Child Pornography Threatens Central America's Children


When officers from the Nicaraguan National Police found a piece of forgotten luggage at the country’s main international airport last Monday, it wasn’t the concern of a terrorist threat that caused their outrage, but a photo album full of child pornography.

The bag belonged to a Nicaraguan woman who had arrived the previous day from the United States. The suspect was arrested when she returned to the airport to collect her bag as the authorities suspected that the photos had been taken in Nicaragua and then developed in Miami.

This is further proof that criminal networks and unscrupulous individuals are operating internationally from Central America trying to fulfill the demand of so called “consumers” that exists, from all different classes and different countries.

“The producers of child pornography – better called sexual exploiters of children - have become a threat to the children of Central America.

There are numerous cases where the same network exploits children in different countries in the region and then distributes the child pornography all over the world. However, in many countries the possession of such materials continues to be legal, which makes it practically impossible to effectively challenge the problem”, explains Bruce Harris, Latin America’s Regional Director of Casa Alianza, an organization that defends children’s rights in Latin America.

Those who are sexually exploiting children do not just operate in one Central American country.

The arrest and charging of ex US Marine Roy Adrian Wildman in Granada, Nicaragua on the 8th of July 2003 has led the police to suspect that there is a link between this location and Costa Rica, as the suspect traveled constantly to the neighboring country, according to Casa Alianza, who collaborated with the police on this investigation.

It was precisely in Costa Rica that at the end of 2002, and as a result of a 9-month investigation carried out by Casa Alianza’s Legal Aid Program, that a group of five members of the “Anonymous Association of Costa Rican Pedophiles” were condemned for sexually abusing children. Their sexual abuse was filmed and photographed and distributed internationally, mostly on the Internet.

Information on the case in Costa Rica - where possession of child pornography for personal use is still not considered to be a crime - led Casa Alianza to inform Chilean authorities of another group of pedophiles that were acting in that South American country.

To date, the Chilean police have broken up near close to a dozen child sexual exploitation networks. However, the accused used legal loopholes to get out of prison in Santiago, which led to a new Anti Pedophile Law being approved by the Chilean Congress in 2004.

The people involved in this illicit activity are not only abusing children, but they also make big money.

The local authorities in Cancún, Mexico estimate that around 18,000 children have been used to produce child pornography in Mexico. Evidence points at one wealthy businessman of Lebanese origin, Jean Succar Kuri, who has been fleeing from authorities since the beginning of 2004, as one of the key abusers.

Other important figures have been linked to similar sexual abuse of children crimes. In May 2003, police from El Salvador raided the house of lawyer Nelson García, former Congressman and candidate for Magistrate of the country’s Supreme Court, where they found a large number of photographs and videos in which he appeared alongside naked girls. García was arrested just two weeks ago and is waiting for his trail to go to trial.

Sex tourism also has a long history of being interlinked with child pornography.

Stefan Irwing, an American pediatrician, was banned from practicing medicine after he was found trying to sexually abuse a boy in the US in 1983. But this didn’t stop him from traveling to Mexico and Honduras, where he reportedly sexually abused children as young as six years old, whom he picked up on the street. He offered them a place to stay and food in return for sex…

American authorities found child pornography on the suspect, which led to his sentencing. A similar case occurred in Canada in March of 2003, in Calgary, Alberta, where Stanley Howard Jordan, 50, was charged with sexual abuse and producing child pornography.

The crimes he committed took place in a Guatemalan indigenous community, near the historic town of Antigua, where Jordan had offered his services as an evangelical pastor to a poor church. The photographs that he took were reportedly sent on to other pedophiles.

Through an agreement made with the Canadian District Attorney's Office, Jordan accepted the charge of possession of child pornography in exchange the dropping of an investigation into the production and international transport of child pornography.

“No Central American country can escape the fact that many people are sexually exploiting the region’s children by producing child pornography with the intent to distribute it internationally. Once these materials are placed on the Internet, there is no way of stopping the circulation. Every time someone logs onto these sites, another small victim’s rights are violated”, added Harris.

Casa Alianza urges Central American authorities to close in on producers of child pornography through effective laws that not only punish the production, distribution and sale of this type of material, but also criminalizes possession. The supply will not decrease until the demand is dealt with.

For more information, please contact Casa Alianza at: media@casa-alianza.org