Some child sex traffickers were hiding in plain sight

FPI / February 18, 2025

Following is the first in a series of excerpts from the book, "Shattered Innocence: A Shared Global Shame", by investigative reporter Christine Dolan, a veteran U.S. broadcast and print investigative journalist who worked as CNN's Political Director in the 1980s.

Part I

In early 2004, UK Journalist Jeffrey Picket and I traveled to Guatemala to investigate the international adoption arena, which was presented to us as a fertile ground for trafficking adoptive children to America.

We believed Bruce Harris was a sincere advocate for children at that time. Harris was the Executive Director of Casa Alianza, an international non-profit organization, and the Latin American branch of Covenant House, which was created in New York City years earlier to protect homeless street children.

Harris was partners with NGOs associated with the U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Office. (TIP). The U.S. federal law shepherded by Congressman Chris Smith, the late Congressman Tom Lantos, who was a Holocaust survivor, and former U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback created that office.

I have always found it disingenuous that the U.S. TIP office recommended that foreign countries establish their federal trafficking office in their judiciary department while the U.S. kept its trafficking offices initially housed at State Department, and later expanded to the U.S. Department of Labor.

President William Jefferson Clinton signed this anti-human trafficking federal law in October 2000. I first began this investigation earlier that spring.

At the time, I thought how ironic, considering Clinton’s own intern scandal inside the White House a couple of years earlier, and through the years, how hypocritical that he hooked his sail and the Clinton Foundation to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, who preyed upon young girls.

Harris led Casa Alianza from 1989 to 2004. This NGO had been recognized for providing shelter, food, and immediate care to homeless and runaway youth across several Central American countries. It had received awards and accolades for years. It received the 1996 Swedish Olof Palme Prize, the 1999 International Award for Children’s Rights from the International Bureau for Children’s Rights in Montreal, Canada, the 2000 Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize, which rewarded one million dollars, and the 2002 Jorge Angel Livraga Award. Harris even received a 2000 Order of British Empire (OBE) award from Queen Elizabeth in England.

But, in the fall of 2004, Homarya Sellier, President of Innocence in Danger in Europe, rang me exceedingly early one morning, “Wake up – we need to talk.”

Harris was alleged to have paid a teenage boy for sex in a hotel after picking him up on the street. Harris had left Central America, and no one seemed to know where he was. I needed to find him. He was in the U.S. Harris was married at the time and a father of two teenagers. Harris had gone radio silent.

I tracked Harris down in Florida and demanded he tell me the truth. He admitted to me that yes, he had had sex with this kid, but he did not even see the young man’s face. Harris said that as if that had influence. Harris found his victim on the street and took him back to his hotel room.

When I asked him about the “rumor” at that point that the young man had been a resident at Caza Alianza up to 2002, Harris said the most shocking statement.

“Had I known that he had been a former resident of Caza Alianza, Christine, I never would have had sex with him.”

My jaw dropped.

“Bruce, you are finished in this field of protecting children,” I was emphatic. This was non-negotiable.

Silence was his response.

I then called two individuals: Jan Eliasson, the then Swedish Ambassador to the U.S., who later served as Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations, who was a champion against all forms of human trafficking.

I reiterated my conversation with Bruce Harris.

The second phone call was to John Miller, the then Ambassador of the U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Office. Miller was a former U.S. Congressman from the state of Washington.

Both agreed with me.

Harris was “done.”

I share these stories now considering what is happening in the U.S.

The world needs to grasp just how sick the Internet is and how sick our society is, especially when there is a movement to decriminalize pedophilia, and a multi-layered attempt to sexually normalize incredibly young children about anal, oral, and vaginal sex through library books and sex education and health classes in school districts. Now, we have morphed into legalizing and promoting the mutilation of children without their parents’ consent.

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"Christine Dolan is a formidable journalist. She has been ahead of all of us in the media having covered human trafficking now for almost a quarter of century. There are few journalists who can match her commitment, experience and knowledge on this subject, and her generosity to share with the rest of us. Shattered Innocence: A Shared Global Shame explains how she discovered a level of evil that many of us in legacy media never investigated." — Lara Logan, Award-winning television journalist and war correspondent.

Free Press International
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