Woman arrested after luring six young women with the promise of modeling work before they were kidnapped and held for $100,000 ransom

A woman has been arrested in Mexico for allegedly luring six young women from Colombia for modeling and then sexually exploiting them, the Veracruz public prosecutor’s office said.

Yésica Ramírez, 34, was tracked Thursday to a house in Xapala-Enriquez, a city in the southern state of Veracruz and 106 kilometers from the city of Boca del Rio, where the women were found wandering the streets on Tuesday.

“The victims consistently indicate that the suspects contacted them in different places and on different dates and that they were transported to different locations, specifically to a property in the city of Boca del Río, Veracruz,” the prosecutor said. General of Veracruz. The agency reported this in a statement.

‘At this location the victims were received and housed by the suspect for the purpose of sexual exploitation, because she advertised the offering of sexual services and escort services to men who contacted them. From these services, the suspect benefited financially as the victims gave her various amounts of money, of which she kept the majority of the profits.”

Colombian online news portal El Colombiano reported that authorities are investigating whether Ramírez was an employee of the social services department of the Government Secretariat of the Comprehensive Center for Justice for Women, an agency that fights human trafficking, after the victims found shared an image of a department ID card with their family members as they seek help to be rescued.

Prosecutors in Veracruz announced Thursday the arrest of Yésica Ramírez, who allegedly lured six women from Colombia and promised to find them well-paying jobs before she and her associates forced them into sex work.

Their families said the women’s profiles appeared at an online modeling agency that Ramírez had previously contacted.

Ramírez contacted the six women, who lived in the cities of Bogotá, Cali and Medellín, and offered to obtain their passports and plane tickets to fly to Veracruz.

Once there, they were told they would be transported to Mexico City, where modeling, a high-end restaurant waitressing position and event hosting awaited.

The victims are said to have flown to Mexico between June and September and were forced into sex work.

One of the first women contacted quit her job as a restaurant table host in Medellín’s Parque Lleras neighborhood.

The young women were found safe on a street in the city of Boca del Río in Veracruz on Tuesday after being abandoned by suspected members of a sex trafficking gang.

Colombian Consul General to Mexico Andrés Hernández revealed that some women fear sex trafficking will retaliate if they return home

The women became concerned on September 24 when they warned their relatives that they feared for their lives. They took advantage of Ramírez leaving her identification cards open and passing on photos of them, as well as the location of the warehouse where they were being held.

The families were able to contact Ramírez, who advised them not to make the incident public and warned them that this would only make matters worse for her employees.

Ramírez reportedly took the women’s cellphones and travel documents and promised to return them once they repaid the money the human trafficking network had invested in their travel and stay.

After not hearing from the women by September 25, the families contacted authorities.

Ramírez contacted the families on Monday and asked for $100,000 in exchange for their release. He told the families to stop talking to the press and authorities before leaving the women in a Veracruz neighborhood on Tuesday.

Intelligence reports reviewed by Colombian news portal El Colombiano show that the sex trafficking network in Mexico is linked to four gangs, including a Venezuelan criminal group, operating in Medellín, recruiting women and promising the opportunity to make large sums of money by living in Mexico to work. and force them into prostitution when they get there.

“They paint a world full of illusions for them, just the beautiful proposal or the perfect world, and what they end up with is the worst nightmare of their lives,” Medellín Mayor Fedérico Gutiérrez told the newspaper.

“They don’t give away so much of that good thing,” he said, adding that it is “a case because there was a complaint from one of the family members and that was what saved these six young women from these criminal structures.”

The Colombian Consul General in Mexico, Andrés Hernández, told the newspaper that some women fear that the criminal groups that have played a role in the ties between them and Ramírez would try to harm them if they return home.

“We are waiting for the rest of the women to report this incident and from this moment on all investigations by the prosecutor’s office and the judges will begin,” Hernández said.