In Panama, UNESCO and UNICEF in a 3-day conference from August 23rd-25th, sought to raise public awareness about slavery and its impact on the current society. Few people are aware that of the 510 million people who currently inhabit Latin America and the Caribbean, 150 million are descendents of former African slaves. According to a series of DNA studies on Panamanians, more than 30% of that country’s population has genes from black races.

In 1804, Haiti became just the second independent country in the Americas and Caribbean after the United States, brought about after an uprising by a small group of the more than 16 million African people who were brought to the American continent as slaves during four centuries. It is estimated that upwards of 700,000 people a year are victims of trafficking – a modern form of slavery – in the world in this, the 21st century.

Instead of being packed in slave ships, the modern day victims of the slave trade – which includes the 14 and 15-year-old desperately poor Honduran girls – are crammed onto buses or bundled into the trunk of a car. The beating and raping of the slaves has not changed over the past 400 years…

This week, thanks to the UN General Assembly’s designation of this period of commemoration of slavery, people from around the world have repeated, “slavery is against human dignity”. Yet instead of recalling slavery in an effort to never let it raise its ugly head again, it seems that many are revisiting the historical elements of slavery in order to perfect it…

Just in Central America there are more than 170,000 child domestic “workers”. These young girls – poor young girls – many of whom are exploited, being forced to work more than 12 or 14 hours each day, are excluded from their right to an education or to play or even be with their families. Given to rich families who often forget their promise to send the girls to school, the children wash floors, prepare food and take care of every whim of their owners. Then there are the slave like conditions of the child sugar cane cutters in El Salvador; the children who make fireworks for other children to play with in Guatemala and the deep sea diver children on the coast of Nicaragua.

Whether from Ghana or Guatemala, Nigeria or Nicaragua, the crushing effect on the enslaved child or the child in slave like conditions is the same.

All the countries in the Americas and the Caribbean – with the exception of the United States of America – have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The laws are in place to fight enslavement of children and so we must change attitudes of tolerance of such criminal exploitation.

Maybe it will take another historic uprising of the region’s young slaves like that of August 23rd, 1791 in Santo Domingo to bring about change in Central America. Perhaps the girl’s should stop washing the dishes and throw in the towel. But then what would they do? How would they eat?

Our complicit society does not seem very interested in stepping in to help - else the girl child would not be there in the first place. Neither does the white oligarchy of the Americas seem too concerned that 93% of the African descendents now living in their adopted lands live in poverty…

Perhaps the downfall of the human race will be our inability to learn from history. Or to understand that it is the children who are truly the treasure of new world.

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* Bruce Harris, Regional Director of Latin American Programs for Casa Alianza spoke at the Panama conference on the “Trafficking of Children in the Region: A Modern Form of Slavery”.