Sex trafficking as desaparición [disappearance]

This chapter highlights the labourious work on the part of activists who produced interpretative frameworks that modeled a local version of trafficking as a public problem. In the name of national security, thousands and thousands of human beings, generally young and even adolescents, became part of a gloomy and ghostly category: that of the Desaparecidos. The campaign against human trafficking went global at the start of the twenty-first century, as transnational activism expanded the reach of this campaign across national and supranational spheres. In 2006, S. E. Merry argues that transnationalised human rights language needs to be translated into networks of local meaning in order to be both attractive and legitimate. Between 2007 and 2008, concurrently with United States State Department demands for a new anti-trafficking law, a group of anti-trafficking organisations came into the public eye. The demonstrations for the desaparecidas en democracia became a monthly ritual for the emerging anti-trafficking movement.