Peruvian authorities on Sunday rescued 23 people from Afghanistan from human traffickers along the border with Brazil, the attorney general’s office said.
The migrants, who were trying to get to Ecuador, paid money to people smugglers to transport them across the nation and to the northern border, prosecutors said.
A statement from the prosecutor’s office said the migrants were cheated out of their money and crowded into a house without food in the village of Inapari in the Madre de Dios department along the Peru-Brazil border.
Among the victims were “four children, including a two-month-old baby,” the statement said.
The migrants were led to believe they would be taken to a regional city, then on to the capital Lima before heading to Tumbes, a city near Peru’s northern border with Ecuador.
Hundreds of people from Afghanistan risk their lives each month to get to the US overland through Latin America. In some cases they trek through 11 countries and risk falling victim to kidnappers and thieves.
