Argentina: Cardinal Bergoglio denounces sexual slavery

“This city is too much,” said the Cardinal Primate of Argentina, Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, who denounced the South American republic’s capital city as a “meat grinder that destroys the lives of these people and breaks their dignity.”

Moreover, said the prelate during a Sunday July 11 homily in the Constitucion neighborhood of Buenos Aires, there are “mafias” that have turned the city into a “slave workshop” dedicated to “human trafficking.” He reflected on the mafias as criminal organizations that “corrupt and destroy, including with drugs, and later throw people to the side of the road.” The mafias control “dens of slavery” that operate openly, having bribed the police and other authorities in one of the largest cities of the Americas.

“Please,” said the clergyman to his listeners, “let us not wash our hands, since otherwise we become accomplices in slavery!”

In May 2010, Nancy Miño, a Paraguayan woman who worked with Argentina’s Federal Police corps, provided testimony that the police in charge of controlling human trafficking and vice were receiving payoffs from the owners of brothels. Prostitution is legal in Argentina, for the most part. However, pimping and the profiting from prostitution is illegal and ostensibly controlled. For its part, the Federal Police has denied Miño’s claims and says that she is currently on medical leave for the treatment of a mental disorder.