Heartbreaking longtime criminal trend in Haiti and the Dominican Republic (now add our border crossers) is child trafficking.
From an old story in The Guardian.
On market day in Dajabón, a bustling Dominican town on the Haitian border, you can pick up many bargains if you know where to look. You can haggle the price of a live chicken down to 40 pesos (72p); wrestle 10lb of macaroni from 60 to 50 pesos; and, with some discreet inquiries, buy a Haitian child for the equivalent of £54.22.
“You just ask around town,” says Hilda Pe-a, who monitors border crossings for the Jesuit Refugee Service. “People know who the scouts are. You just tell them what kind of child you are looking for and they can bring across whatever it is that you want.”
There is a thriving trade in Haitian children in the Dominican Republic, where they are mostly used for domestic service, agricultural work or prostitution. Eight-year-old Jesus Josef was one of them. Numbed by a mixture of trauma and shyness, this small boy with huge eyes cannot recall how he left his three brothers and mother in Haiti and ended up doing domestic work for a Dominican family in Barahona, 120 miles from the capital, Santo Domingo.
It's my understanding that it's the way of life in most all of South America.. Kidnapping and ransom are very common. That's why all the walls, iron bars and razor around just about everything...
There is zero respect for private property. Coming to a neighborhood near you...