MONTREAL (Reuters) -- Pedophile tourists are switching to Latin American destinations following recent crackdowns in Asia, a leading authority on the exploitation of street children says.
Experts attending a two-day international conference in Montreal this week said that despite the adoption 10 years ago of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child to protect against such abuses, many countries are too desperate for tourist dollars to prosecute globe-trotting pedophiles.Bruce Harris is a director of Covenant House, an international nongovernmental agency, headquartered in San Jose, Costa Rica, that aims to protect street children. From his headquarters, the 44-year-old Briton sees the damaging effects of Latin America's burgeoning pedophile tourism industry close hand.
"Sexual tourists will not go to places where they know it is going to be dangerous, so they are looking for other countries where there are weak laws, weak and sometimes corrupt police, and where they can get away with abusing children," Harris told Reuters in an interview.
With a staff of 440, Covenant House, Casa Alianza in Spanish, helps downtrodden children by providing a variety of social services such as shelter, food and counseling. It also tries to track down adult foreigners looking for underage sex in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
Lawyers and investigators gather evidence and submit it to local and foreign police in hopes of prosecuting those seeking sex with local children.
Harris, who won Sweden's Olaf Palme Award in 1996 for his work with children, lauds Asia's all-too-tardy acknowledgment that the sexual exploitation of minors by tourists has ravaged that region. But in the face of Asia's stepped-up efforts to stem the tide of visiting pedophiles, the child sex tourists, who come mostly from developed countries, have been revising their travel plans.
Costa Rica, whose population of four million depends heavily on tourist dollars, is a sad and worrisome example of that shift, he said. Police estimate that one out of every 200 foreign visitors to Costa Rica, a popular Central American destination for eco-tourists, vacationers and adventurers, has a more odious goal -- sex with children.