Kevin Baldeosingh
?Last Monday, the owner and an employee of a brothel in Central Trinidad were arrested for trafficking two Venezuelan women and causing a 10-mile highway pile-up due to maccoing.
The fact that the women are Venezuelan is, of course, incontrovertible evidence that they were being forced to do sex work rather than choosing to be prostitutes. After all, would these women have really left the socialist paradise created by the late Hugo Chavez to come to Trinidad to have sex with men? Activist Wayne Kublalsingh would surely say No, and should be called by the Director of Public Prosecutions to present evidence on behalf of the State, not including tulsi leaves.
These arrests have achieved three important goals for Trinidad and Tobago. First, citizens now know that all the time spent by Members of Parliament in 2011 to pass the Trafficking in Persons Act has not been wasted, since two people have been arrested four years later. Secondly, the police officers in the Counter Trafficking Unit have finally been able get some exercise other than the thumbs twiddle. And, third and most important, T&T will be praised in the US State Department's next report on human trafficking.
Moreover, since these Venezuelan women could not have left their socialist paradise to come to capitalist T&T of their own free will, they cannot be charged for being illegal immigrants. The DPP's office should bear in mind, however, that the defence might argue that the women came here to get toilet paper. But these rumours of a toilet paper shortage in Venezuela are probably just vicious US propaganda. After all, since Venezuela is a socialist paradise, the people are eating more nutritious food and hence have less waste to excrete. This has resulted in lowered demand for toilet paper, hence created the illusion of shortages: and I am sure that MSJ leader David Abdulah will be willing to take the stand to testify to this.
But, even if there was a Charmin shortage in Venezuela's socialist paradise, this would still mean that the two Venezuelan women were human trafficking victims who couldn't obey the red light. After all, the Act defines trafficking as "The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion..." And what is more coercive than denying two-play tissue to a person with a gripe?
And, talking of crap, the CTU says it has rescued 26 women from traffickers in the past three years, yet it has not charged anyone for driving passive aggressively in the fast lane. So add Number Two with these Venezuelans, and the CTU should definitely consult with this country's leading crime expert, Pastor Clive Dottin, who just last Sunday morning on 102 FM was telling the radio-listening public how human trafficking was linked to the drug trade and how he had recently gone to a place where "slabs of cocaine" were being handed out to persons old like himself. The Seventh-Day Adventist pastor didn't say whether he had gone to this place with the police, the drug-dealers, or the Holy Spirit: but no doubt all this inside knowledge of the criminal underworld will help sever the octopusitic tentacles of the squidistic trade in human beings.
But what does the future hold for these women? Guardian reporter Liz Hassanali should interview Venezuelan psychic Yesenia Gonzalves to answer these questions about human trafficking. And, while I am neither clairvoyant nor a unicorn, I assume that the two Venezuelans will be returned to their socialist paradise, where they are guaranteed a job if not work. I also assume that they will be able to support themselves and their families, since they didn't choose to come to Trinidad to get money for sex. After all, if that were the case, it would mean that they really didn't have any better options, but this of course is impossible since they are citizens of a socialist paradise.
So they must be victims of human trafficking and a bad drive, and this would also apply to any Colombian, Dominican and Guyanese women found in similar circumstances, unless they are really ugly in which case this would be proof that they are really illegal immigrants. But this also means that no Trinidadian women in any brothel can ever be charged for prostitution ever again since, with religious leaders in T&T blaming sex for all our social problems, none would choose sex work over store work.
n Kevin Baldeosingh is aprofessional writer, author of three novels, and co-author of a Caribbean history textbook.