Daniela remembers being driven blindfolded through the desert in northern Mexico, thinking she was going to her death. She recalls being told to get out of the van, uncover her eyes, and follow her armed captors into a large house and down into the cellar. She was obliged to watch what was going on, and tried to blank out her mind. She still remembers the scene — about five young women bound to pillars, surrounded by men who had paid a lot of money not just to rape them, but to torture and perhaps kill them as well.
Daniela is not her real name. She insists on a pseudonym, because she may have escaped, but the reach of her former captors is long. What she saw that day was just one of many horrific experiences she went through in seven years as a sex slave, first under the control of the Zetas cartel and then the Gulf cartel.
It ended with her escape last year and her return to her family in Nicaragua, where the nightmare had begun. The pledges intensified after the mass disappearance of 43 student teachers in September in the southern city of Iguala triggered national, and international, outrage. Human rights groups in Mexico and outside have repeatedly lambasted authorities for not doing more to find the missing.
Those who go missing rarely come back to tell their stories. The reasons for their abduction vary, but many are kidnapped into sexual slavery. Daniela says that she herself was shocked when she discovered the length of her ordeal. I slept in one of their houses, they took me to the clients to do ugly things, they took the money, and then they took me back to sleep.
It all began when she was a year-old, struggling to feed her children and her mother by working as a seamstress in an assembly-for-export factory near her hometown in Nicaragua. It was April and Nicaragua was relatively free of the horrific violence that already rampaged in parts of Mexico, and in neighboring countries in Central America. Daniela had no obvious reason to be wary about accepting an invitation to attend a meeting in which she was told she would be evaluated for a loan.
