Haitian Orphans Case
Figure Also Wanted In El Salvador
By Gerardo Reyes and Juan Carlos Vasquez,
ElNuevoHerald.com
SAN SALVADOR -- When two Nicaraguan girls,
held captive in a house on the outskirts of
San Salvador, overheard that they were to be
sold as sex slaves for $150, they were
terrorized. They decided to escape and
report their story of abuse and deceptions.
Their statements led Salvadoran police last
May to a child prostitution ring allegedly
run by Jorge Torres Puello and his wife Ana
Josefa Ramírez Orellana, according to the
documents filed in the criminal case in San
Salvador.
Torres Puello, who also went by the name
Jorge Torres Orellana there, is at the
center of an international scandal involving
American missionaries who attempted to
remove orphaned children from Haiti without
government permission.
Interviewed in the Dominican Republic on
Sunday by CNN, Torres Puello confirmed that
he is the same person is sought by the
Salvadoran justice system.
Torres Puello's past has begun to emerge in
pieces that indicate a turbulent life, with
troubles with the law.
He is wanted in the United States for
violation of probation in a bank fraud case
in Pennsylvania.
Last Friday the presiding judge in San
Salvador case, David Amael Moran Asencio,
called for the arrest of Torres Puello on
charges of using persons under 18 for
pornography, trafficking and prostitution.
The victims were listed as five Nicaraguan
girls, 14 to 16 years old, and two Dominican
teenagers who were of age.
El Mundo, a newspaper in San Salvador, had
access to records from the district court of
San Juan Opico, a town outside the capital,
which detail some of drama experienced by
the victims of the organization.
The Nicaraguan girls told police they had
met Torres, his wife Ana and Jency Ivonne
Ramirez, another woman also charged in the
case, in a gas station in Managua,
Nicaragua.
They told them that they were students who
helped out with the housework at home.
Torres then offered to take them to San
Salvador and transform them into models who
would make their debut at a farewell
ceremony for the outgoing president of El
Salvador.
Thrilled with the prospect of changing their
lives, the girls accepted the offer. To get
around immigration controls, they walked for
two hours to the border with El Salvador,
where Torres picked them up in a car and
took them to in the town of Versalles.
Initially, the members of the gang took the
victims to shopping centers, inviting them
to nice restaurants and buying the new
clothes.
According to the girls, Torres presented
himself as a missionary who helped
immigrants from several countries. But the
girls discovered that his intentions were
different when one night he asked them to
pose naked for photographs.
The girls felt that they could not refuse.
Those images were displayed on an Internet
page that advertising escort services.
Torres also asked them to sleep with him,
but they refused him. The group charged
customers $60 to spend the night with some
of the victims. However, the two girls who
filed the report maintained that at no time
were they ever sexually abused.
Then one night they overheard Torres
discussing with his wife and Yvonne Torres
Ramirez how the they were to be sold for
$150 to two clients. That same night a man
from Guatemala arrived who wanted to pay for
sex with one of them.
The girls refused. An enraged Torres threw
them out of the house and left them on the
street, although he came back to pick them
up at dawn and gave them each $20 for the
bus trip back to Nicaragua. As the fare was
much more expensive, the girl explained
their situation a man who contacted the
police on May 26.
``I did nothing,'' Torres Puello told CNN.
``One time we gave some Nicaraguan and Costa
Rican women money to return to their
countries and instead they filed a complaint
against us. I've never held anyone against
their will.''
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