A teenage sex slave was raped 43,200 times in the hellish four years she was forced to sell herself on the streets of Mexico.
Karla Jacinto estimated she was forced to have sex with 30 men every day for four years. The nightmare started when she was just 12 years old.
“I had to close my eyes so that that I wouldn’t see what they were doing to me, so that I wouldn’t feel anything,” Jacinto, now 23, CNN. “I started at 10 a.m. and finished at midnight.”
Jacinto is just one of thousands of Mexican girls how have been kidnapped and forced to work in the county’s underground human trafficking network. Many of the girls are abducted and taken to the tiny town of Tenancingo before they are forced into prostitution across the nation, experts said.
Jacinto met her would-be pimp when she was 12, she said. She was waiting for a subway in Mexico City when he wooed her with candy and asked for her phone number.
He called a week later, and picked her up in a luxury car. After more courting, he convinced her to move in with him.
“I lived with him for three months during which he treated me very well,” she said. “He loved on me, he bought me clothes, gave me attention, bought me shoes, flowers, chocolates, everything was beautiful.”
But there were red flags, too: The man’s cousins would come to their apartment with new women every week. When Jacinto finally asked what the family did for a living, the man told her he was a pimp.
“A few days later he started telling me everything I had to do — the positions, how much I need to charge, the things I had to do with the client and for how long, how I was to treat them and how I had to talk to them so that they would give me more money,” she said.
After the sick training, the pimp took Jacinto from city to city, forcing her to sleep with clients in brothels, dirty motels and private homes. Sometimes, he’d even send her to streets known to be prostitution hotspots.
The young Jacinto was forced to have sex with 30 men a day and had no days off. In the four years she was enslaved, she saw at least 23,200 clients, she said.
Her once affectionate and kind pimp turned brutal: He once beat her up because she came home with a hickey from a customer.
“He started beating me with a chain in all of my body. He punched me with his fists, he kicked me, pulled my hair, spit at me in the face, and that day was when he also burned me with the iron,” she said. “He told me I like being a whore.”
Jacinto gave birth to a baby girl when she was 15. The father was her pimp, she said, and he used the infant as blackmail. If Jacinto wasn’t obedient, he would hurt her daughter, she said.
She was eventually rescued in 2008 during a sting operation in Mexico City. She was 16.
Since then, Jacinto has become an anti-sex trafficking advocate. She told her story to Pope Francis during a July visit to the Vatican and has spoken in front of the U.S. Congress about Mexico’s horrific sex slavery industry.
“These minors are being abducted, lured, and yanked away from their families,” she told CNN. “Don’t just listen to me. You need to learn about what happened to me and take the blindfold off your eyes.”
