The Supreme Court confirmed the sentences of up to 27 and a half years in prison that the courts of Castile-La Mancha imposed on two pimps for sexually exploiting four Colombian women, including in several apartments in Talavera de la Reina. The judges rejected the last appeals of the two women prosecuted for having recruited their victims in their country, where they already practiced prostitution, then having subjected them to what the courts defined as “wild sexual exploitation”.
Police discovered this pimping network while investigating another similar group and questioning 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, flying them to Spain and once in the city, informing them that they had a debt which, in some cases, reaches 13,000 euros.
A debt that, as is often the case in trafficking networks, the victims had to pay through prostitution, but not under the conditions in which they were told it would take place. They had to be available all day, they did not choose their clients and had to submit to any type of request from their captors. During this time, a significant portion of their profits had to be donated to the organization.
“I accepted out of necessity, but it was real exploitation,” one of the victims said during the trial in the Toledo court, a court that went so far as to characterize what happened as “wild sexual exploitation”. All were threatened so that they would continue to hand over the money, one of them even after having escaped the clutches of the group: “They will 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 enslavement they would endure both in Talavera and in other towns to which they would ultimately be transferred.
The Supreme Court has just ruled on the case, confirming the sentences handed down in second instance by the Superior Court of Justice of Castile-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 to the tune of 6,000 euros each. Initially, the Toledo court imposed harsher sentences, but the TSJ replaced certain “abusive” prison sentences with financial fines.
The Criminal Chamber rejected the appeals of the two convicted women who, throughout the legal 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 work same and that they the complaint was executed to obtain the papers. “Everyone is big and knows what they are doing,” said one of the pimps present at the trial.
Without being able to decide about their own body
The Supreme Court explains that “it is of no importance” that they had already been prostitutes 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 vulnerable situation, losing their autonomy and even the ability to make decisions over their own bodies” , affirms the High Court.
The fact that they knew they were also going to prostitute themselves in Spain does not make what they did with them any less criminal. “They arrived in Spain knowing that they were going to prostitute themselves and that they would incur debts, but they were deceived about the form of exploitation in which this activity was going to be carried out, leaving them immersed in a situation of increasing vulnerability .
The two convicted women were part of an organization with branches in Colombia, although other possible suspects have not been tried. Their conviction attributes to them illegal immigration crimes for illegally bringing women into Spain and posing as tourists, in addition to crimes related to human trafficking, both in its aspects of sexual exploitation and exploitation economic.
