Peter Landesman managed to get this article in the NYT when arguably the mainstream media was in it's last twilight as a source of truthful and hard hitting journalism. He discusses how children are traded in the Disneyland parking lot, confirming so many suspicions I'd always had about the evil mouse who hoodwinks parents to pay for advertising while he hypnotizes their children. He writes about the child prostitute market of Mexico, held within fairly easy reach of the US border. He discusses safe houses in the US, hints at the sheer volume of the trade and how handlers control and train the kids so they will never cry or try to run, unless that is what their rapist desires. I was stunned by what I read in this article back then, and knew even back then this was a much bigger disease than was being acknowleged.

Still he did not explore the government's involvement in the trade, the use of ports as points of entry, of protected government personnel who find and herd orphans like flocks across borders, or the blackmail side of it. Maybe that's because he saw what happened to Gary Webb, who exposed the CIA's involvement in drug trafficking and met a bad death. Landesman wrote the screenplay "Kill The Messenger" about Webb's investigation and death, based on Webb's book Dark Alliance. All of these efforts are well worth taking a look. The debt we owe to these kind of journalists cannot be measured - true heroes who take enormous risks as writers with very little in compensation except the eternal gratitude and admiration of the very few who still bother to read in depth, and remember.

One thing Landesman brought home to me as I digested this article - rampant child sex trafficking was very real, was happening, and is still happening right this very moment. Even as you read this, a child with a very short future ahead of them is very probably being directed to obediently walk across a parking lot, familiarly take the hand of a well dressed man they've never met before, and call him "daddy."

https://archive.is/f8j1R

original still up http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/the-girls-next-door.html?_r=0