I check my passport, ticket, and Turkish visa. I am ready to begin my trip to Central Asia; First London, then Istanbul and from there to Uzbekistan until I get to Japan. I study the map, and memories of my previous trips come back to me.

A year earlier I followed the Colombian mafias to Venezuela, Guatemala and my own country: Mexico. I traveled through the United States looking for the human slave market and found it next to the White House, in Chicago and in New York. I listen to the children in Cuba, and dress up as a prostitute in Dominican Republic to interview European and American sex tourists who pay 3,000 dollars for a virgin teenager.

Some years ago, I traveled to Finland, and then to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev. Later, I flew to Tbilisi, Georgia, where I came to know and respect Anna Politkovskaya, who helped me understand the complexities of the region. I passed through Azerbaijan and Armenia. I visited Tashkent and Samarkand, once one of the most beautiful cities of the Persian Empire. From Uzbekistan, I went to the border of Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. It was October, and it was cold.

As cold as when I was seven years old and every time my sister and I went out on the street our mother warned us to stay away from the “kidnapper,” an old woman, well known in our neighborhood, who robbed girls. She would entice them to approach her with candy only to snatch them away and sell them to strangers.

Forty years later, I discovered that what seemed to be a lesson taken from a Dickens’ novel had become one of the most serious problems of the twenty-first century. Society in general tends to consider the trafficking of women and girls as a throwback to another time in which “human trafficking” was a small-time business of pirates that kidnapped women to sell them to brothels and Geisha houses in faraway countries. We thought that modernization and strong global markets would eradicate such kidnappings and that the abuse of children in the “underdeveloped” world’s darkest corners would simply disappear through contact with Western laws and market economies. But today we see the exact opposite. Many countries have legalized sex slavery calling it prostitution, some governments even act as official pimps to denigrate and sell women and girls, robbing them of any chance to become anything other than objects for tourists and local clients.

For five years I traveled around the world following the trails of the mafia rings—big and small—who gain 35 billion dollars a year by selling sex slaves in local and international markets. We are witnessing a trend that considers the kidnapping, disappearance, trade, and corruption of girls and teenagers as something normal. These girls and teenagers become sexual objects for rent and for sale, while this culture encourages their human objectification as an act of freedom and progress. In a dehumanizing market economy, millions of people assume that prostitution is a minor evil. They choose to ignore that underlying prostitution are exploitation, discrimination, racism, abuse, and the exercise of organized crime’s great power on a small and large scale around the world: the biggest power of them all is wrapped in this message: “Girls and teens are worth nothing, we will let them know prostitution and pornography are their only choice to have a free erotic experience”.

This is not just another moral panic story, on the contrary, women and girls around the world taught me this lesson: if you do not have real opportunities to exercise your rights how can you choose freely.

I know my rights. I’ve survived rape, incarceration, two trials and an assassination attempt for the simple fact of exercising my freedom to be an echoer of other women’s voices. And here I am making a free choice that millions of our sisters cannot make; until we are able to walk the path together, I will keep writing. And I will do it under the warm inspiration of our deceased colleagues from around the world, those who where assassinated for their honesty and their bravery, just like Hrant Dink, whose life and death touched us all in Latin America.

Thanks to him many of us gained a better understanding of the impending need of the democratization in Turkey, his way of carrying news of developments in the Republic of Armenia helped us see a clearer view of the Armenian genocide and the complexities of the Diaspora.

The compassion Hrant had for all human beings and his congruency will not be forgotten. I stand Humble before you, I receive this award, I salute his memory, his professionalism and his legacy for freedom of expression and Human Rights.

Thank you