Thirty-five people have been arrested in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal on charges of human trafficking, money laundering and forgery of documents, the judicial police announced on Wednesday.
“The suspects are part of a criminal structure dedicated to the exploitation of migrant workers, most of whom have been recruited from their home countries to work on farms in the area,” the authorities said in a statement.
The police indicated that the suspects, who are men and women aged between 22 and 58, hold Portuguese and other European nationality, without going into further details.
He added that the dozens of trafficking victims who have been identified come from Romania, Moldova, India, Pakistan, Senegal, Morocco and Algeria.
“Migrants work in inhumane conditions with very low wages and live in overcrowded and dilapidated housing,” a police source told AFP.
Their movement was also restricted due to the confiscation of their identity documents, according to the source, who spoke of an important operation in an area where many migrant workers work in the agricultural sector.
This campaign, in preparation since January 2022, has mobilized around 400 judicial police inspectors who carried out 65 raids in the municipalities of Beja, Serpa, Copa and Ferreira do Alentejo.
Portuguese authorities reported 1,152 victims of these networks between 2016 and 2020, according to a report by the Council of Europe’s Group of Experts on Trafficking in Human Beings.
