On November 29, 2022, the Monagas family last heard from Lismar Monagas. Since then, the family has been unsure about what happened to Lismar, a 21-year-old Venezuelan woman who, at the time, was living in Peru and under the control of a group connected to human trafficking.
Lismar left Venezuela on October 16, 2021, without any warning. Her grandfather, Leonel Monagas, later found out that Lismar, who he had raised as a daughter in the El Cementerio neighborhood, a working-class area in the west of Caracas, had left the country irregularly, without a passport, by bus.
This was Lismar's first time leaving Venezuela. She was feeling happy and hopeful. She documented her journey through Colombia and Ecuador in videos and with video calls to her family. However, Leonel was concerned. He suspected that something bad might happen, and his fears were justified: Lismar had been captured by a human trafficking network without her knowledge.
“In the first few days she told me that they gave her things and clothes, and I told her that this was dangerous, and that they were going to charge her because I suspected why they had taken her,” Leonel said.
Several Venezuelan women have become victims of human trafficking networks recently. But Lismar’s story highlights how these networks are now using new tactics, such as increasingly recruiting victims beyond the Colombian border and using women more often to recruit others.
Being Trapped in Sexual Exploitation
Like the nearly eight million Venezuelans who have migrated, Lismar Monagas left her country to support her family — particularly her eight-year-old son and her grandfather, Leonel. However, instead of finding the better circumstances she hoped for, she became one of the many Venezuelan women who fell victim to human trafficking.
As per Mulier Venezuela, a non-governmental organization that studies the trafficking of Venezuelan women in Latin America, 415 Venezuelan women were rescued from trafficking networks in 2021. This number has gone up since then. In 2022, the most recent year with statistics, 1,390 Venezuelan women were rescued, including 294 girls and adolescents.
However, these are only the women who have been rescued and documented. The actual number of trafficking victims inside and outside of Venezuela is likely much higher. Venezuela’s Minister of Interior and Justice Remigio Ceballos Ichaso announced earlier this year that authorities had dismantled 16 criminal gangs dedicated to human trafficking and rescued 55 victims. However, these cases are generally underreported, so government data is usually just a fraction, as well as unreliable.
Venezuelan Migrants Remain Easy Prey for Organized Crime
“The state does not report data for many cases of violence against women. This is part of the Venezuelan government’s policy of opacity, where they do not fulfill their duties,” Estefania Mendoza, a lawyer and coordinator for Mulier Venezuela, told InSight Crime.
As the number of women trafficked has increased, trafficking victims are increasingly being recruited further from the Colombia-Venezuela border, like Lismar, in the center of the country. Due to the worsening economic crisis and the complex humanitarian crisis, criminals were pushed to seek victims in other areas, Mendoza explained.
The person mentioned that this situation is making it more common for unscrupulous people to exploit others for money.
The Collectors
Lismar's journey started when a friend from her neighborhood in Caracas offered her a job as a sex worker in Peru. She was promised contacts and travel arrangements, but she never expected to become a victim of sexual exploitation.
In the region, it's typical for women to recruit other women. While there is no specific data by nationality, women make up 45% of those prosecuted for human trafficking in South America, according to the latest United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report on human trafficking. report on human trafficking.
Mendoza stated that women are often the weakest link in sexual exploitation networks, making them vulnerable to being forced to recruit other young women. She explained that women use their gender and nationality to build trust and recruit others.
This way of operating is becoming more common.
On March 12, 2024, officers from the Scientific, Criminal and Criminalistic Investigations Corps (CICPC) rescued four young women in Táchira, a state bordering Colombia. It appears that they had been recruited by another previously recruited minor.
A CICPC official informed InSight Crime that the unit also rescued four young women in 2022 in Aragua state who were recruited by friends. The official explained that the friends told them how much money they could make as sex workers and that they only needed to take a few photos to go to Peru. This case gained significant attention, according to the official, who spoke anonymously due to not being authorized to speak to the press.
In addition to victims being recruited by other victims, the economic crisis in Venezuela has led to instances where family members and close friends deliver young women to sexual exploitation networks. In their desperation, these young women agree to what they believe are genuine job offers, according to police sources interviewed by InSight Crime.
“We are not only talking about vulnerable migrant women being targeted, but also about women, girls and adolescents in Venezuela who are in a very precarious economic situation,” Mendoza specified. “Women’s bodies always end up being like a currency,” she said.
A Living Hell
Upon arriving in Peru, instead of working with her friend, Lismar found herself in the hands of a criminal organization. They imposed a high-interest “debt” on her for the expense of getting her out of Venezuela, a friend told InSight Crime. She had to pay a daily fee, and if she didn't earn enough, the debt would increase.
For months, Lismar was sexually exploited by the human trafficking network that took her to Peru.
They bought her clothes, put fake nails on her, and gave her money for makeup so she could work in a retail area. There were slow days when she had no business, and they would send her to a hotel in lingerie to be used by the men who visited. And when she did nothing, they took her away… to punish her,” her friend said.
Soon, her family found out that things were not going well.
“She started to change. She began to say that she had a debt and that they were making her do things against her will. She said she wanted to pay that debt to go to Venezuela,” said her grandfather Leonel. “One time she called me crying, saying that she wanted to come home, that every day she had to be with three men … She had to pay 200 soles a day [$50] and when she didn’t make the money, it [her debt] grew,” he added.
Tren de Aragua’s Criminal Portfolio: Adapt or Die
But the debt was impossible to pay, and some time later, several of her relatives received extortion calls with death threats from a woman who identified herself as Oriana Hernández, and who was supposedly Lismar’s boss. In the messages, she demanded money to pay off Lismar’s debt in Peru.
Although Hernández never mentioned the name of a criminal gang, Leonel and Lismar’s relatives turned to social networks, mainly Facebook, to investigate. They started keeping an eye on Lismar’s friends in Peru.
“One of them identified herself as connected to Hijos de Dios (Children of God), and in some publications she included some train [emojis], so it is possible that they have ties to Tren de Aragua,” said one of Lismar’s relatives, who asked not to be identified.
Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that has spread across the region, and one of its factions in Peru, Hijos de Dios, have been involved in the sexual exploitation of Venezuelan and Peruvian women for several years.
In December 2022, one of Leonel Monagas’ former neighbors, who is now based in Colombia and has ties to gangs in Peru, told Lismar’s family that she had been killed for failing to pay her debt. Peruvian authorities, however, have not confirmed the murder, nor do they have any trace of Lismar.
Since the young woman migrated to Peru, her grandfather Leonel has had trouble sleeping. He splits his time between his work as a laborer and his efforts to find his granddaughter, whom he affectionately calls “cachito.” He takes some comfort in an arrangement of balloons that she sent him in June 2022 for Father’s Day in Venezuela, and listening to voice notes that Lismar sent him before she lost communication with her family. For now, he said, he will keep following any trail that could lead to his granddaughter.