The businessmen accused of being involved in a prostitution ring with minors will not go to prison. Of the maximum sentences of 24 to 56 years that they were facing, they will finally be sentenced to a sentence of between five months and two years for each of the crimes. Regarding compensation, the accused must pay between 500 and 2,000 euros per victim. Added to this are the fines, which vary between 450 and 720 euros.
The defendants agreed to reduce their prison sentences and avoid a trial, in exchange they admitted the facts. Among the arguments for reducing the sentence was the mitigating circumstance of the abusive denunciations: in other words, the delay in the judicial process, which took 10 years to complete.
Those who are sentenced to 5-month prison terms for each of the victims are guaranteed not to go to prison. The situation of those prosecuted and sentenced to 2-year sentences remains to be confirmed: “This is what we hear [la suspensión de penas]”But it is something that the Court must consider,” explained Paola Marcela Suarez, one of the defense lawyers.
All those investigated knew that the victims, who were between 14 and 17 at the time, were under the age of majority, according to the indictment. The plot was uncovered in 2014 and the victims had to wait a decade for the trial to begin.
Among the clients prosecuted for using this network of minors are renowned businessmen from the region, such as JC, a real estate developer and former vice president of the Confederation of Business Organizations of Cartagena, who left his position in 2014 when the conspiracy was discovered. Members of a law firm are also implicated, who requested that girls be brought to their office.
The defendants knew they were hiring girls and solicited them voluntarily. The prosecution says that one of the defendants, nicknamed “El Petrolero,” always asked for “young and new girls to have sex with them.” The prosecution describes how one of the victims was forced to lie about his age: “Saying he was even younger than he was, that is, saying he was 15 or 16, because that made the clients look older. “Morbid.”
They caught them in clubs and schools
The pimps created an entire exploitation network where they demanded images of themselves in certain poses from minors, which they then included in a catalogue. In total, there were photos of more than 400 people, including the images of the twelve girls who were released. “They captured girls at the doors of juvenile clubs and even schools, some from broken families and others in situations of need and vulnerability,” the prosecution’s indictment details.
The document explains how the organizers of this network deceived young women by promising them “a lot of money” in exchange for positions as masseuses, always with the aim of introducing them to their profession of offering sexual services to the elderly. Of the amount received by the pimps, the victims received only a little more than a third.
“I had met her in a nightclub where there were many underage girls, in the evening, from five to ten o’clock in the evening, in order to get her to prostitute herself for her, without her having ever considered this possibility before,” he says. The prosecution reports one of the captures.
In addition to the people involved in recruiting the girls, the network also had a home that gave up the rooms where this exploitation of children took place in exchange for a share of the profits. Four furtive taxi drivers, also arrested, moved them around the capital of Segura, between private apartments and guesthouses.
