own bodies
The Supreme Court explains that “it is irrelevant” that they had already been prostituted in the past and in another country. “What is relevant is that the objective of those who brought them was to profit from their exploitation, placing them in a situation of vulnerability, losing autonomy and even the ability to make decisions over their own bodies,” says the high court.
The fact that they knew that they were also going to be prostituted in Spain does not make what they did with them any less criminal. “They came to Spain knowing that they were going to practice prostitution and that they were assuming a debt, but they were deceived about the form of exploitation in which the activity was going to be carried out, leaving them plunged into a growing situation of vulnerability.”
The two convicted women were part of an organization with branches in Colombia, although other possible suspects have not been tried. Their sentence attributes crimes of illegal immigration to them for bringing women into Spain illegally and posing as tourists, in addition to crimes related to human trafficking, both in its aspects of sexual exploitation and labor exploitation.
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