Chilean Women

Eight shabby sedans, each driven by a grim-faced man, each freighted with five pretty, nervous and very young women, dashed and slithered over the mountain road from Chile to Argentina, plowed with whining gears through deepening snow, finally bogged down in a great drift just beneath the towering statue of "The Christ of the Andes."

Not even the Statue of Liberty is more famed among Latins. Thirty-one years ago Argentina and Chile renounced war in a spirit profoundly Christian, melted down hundreds of cannon to cast "The Christ of the Andes." Last week the huge figure, standing guard between two nations as their Prince of Peace, towered majestic and compassionate above the snow-bogged motorcade. With his left hand the Savior supports a cross taller than himself. The right hand is raised in benediction. Darkness came on as the drivers of the eight sedans jumped out and began vainly to shovel. Slowly the snow-whipped statue vanished into the night. Shivering and whimpering, the 40 young women grew rapidly hysterical, were roughly told to remember, in case anyone should come along and ask questions, that they were all either "brides" or "seamstresses."

Even on zero nights Chilean policemen must patrol the pass beneath "The Christ of the Andes." Stabbing the dark with electric torches they discovered the stalled motorcade. The policemen did not ask to see passports, for passports are no longer needed between Argentina and Chile. But to find in eight shabby sedans eight shifty-eyed men and 40 young brides & seamstresses was a coincidence pointing to only one thing: the brothels of Buenos Aires.

Making a blanket arrest on the charge of trafficking in women and children, the Chilean police helped to dig the motorcade out, hurried it to the frontier town of Los Andes. There the brides & seamstresses confessed that they had been recruited in Santiago and Valparaiso to work in the casitas of Buenos Aires. They gave their ages as between 14 and 25. A few said they had been "lured" from home by promises of a motor ride to see the sights of Buenos Aires.

All the young women were Chileans--which was puzzling. In Buenos Aires the trade demands Franchuchas (French prostitutes), reluctantly accepts such substitutes as Poles, scorns South American recruits. On the eight men letters were found which solved the puzzle. With elaborate Latin courtesy a Buenos Aires white slaver wrote to his "forwarding agent" in Valparaiso that he had been unable to get any French or European women sent over via Panama to be forwarded via Chile. Apologetically the slaver asked his agent to stoop to recruiting Chilean women. "The prying activities of the League of Nations," he wrote plaintively, "have been giving us trouble."

Proud of their catch, the Chilean police boasted that it would lead to extermination of Argentina's renowned white slave ring, Zwi Migdal. Argentines were skeptical. The whole thing, they observed, is a matter of profits so huge that Zwi Migdal can well afford to pay bribes big enough to keep the traffic going. Not long ago a Franchucha testified that during her first week 402 men were shown into her room, paid not quite $3 each--or nearly $1,200.

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