Acapulco, Mexico CNN -- It's early in the evening and they're already on the streets looking for customers. They are all very young, some still in their teens. One teenage girl wearing a tight, revealing, deep pink dress walks by while prying eyes follow her every move.
At La Noria Street in downtown Acapulco, this is part of daily life. It's supposed to be illegal, but it's not hard to find underage girls offering sex for money here. This is Acapulco's dark secret and the reason why the Mexican beach resort has gained a sad notoriety with tourists seeking children for sex.
Rosario Santos, who runs a shelter for street boys and girls called New Hope, says that customers are "mostly foreigners" coming to Acapulco on cruises or by plane. One of the children she rescued is Irene Lopez. The year-old says she was only 16 when she got caught in the trap of prostitution after running away from an abusive home. To "make a connection" in the parlance of the street here means to pick up a customer for sex. Lopez says her customers were all tourists, mostly from the United States.
It is an open secret that the main square in downtown Acapulco was the place to go for pedophiles. Customers would wait at the square to make "a connection" with children providing sex for money, children's rights activists say. She and others have pressured officials to increase police presence at The Catwalk, while helping as many children as possible get off the streets.
Those children are taken into shelters, some run by the local government, where they find protection and a home away from drugs and the violence of the streets. I would always tell them that it was not worth their life and their emotional and psychological well-being," says Cruz. Melissa Monroy, who works at a shelter known as the Acapulco Children's Home, has repeatedly heard the same abuse stories.
