12,000 Child Porn Sites Identified in Mexico

Mexico has been the world’s largest distributor and the second-largest producer of child pornography for at least half a decade, and a new report on the situation suggests nothing has changed.

The federal Congress called on state governments to strengthen their efforts against it after a report by the federal Attorney General’s office (PGR) revealed it had detected over 12,300 Mexican internet accounts that distribute photographs and videos of children being sexually abused.

According to data gathered by the Federal Police’s Center of Cybercrime against Minors, Veracruz is one of the states where the crime has noticeably increased in recent years, targeting girls aged between 11 and 15.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has estimated that there are 16,700 websites worldwide dedicated to distributing child pornography, and that 73% of the victims appear to be younger than 10 “in pictures that are increasingly graphic and violent.”

Congress has also asked the Veracruz government for a detailed report on the measures it has set in place to combat child pornography.

The governor himself, Miguel Ángel Yunes Linares, has been accused of links to a child pornography scandal in which businessman Jean Succar Kuri has already been convicted and sentenced in 2011 to 112 years in prison.

He has labeled the accusations as a part of a politically motivated “dirty war” against him.

While the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has stated that on a global scale organized crime is not involved in child pornography, the same might not be said for Mexico, where criminal organizations have been involved in human trafficking and linked to underage prostitution.

Estimates made early in the decade suggested that 20,000 children are victims of human trafficking for sexual exploitation annually in Mexico, and there was a high probability that some of them become part of the country’s large child pornography industry.