Amy Bradley: A Caribbean Investigative Journalist on the Trafficking Networks Operating Where She Disappeared | Witness Wednesday: Mark Bassant

Amy Bradley was last seen in Curaçao in March 1998. She has been reported in Barbados. A witness place her in Venezuela. An investigative journalist who has spent 15 years tracking the trafficking networks that operate across those exact waters finally sits down with Midnight Mystery Archive.

Mark Bassant is an investigative journalist from Trinidad and Tobago with over 30 years in journalism and 10 Caribbean Broadcasting Union Investigative Journalism Awards. He has covered drug trafficking, political corruption, the assassination of a state prosecutor, and most relevantly to this series: human trafficking networks in the Caribbean and South America including going undercover inside a Trinidad brothel and being forced into hiding after sources tipped him that organized crime had put him in their sights.

In this final Witness Wednesday of the Amy Bradley series, Bassant explains the mechanics of Caribbean trafficking networks that most North American audiences have never encountered: how Venezuelan, Colombian, and Guyanese women enter the islands; how debt bondage and passport seizure are used for control; how ketamine and other drugs are increasingly used to keep victims unable to resist; how women are moved between countries — Trinidad, Barbados, Dominican Republic, Curaçao, St. Lucia, Jamaica — precisely when investigators get close; and how the complicity of law enforcement officers at every level (police, immigration, Coast Guard, Customs) makes these networks nearly impossible to penetrate from the outside.

He also speaks directly to the geography of Amy's case: the southwestern tip of Trinidad sits seven miles from the Venezuelan coast. The same tributaries and river routes used to move trafficked women from Venezuela into the islands are the routes that connect to every country where Amy has reportedly been seen. The sighting pattern — three countries, seven years — is not unusual for these networks. It is, Bassant says, how they operate.

And he speaks to what most Americans misunderstand: the traffickers who move women through the Caribbean have enablers in North America, Europe, and Asia. This is not a regional problem with regional demand. It's a global network with global reach, and the demand side is not confined to the islands.

This is the final Witness Wednesday of the Amy Bradley series. Part 12.2 — the Bradley family — follows.

If you have information about Amy Bradley's disappearance: Call 1-800-CALL-FBI or submit a tip at tips.fbi.gov. Anonymous. $100,000 reward.

AmyBradleyisMissing.com

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