Thomson Reuters Foundation.México
“I was never taught to value women. I saw my mother being hit by my stepfathers. She’d go back to them again and again. So women became worthless.”
Mario Garfias never thought twice when he pulled out his baseball bat, nicknamed Panchito, to beat the women and teenage girls that he used as prostitutes in Mexico City’s red light district of La Merced.
Together with his younger brother Enrique and mother Esperanza, Garfias was a sex trafficker. For nearly eight years, the trio inflicted terror over young women and girls – who the brothers referred to as “merchandise”.
If the girls, some as young as 16, did not earn their daily quota or disobeyed rules, they faced Panchito.