Models of behavior used by traffickers to recruit and exploit victims are almost identical across the world. Agricultural labor traffickers in Portugal, for example, fraudulently recruit migrant workers from neighboring nations in the same ways labor traffickers exploit migrant workers here in the United States.
A Thomson Reuters Foundation human trafficking reporter recently covered official action Portuguese law enforcement have instituted to investigate and monitor agriculture employers to ensure legal business and employment practices.
Portuguese investigators say typical victims are impoverished migrants brought to Portugal by trafficking rings with the promise of a job advertised on the Internet. …
But once put to work, their identity documents are often confiscated and their pay withheld, with many packed into grim, common living quarters with few amenities.
Human trafficking is a phenomenon that really worries us,” Filipe Moutas, a police captain in Portugal’s National Republican Guard (GNR), told Reuters as a team checked workers’ employment contracts and identity documents during a raid on a 100-acre (40-hectare) raspberry farm in Alentejo last week.
Collective Liberty analysts and data scientists help support US-based enforcement agencies build strong, actionable cases against traffickers of all types. Support our work to help agencies adopt international best practices for holding US-based traffickers accountable to the same degree nations like Portugal are starting to penalize their traffickers.
