Mariana

Marianna was very poor with very few options in her home country. She was raising two young children by herself in Mexico and trying to pay off her father's medical bills when she saw a newspaper ad for an agency that arranged jobs in Canada.

They told her that for $3,000 they could arrange for her to get a job in Vancouver at a cardboard-box factory for $10 an hour - three times as much money as she could earn at home.

Marianna borrowed money to pay the $3,000 agency fee, and an extra $1,000 for her plane ticket to Vancouver. Upon arriving in Vancouver, a man picked Marianna up at the airport and brought her to a house in the suburbs where a woman took her passport for "safekeeping". The woman then told her that the factory job had not come through and instead she would be working in the lab downstairs, which, Marianna discovered, produced crystal methamphetamine and other illegal drugs.

Marianna did get paid and fed, but had to work very long hours and sleep in a room next to the lab with 10 other men and women. Marianna was scared that she would be seen as a criminal for working in an illegal drug lab. Marianna asked for her passport back because she wanted to leave, but was told that she knew too much, and if she tried to leave they would kill her.

Marianna was eventually released when the lab was raided and she was identified by police, along with the 10 others, as a trafficked victim. Her traffickers were arrested and imprisoned.