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>Sunday Night’s Matt Doran goes undercover with Operation Underground Railroad to bring down Haiti child sex ring
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In reality, this meeting is part of an elaborate, multi-agency bust that has been almost a year in the planning — all done with the approval and co-operation of federal Haitian police.
A meticulous operation that began with the infiltration of the dark web, and that will culminate in the take-down of high-level Haitian traffickers linked to the abuse of hundreds of school-age children.
Many of them are traded, as though commodities, to rival gangs, and put up for sale or rent in filthy, underground Haitian brothels. Some are loaded into trucks or buses and smuggled across the border to be used by tourists in the Dominican Republic.
Foreigners with the appetite can buy an hour of their services for as little as a handful of Australian dollars.
I’m embedded with an organisation calledOperation Underground Railroad, a group of ex-police and former CIA and Department of Homeland Security operatives who travel the world rescuing trafficked children.
'''This is far from a ‘vigilante group’; leading the team is ex-Department of Homeland Security special agent Tim Ballard, perhaps America’s foremost human trafficking expert.
“The problem in Haiti is an international crisis,” Ballard explains. “With so many children displaced or orphaned during the recent earthquake and hurricane, recruiters moved quickly to sweep these children up. And the worst part of it all is that in many cases the clients are the foreigners who’ve come here to help, the NGO workers and the so-called humanitarians.”'''
As our meeting with the traffickers ends, the undercovers set their trap. They give the criminals the time and place for the bust and agree to a price for the children’s services on the yacht.
Over the next week we will meet with the leaders of another five trafficking networks, often late at night in child brothels protected by heavily-armed guards.
“These places are dark and shadowy and the men who run them have virtually no respect for a human life,”Ballard tells me. There’s one way in and one way out … if they catch you filming, that’s when they pull the guns out. That’s when they realise you are better off dead to them than alive.”
Despite more than few tense moments, including several hours spent hiding out from suspicious gang members on the roof of a western hotel, each of the meetings ends safely.
And suddenly everything is in place: the traffickers have bought our story that we’re throwing a child sex party on our yacht, and they’ve agreed to deliver 30 children.
The victims think it will be just another day of abuse by men whose language they can’t understand. In fact, they are now just 24 hours away from being rescued.
Two brave Australians are among the rescue team on the ground in Haiti.
‘Pete’, is a father and a top paramedic. His colleague, ‘Vivienne’, is a mother of two and a former detective with more than two decades of experience.
They were recruited by Operation Underground Railroad for their skills as covert investigators. They can’t be identified for fear of reprisal attacks from traffickers with international tentacles.
“My role in the Haiti operation is to care for the children once the traffickers deliver them to beach resort where the sting will go down,’’ says Vivienne. “Keep them calm, keep them safe while the traffickers are given their cash, before the police move in. What goes through my head is the whole mother instinct; wanting to nurture them, give them a hug and say, it’s going to be OK. What’s gut wrenching is I actually don’t know if it’s going to be OK.”
Pete is on standby for any medical emergencies, to treat any injuries should the traffickers bring weapons or become violent when the SWAT team moves in for the arrests.
“You start to think, ‘OK, what if this was my child? How would I be? What would I feel?’ And it pulls you apart,” Pete says. “There’s a temptation for us at times, in our bubble in Australia, to dismiss this as someone else’s problem. We’re different cultures, different races, different countries, but we are all human beings.”
As word comes through that the traffickers and the children are now en route, we put the final touches on a series of hidden cameras and microphones, which will capture the evidence needed for the Haitian authorities.