Testimony: Woman from Mexico forced into prostitution

The 29-year-old woman, keeping her gaze down and away from the defendant across the courtroom, testified that Amador Cortes-Meza sweet-talked her into his car in Mexico and then never let her go, taking her instead to Georgia to work as a prostitute.

“In the beginning, when I first met him, he was kind,” said the woman identified as only LMJ in a 31-county human trafficking case.

She said she never wanted to come to the United States but she was under Cortes-Meza’s control after he took all her money and her cell phone and took her to a place where she knew no one and didn’t speak the language.

“He wanted me to come to the United States with him,” LMJ testified Wednesday with the help of an interpreter in U.S. District Court in Atlanta. “I told him I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to be with my family. He said I had to do what he said.”

Cortes-Meza, a Mexican national, is the only one of eight men indicted in 2008 in the human trafficking case to go to trial. The others, including Cortes-Meza’s brother and nephews, pleaded guilty and are in federal prison for their roles in an operation that brought teenagers and young women from rural parts of Mexico to Gwinnett County. Once at one of five houses in Norcross, the women allegedly would be taken to several apartments where they would have sex with as many as 10 to 40 men a night, six days a week.

They were paid $30 for each encounter but the men who drove them got half and Cortes-Meza got the other $15, according to testimony. Prosecutors said the women could keep the tips, if any were offered.

Cortes-Meza’s lawyer suggested in her opening statement, however, that the women may have willingly endured abuse from Cortes-Meza because they wanted to stay in the United States.

Some of the girls and young women were promised love and marriage as well as good-paying jobs at restaurants, according to prosecutors. Others, like LMJ, were just taken.

LMJ was from a small farming town where her family grew corn and beans. Her education ended with elementary school, she said.

She met Cortes-Meza while walking in a park in 2006.

The next day they met again in the park and he invited her to a dance, a traditional party for girl on her 15th birthday.

At that time, she hoped to be his girlfriend, but by the end of the day she thought otherwise, LMJ testified.

“After he took away everything I had on me that day, I realized everything he was telling me was not true,” LMJ said.

They drove for six hours to a hotel where he held her for a week, she said. On the first night, she testified, Cortes-Meza forced her to have sexual intercourse with him.

“I told him to leave me alone because I didn’t want to do that,“ LMJ said.

In the days that followed, he would be “aggressive” and “yell” if she asked questions or said she wanted to go home, LMJ said.

At the end of the week, in May 2006, they flew from Mexico City to a border town and walked to Phoenix; it took two days and two nights, she said.