Good evening, I come from Argentina

For 26 years, the uncomfortable question that God asks Cain - "Where is your brother?" Where is your sister? - has been marking my life. My brother or sister endure mistreatment, torture, any kind of atrocity. Where? It a Cabaret, in a clandestine textile workshop, on an operating table where their organs are ripped out, in a pornography studio, or when they hold a gun while they should have a pencil in their hands. My brother or sister lives a PERMANENT VIA CRUCIS, where every station of the Cross is more painful than the previous one.

There is a brother or sister of ours who is a child, a teenager, an adult or also an elderly person, trapped in this modern slavery, which leaves the scars of pain.

Globally, we have made progress in prosecuting human trafficking crimes, but very little in assisting victims because Governments do not want to spend their budgets on those who are considered rejects of society. The "discarded." – as the Pope uses to say.

What is human trafficking? Boys and girls sold to traffickers for sexual exploitation, slave labour or the organ trade. I voice a 9-years old girl that has recently been liberated by human trafficking: "I'm scared, very much afraid that the man whom my mother allowed to film me with the smartphone will come back”. “Do you love me? Don't take out your cell phone, I'm scared" Juanita, age 9.

In this square and in front of the whole world, today we demand that human trafficking be declared a Crime Against Humanity. And that all victims be redeemed. 

"Am I my brother's keeper?" Yes, I am, we are.

Because, as Pope Francis says "...indifference also kills...".