Ana María arrived in a small village in Lugo (Galicia) from her native Colombia three years ago, alone, and with hardly any money.
There, her compatriots told her about a placement agency that hired girls for domestic service.
She had no papers and was looking for a job.
Without any qualifications, she started working 24 hours a day, seven days a week as a caregiver for the elderly.
She earned a pittance and did not have the right to vacation: "I freed two days in three years that were deducted from my salary," confesses Ana María in this video report.
She is one of the complainants, along with 80 other women, of an alleged network of labor exploitation of domestic workers in the Galician town of Castroverde.
The video that accompanies this piece recounts the experience of these vulnerable, foreign and undocumented people, who become the perfect target for labor exploitation networks.
How do the mafias work?
Who are these criminal networks?
"We have noticed a change when it comes to acting, now these mafias try to capture their victims here in Spain and not in the country of origin because that way they save the penalty that a crime as serious as human trafficking entails. and they only assume that of labor exploitation”, points out the lawyer of the NGO Aliad-Ultreia, Gerardo Pardo de Vera, who emphasizes that the intention in one case and in another is the same: to abuse a fragile person.
The crime of trafficking in human beings for the purpose of labor exploitation, increasingly frequent in our country, is being heavily prosecuted by the security forces.
This video report also covers the work of the Human Trafficking Section of the Criminal Intelligence Unit of the Civil Guard, which, in collaboration with the Prosecutor's Office, orders inspections of workplaces and acts preventively with the aim of protecting women. victims.
For Beatriz Sánchez, prosecutor of the Aliens Coordinating Chamber, labor trafficking
“
is the most miserable form of externalization of slavery in the 21st century.
A very serious attack against the dignity of people that we cannot afford as a modern society”.