How to Buy a Child in 10 Hours [Haiti]

This deeply unsettling experiment starts on a typical Monday morning on Manhattan's leafy Upper West Side, where commuters stroll by Starbucks and Central Park.

It's 45 minutes to Kennedy Airport and an hour or so wait in the terminal, then a 3½-hour flight to Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

By the time my team and I have collected our luggage, gone through immigration and customs, and are loaded into our vehicles, it's about 3:15 p.m.

As we leave the airport, two things become immediately apparent: Port-au-Prince is an amazing, vivid place, and it's also extremely poor. The U.S. State Department warns Americans against visiting here. United Nations peacekeepers patrol the roads while we drive with our own security team: two armed Haitian men in SUVs.

By 4:45 p.m., I'm poolside at one of the city's few upscale hotels. I'm wearing a hidden camera built into the strap of a bike messenger-style bag that's around my neck. There's another hidden camera in a leather satchel on the table, right next to the fruit plate and Evian water. My colleagues are manning cameras in hotel rooms overlooking the pool.

He says he's a former member of parliament and that he has connections. In broad daylight, with hotel waiters walking by, he doesn't even flinch when I make a horrific request.

"If I would like to get a child to live with me and take care of me," I ask. "Could you do that?"

I saw this last night. Summary:

There is a large and thriving slave trade in Haiti characterized by urban Haitians buying or trading rural children to use as domestics and as sex slaves either for their own use or for rental to tourists.

For $150 a foreigner can buy a prepubescent girl for Haitian use, for $10,000 a foreigner can buy a prepubescent girl with the paperwork required to adopt her and give her documentation required for a US visa.

The story of one girl they profiled was particularly heartwrenching - and the producers actually broke the slimy "journalistic code" such dirtbags usually go by and helped her out.

this guy was on the bill handel radio show am 640, los angeles the other day.

handel mentioned why didn’t you just buy the kid and turn her lose?

but he said he was asked not to do that by human rights groups that track and assist human slaves

because the owner would just go get another slave.

iow, you’d be contributing to the slave business.

In some places, the practice is not necessarily for monetary gain. Flashback to '97:

December 20, 1997 Web posted at: 3:50 p.m. EST (2050 GMT)

BAHR EL GHAZAL, Sudan (CNN) -- A global charity is fighting the internationally condemned slave trade in Sudan in its own way -- by buying the freedom of slaves and reuniting them, mostly boys and girls, with their families.

Christian Solidarity International estimates that tens of thousands of children and adults have been snatched from their homes in the southern part of the African nation and brought to the north by suspected members of the northern government militia, known as the Popular Defense Force.

The practice stems from the lengthy civil war between forces loyal to the government in the predominantly Arab-Muslim north, and rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Army in the mainly Christian and animist south.

The practice of slavery is strong in Sudan as an outgrowth of a lengthy civil war -- much to the dismay of the United Nations and human rights groups. Tribal militias routinely capture women and children as war booty, according to the annual report from Human Rights Watch. Earlier this year, U.N. officials called on the Sudanese government to carry out its pledge to investigate cases of slavery, forced labor and similar practices.

The conflict and related famine have killed an estimated 1.3 million people since the mid-1980s, when the SPLA took up arms to end what they see as domination of southern Sudan by the north.

The southerners are said to be seeking autonomy and an end to Islamic Sharia law.

CSI has so far managed to buy the freedom of dozens of slaves for about $100 apiece or three cows per person, the organization said.

"The government is aiming to completely destroy the social fabric of the Dinka people in this area. They regard them as enemies, because they resist the forced Islamisation and forced Arabisation policies of the regime." John Ebner said.

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