South America

Regional Overview

South America is a continent of stark contrasts in the trafficking landscape. It is home to Brazil, the region’s largest source and destination country, as well as Venezuela, whose humanitarian collapse has produced one of the world’s largest displacement crises and a corresponding surge in trafficking. Across the continent, trafficking is driven by extreme inequality, vast ungoverned territories, the economic power of extractive industries, and the exploitation of indigenous and Afro-descendant populations who have been marginalized since the colonial era.

The Global Slavery Index estimates that approximately 1.3 million people are held in conditions of modern slavery across South America, encompassing forced labor in agriculture, mining, and domestic service, as well as sex trafficking. The UNODC identifies the region as predominantly a source area for trafficking, with victims trafficked both within the continent and to destinations in Europe, North America, and Asia.

Brazil

Brazil is the largest trafficking country in South America by every measure: the most victims, the most prosecutions, and the most complex trafficking ecosystem. The country’s vast territory, extreme economic inequality, large informal economy, and history of slavery create conditions in which trafficking thrives across multiple sectors.

Forced Labor & Domestic Servitude

Brazil maintains one of the world’s most proactive forced labor inspection programs. The Ministry of Labor’s mobile inspection teams (Grupos Móveis) have rescued over 60,000 workers from conditions of forced labor since 1995. Workers are most commonly found in cattle ranching, sugar cane harvesting, charcoal production, coffee farming, and construction. Victims are typically recruited from impoverished states in the northeast, Maranhão, Piauí, Bahia, and transported to remote farms and ranches in the Amazon region, Mato Grosso, and Pará.

The lista suja (“dirty list”), a public register of employers found using forced labor, has been an innovative enforcement tool, subjecting listed companies to financial restrictions and reputational consequences. However, powerful agricultural lobbies have repeatedly challenged the list in court, and its effectiveness has been reduced by political pressure.

Domestic servitude affects an estimated 6.2 million domestic workers in Brazil, the vast majority of them Black and mixed-race women. While not all domestic labor constitutes trafficking, conditions of forced labor, including confinement, withholding of wages, and physical abuse, are documented, particularly in rural areas and among workers recruited as children.

Sex Trafficking & Sex Tourism

Brazil is a major destination for sex tourism, with cities including Fortaleza, Recife, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, and Natal identified as hotspots. European tourists, particularly from Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Germany, have been disproportionately identified as sex tourism consumers. The trafficking of Brazilian women and girls to Europe, especially to Spain, Italy, Portugal, and the Netherlands, has been documented in numerous prosecutions.

Internally, sex trafficking is concentrated along major highways and in mining regions. Transgender women in Brazil face particularly acute trafficking risks, driven by extreme discrimination and violence that limits employment options and increases vulnerability to exploitation.

The Venezuelan Humanitarian Crisis

The collapse of Venezuela’s economy and political system has produced one of the largest displacement crises in modern history. Since 2015, approximately 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled the country; the vast majority to other South American nations, particularly Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, and Chile. This mass displacement has created a trafficking emergency of enormous scale.

Venezuelan refugees and migrants face trafficking risks at every stage of their displacement. Many leave without documentation, limiting their access to legal employment and social services in destination countries. Traffickers operating along border crossings and migration routes recruit Venezuelans with false promises of employment, housing, and documentation.

Within Venezuela, the humanitarian crisis has driven a surge in internal trafficking. The collapse of wages, the minimum monthly salary is worth less than $5 at unofficial exchange rates, has pushed women and girls into survival sex, which traffickers exploit. The Venezuelan government does not maintain credible trafficking data, and the TIP Report has placed Venezuela on Tier 3 since 2017, indicating that the government does not meet minimum standards and is not making significant efforts.

Venezuelan children are particularly vulnerable. Unaccompanied minors crossing into Colombia, Brazil, and Trinidad and Tobago have been identified as trafficking victims. Criminal organizations, including Colombian armed groups (ELN, FARC dissidents) and Venezuelan colectivos, recruit Venezuelan children for forced labor, drug trafficking, and sexual exploitation.

The scale of Venezuelan displacement has overwhelmed the capacity of host countries to provide protection. Many Venezuelans lack regular immigration status in their destination countries, despite programs like Colombia’s Temporary Protection Status (TPS) which regularized 1.8 million Venezuelans. Those without documentation are excluded from formal employment, healthcare, and social services, making them dependent on informal economies where trafficking thrives. Women in particular report being offered employment that turns out to be sexual exploitation, with their undocumented status used as leverage to prevent them from seeking help.

The trafficking of Venezuelan women and girls has been documented across the Caribbean as well. Trinidad and Tobago, Curaçao, and Aruba have all reported increases in sex trafficking linked to Venezuelan migration. In Trinidad, Venezuelan women arriving by boat have been intercepted and trafficked into the sex trade, sometimes within hours of arrival. The Caribbean trafficking dimension of the Venezuelan crisis receives less attention than the South American routes but affects thousands of victims.

Colombia: Conflict-Related Trafficking

Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict between the government, FARC, ELN, and paramilitary groups created a trafficking infrastructure that persists despite the 2016 peace agreement. Armed groups used trafficking as a weapon of war: forcing children into combat, subjecting women and girls to sexual slavery, and using forced labor for coca cultivation and illegal mining.

The 2016 peace agreement with the FARC has not eliminated conflict-related trafficking. FARC dissident groups, the ELN, and criminal bands (bandas criminales or BACRIM) continue to recruit children, control sex trafficking networks, and use forced labor in illegal mining and coca production. The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), Colombia’s transitional justice mechanism, has documented sexual violence and trafficking as systematic practices by all armed actors during the conflict.

Colombia is also a significant source country for international sex trafficking. Colombian women are trafficked to destinations across Latin America, East Asia, and Europe. The country’s internal displacement crisis, Colombia has approximately 8.2 million internally displaced persons, the second highest in the world, creates ongoing vulnerability to trafficking.

Peru & Bolivia: Mining and Domestic Servitude

Peru and Bolivia share trafficking patterns rooted in extractive industries, poverty, and the exploitation of indigenous populations. Both countries have significant indigenous populations, approximately 26% in Peru and 41% in Bolivia, who face disproportionate trafficking vulnerability.

Peru

Peru’s illegal gold mining sector, concentrated in the Madre de Dios region, is one of the most documented sites of forced labor and sex trafficking on the continent. An estimated 30,000–40,000 people work in illegal gold mines, including children as young as 10. Workers are recruited from Andean highland communities with promises of wages that are never paid, and are held in remote mining camps through debt bondage, threats, and geographic isolation.

Sex trafficking in Peruvian mining camps follows a distinctive pattern. Bars and brothels in mining towns employ women and girls trafficked from surrounding communities and from Venezuela, Colombia, and Bolivia. Victims are held in debt bondage, forced to consume alcohol to generate bar revenue, and subjected to serial sexual exploitation. The Peruvian government has conducted periodic raids on mining camps but lacks the capacity for sustained enforcement in remote Amazon regions.

Domestic servitude in Peru disproportionately affects indigenous Quechua and Aymara girls, who are sent from rural communities to work in urban households under informal arrangements. While sometimes framed as cultural practice or educational opportunity, these arrangements frequently constitute trafficking when children are denied education, confined, subjected to physical abuse, or compelled to work without compensation.

Peru’s government has strengthened its anti-trafficking legal framework in recent years, with Law 28950 (2007) and subsequent amendments criminalizing all forms of trafficking and establishing a national multisectoral plan. The country’s specialized anti-trafficking police unit (DIRCTPTIM) has conducted operations in Madre de Dios and other mining regions, resulting in rescues of trafficking victims and some prosecutions. However, the remoteness of mining operations, the corruption of local officials, and the sheer scale of illegal mining mean that enforcement reaches only a fraction of exploitation.

Bolivia

Bolivia permits children as young as 10 to work under a controversial 2014 law, creating a legal framework that complicates trafficking enforcement. An estimated 800,000 children work in Bolivia, many in hazardous conditions including mining, sugar cane harvesting, and Brazil nut collection. Child labor in Bolivian mines, particularly tin, silver, and zinc mines in Potosí and Oruro, involves conditions that frequently meet the definition of forced labor.

Bolivian citizens are trafficked to Brazil, Argentina, and Chile for forced labor in agriculture, textile manufacturing, and domestic service. The zafra (sugar cane harvest) in Santa Cruz department relies heavily on indigenous workers from the highlands who labor under exploitative conditions, sometimes held in debt bondage.

Argentina: Textile Sweatshops

Argentina’s textile industry, concentrated in Buenos Aires, has been a persistent site of labor trafficking. An estimated 3,000–5,000 clandestine textile workshops operate in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, employing primarily Bolivian migrants held in conditions of forced labor. Workers live in the workshops, laboring 16–18 hours per day producing clothing for Argentine and international brands, earning as little as $1 per hour, with wages frequently withheld.

A devastating 2006 fire at a clandestine textile workshop in Buenos Aires killed six Bolivian workers, including four children, and exposed the scale of labor trafficking in the sector. Despite subsequent government crackdowns, the industry persists. Workers’ undocumented status, fear of deportation, language barriers, and debt bondage for smuggling fees prevent them from seeking help.

Argentina also faces significant sex trafficking, with victims trafficked from Paraguay, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, and within Argentina itself. The northern provinces of Misiones, Tucumán, and Santiago del Estero are documented source areas for internal trafficking. Argentina’s anti-trafficking law (Law 26.842 of 2012) eliminated the consent defense in sex trafficking cases, strengthening prosecutions.

The Buenos Aires textile trafficking model has been replicated in other Argentine cities, including La Plata, Córdoba, and Mar del Plata. The supply chain connects clandestine workshops to legitimate retail outlets, including major shopping districts and open-air markets. Consumer demand for inexpensive clothing sustains the economic logic of exploitation: brands that source from these workshops can undercut competitors on price precisely because their labor costs are suppressed through trafficking. Efforts by organizations like La Alameda to map and expose these supply chains have led to some workshop closures and prosecutions, but the industry’s decentralized structure, with thousands of small workshops rather than large factories, makes comprehensive enforcement extremely challenging.

The Amazon Region: Illegal Mining & Indigenous Exploitation

The Amazon basin, spanning Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, represents one of the world’s largest ungoverned spaces and a critical site of trafficking linked to illegal resource extraction. Illegal gold mining (garimpo in Brazil) has surged across the Amazon, driven by high gold prices and weak enforcement in remote areas.

The Yanomami indigenous territory in Brazil’s Roraima and Amazonas states became a global symbol of mining-related trafficking and exploitation in 2023, when the Brazilian government declared a health emergency and deployed military forces to remove an estimated 20,000 illegal miners. The miners had brought disease, malnutrition, sexual exploitation, and environmental devastation to the Yanomami people, who have a population of approximately 30,000.

Indigenous communities across the Amazon face trafficking driven by encroachment on their territories. Logging, ranching, mining, and hydroelectric projects displace communities, destroy livelihoods, and create conditions of dependency that traffickers exploit. Indigenous leaders who resist exploitation face assassination. Global Witness has documented the Amazon basin as the deadliest region in the world for environmental and land defenders.

Intra-Regional Trafficking Routes

Trafficking within South America follows established patterns shaped by economic disparity, border permeability, and historical migration routes.

The Tri-Border Area (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay) and the Colombia–Venezuela border are particularly critical trafficking zones. These areas combine weak border enforcement, high levels of organized crime, large informal economies, and populations with limited access to legal protection.

Regional Responses & Challenges

South American governments have adopted varying approaches to trafficking, with Brazil and Colombia generally recognized as regional leaders in both legal frameworks and enforcement capacity. The Organization of American States (OAS) and the Mercosur bloc have adopted anti-trafficking protocols, but implementation varies significantly.

Brazil’s forced labor inspection system and lista suja are considered international best practices. Colombia’s comprehensive anti-trafficking law and dedicated prosecution units have produced more convictions than most countries in the region. However, even these relatively strong responses are overwhelmed by the scale of trafficking.

Persistent challenges include: corruption within law enforcement and judiciary, insufficient victim identification and protection services, the criminalization of trafficking victims (particularly sex trafficking victims arrested for prostitution), lack of coordination between countries on cross-border cases, and the political power of industries (agriculture, mining, domestic service) that rely on exploitative labor.

Child Trafficking & Child Labor

Child trafficking and exploitative child labor remain deeply embedded in South American economies. The ILO estimates that 10.5 million children in Latin America and the Caribbean are engaged in child labor, with a significant proportion in conditions that constitute trafficking under international law. The most hazardous forms of child labor, mining, agriculture, and domestic servitude, are concentrated in rural and indigenous communities across the continent.

In Brazil, an estimated 2.4 million children aged 5–17 work, despite comprehensive legal prohibitions. Child labor is concentrated in agriculture (particularly sugar cane, coffee, and tobacco), domestic service, and the informal urban economy. Trabalho infantil doméstico (child domestic labor) disproportionately affects Black and mixed-race girls from the northeast, who are sent to work in urban households under arrangements that often constitute trafficking.

Peru’s mining regions employ children as young as 10 in illegal gold extraction, exposing them to mercury poisoning, cave-ins, and sexual exploitation. In Bolivia, child labor in mining is both widespread and, controversially, partially legal under the 2014 Child and Adolescent Code, which allowed children as young as 10 to work in certain circumstances before being modified under international pressure.

Sex Tourism

Sex tourism is a significant driver of trafficking across South America, with Brazil, Colombia, and Peru identified as primary destination countries. The industry thrives in coastal cities, tourist destinations, and areas with high concentrations of foreign visitors. Sex tourists arrive primarily from the United States, Europe, and other South American countries.

In Brazil, sex tourism is concentrated in the northeastern cities of Fortaleza, Recife, Natal, and Salvador, as well as in Rio de Janeiro. Major international sporting events, the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Olympics, generated significant anti-trafficking concern, as large influxes of foreign visitors historically correlate with increased demand for commercial sex. Brazilian authorities conducted awareness campaigns and enforcement operations, but anti-trafficking organizations documented an increase in child sexual exploitation around event venues.

Colombia’s sex tourism industry has grown rapidly, particularly in Cartagena, Medellín, and Bogotá. The country has enacted specific legislation criminalizing sex tourism involving minors and has prosecuted both Colombian facilitators and foreign offenders. However, the scale of the industry vastly exceeds enforcement capacity, and the digital facilitation of sex tourism through websites and apps has complicated detection.

Corruption & Impunity

Corruption is a primary enabler of trafficking across South America. In every country in the region, documented cases exist of law enforcement officials, judges, prosecutors, immigration officials, and politicians facilitating or protecting trafficking operations. The economic power of trafficking, generating billions of dollars annually across the continent, provides ample resources for corrupting public officials.

In Brazil, police complicity in sex trafficking has been documented in multiple states, with officers receiving payments from brothel owners in exchange for ignoring trafficking. In Peru, prosecutors have been removed for accepting bribes from illegal mining operators who use forced labor. In Argentina, the disappearance and presumed murder of Marita Veron, a young woman trafficked into sexual exploitation in 2002, and the initial acquittal of her accused traffickers in 2012 (later overturned) became a landmark case exposing judicial corruption and the protection of trafficking networks.

The Marita Veron case galvanized Argentina’s anti-trafficking movement and contributed to the passage of the country’s comprehensive anti-trafficking law in 2012. Her mother, Susana Trimarco, became one of Latin America’s most prominent anti-trafficking advocates, founding a victim support organization and publicly challenging the impunity that protects traffickers across the region.

Ecuador, Paraguay & Other Nations

Ecuador serves as a source, transit, and destination country for trafficking, with its geographic position between Colombia and Peru placing it on major trafficking routes. The influx of over 500,000 Venezuelan refugees has intensified trafficking dynamics, particularly in Quito, Guayaquil, and border areas. Ecuadorian children are trafficked for forced labor in mining, agriculture, and domestic servitude, and for sexual exploitation in urban areas. The country’s banana and shrimp industries have been linked to labor exploitation, including conditions that meet trafficking definitions.

Paraguay is a significant source country for trafficking victims, with Paraguayan women and girls trafficked to Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Spain, and other countries for sexual exploitation and domestic servitude. The Tri-Border Area (Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil) is a known trafficking zone, where criminal organizations exploit the convergence of three jurisdictions, weak border controls, and high volumes of cross-border commerce. Paraguay’s criadazgo practice, in which children from poor families are sent to live and work in wealthier households, is identified as a form of domestic servitude that constitutes trafficking.

Chile, Uruguay, and Suriname face smaller-scale but documented trafficking problems. Chile has seen increased trafficking linked to the arrival of migrants from Venezuela, Colombia, and Haiti. Uruguay’s sex trafficking is linked to tourism in Punta del Este and Montevideo. Suriname’s interior gold mining operations employ trafficked workers from Brazil, Guyana, and China in conditions of forced labor, mirroring the patterns seen across Amazon mining regions.

Global Supply Chains & South American Trafficking

South American trafficking is deeply embedded in global supply chains that deliver products to consumers in the United States, Europe, and Asia. The commodities produced through forced labor and trafficking in the region include gold, coffee, sugar, cocoa, soy, beef, timber, Brazil nuts, coca (processed into cocaine), and textiles. The complexity of these supply chains, involving multiple intermediaries between the site of exploitation and the end consumer, makes tracing and accountability extremely difficult.

Brazil’s cattle ranching industry, which occupies vast tracts of deforested Amazon land, has been linked to forced labor by the country’s mobile inspection teams. Major meatpacking companies that export to global markets have been found sourcing from ranches where workers were held in conditions of forced labor. The lista suja has named major agribusiness operations, but the economic and political power of the sector limits enforcement.

Gold mined through forced labor in Peru, Colombia, and Brazil enters international supply chains through intermediaries who mix illegally mined gold with legally sourced material, making it impossible to trace. An estimated 70–80% of gold from Peru’s Madre de Dios region is illegally mined, much of it using forced labor, yet it is exported to refiners in Switzerland, the United States, and India with no effective traceability.

Environmental Destruction & Trafficking

The link between environmental destruction and trafficking in South America is direct and measurable. Deforestation in the Amazon, which reached a 15-year high in 2021 before declining in 2023 under renewed enforcement, is driven by illegal logging, cattle ranching, soy cultivation, and mining, all of which rely on forced labor. Workers trafficked into these industries clear forest, work in illegal sawmills, tend cattle on illegally deforested land, and mine gold in areas where the Amazon’s ecosystem is being destroyed.

The environmental and human costs are inseparable. Mercury used in artisanal gold mining poisons rivers and communities downstream, affecting indigenous populations who have no involvement in mining but depend on contaminated water and fish. The destruction of indigenous territories forces communities into displacement and vulnerability to trafficking. Armed groups that control trafficking networks also control illegal deforestation and mining operations, creating an integrated criminal economy.

Brazil’s IBAMA (environmental enforcement agency) and FUNAI (indigenous affairs agency) have been identified as critical but underfunded institutions in the fight against both environmental destruction and trafficking. Under President Lula’s administration beginning in 2023, enforcement operations against illegal mining increased significantly, including the Yanomami territory operation. However, the political power of Brazil’s agribusiness lobby (“bancada ruralista”) continues to resist enforcement measures that threaten their economic interests.

The relationship between climate change and trafficking is emerging as a critical concern across South America. Extreme weather events, droughts in the Amazon, flooding in Brazil’s south, and glacier retreat in the Andes, are displacing communities that depend on agriculture and natural resources. Climate displacement increases trafficking vulnerability as affected populations move to unfamiliar areas without social networks or economic alternatives. Researchers project that climate-driven migration in South America will accelerate in coming decades, creating new trafficking risks on a scale not yet accounted for in regional anti-trafficking frameworks.

South America’s trafficking crisis is driven by the continent’s defining characteristics: extreme inequality, vast ungoverned spaces, powerful extractive industries, and the legacy of colonialism that continues to shape who is vulnerable and who profits from exploitation. The Venezuelan displacement crisis has added an unprecedented dimension, creating millions of new potential victims across the continent. Addressing trafficking in South America requires confronting these structural realities; not merely prosecuting individual traffickers, but transforming the economic and social conditions that make trafficking profitable and its victims invisible.

The continent also demonstrates that effective responses are possible. Brazil’s mobile inspection teams and lista suja represent genuine innovations in anti-trafficking enforcement. Colombia’s legal framework and transitional justice mechanisms provide models for addressing conflict-related trafficking. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program, while originating in the United States, has influenced anti-trafficking approaches across the hemisphere. These successes suggest that with political will, adequate resources, and genuine commitment to the rights of marginalized populations, progress against trafficking in South America is achievable.