Spanish actor and producer Antonio Banderas made a call from Mexico for everyone to join the fight against child sexual exploitation, something that, he said, affects not only underdeveloped nations but everyone.
“We have to take this very seriously and root it out,” the film star, who is visiting the Mexican city of Cancun as a guest of honor at the opening of a hotel of the Spanish Iberostar chain, said Friday.
Banderas made the call during the presentation of the book “Libro de Sueños” (Book of Dreams), prepared by the humanitarian organization Unicef and the Iberostar Group to make parents and their children understand the dangers and degradation of child sexual exploitation.
He spoke about the importance of raising awareness to combat child sexual exploitation and said that in recent years it has become “a problem affecting many nations.”
“Many of us associate the scourge with a single country, I’m not going to say which one but it’s in all our minds, an Asian country, but when we do that we’re making a little exercise in hypocrisy because we know that basically that is going on in many countries, including some that are totally developed,” he said.
The country to which Banderas referred seems to have been Thailand, where the scourge of child sexual exploitation is prevalent.
At the opening ceremony, the executive vice president of the Iberostar Group, Gloria Fluxa, announced that the new publication, “Libro de Sueños,” is to be found in every room of the hotel chain, with versions in Spanish, English and German.
She said that the work is a story by the Zaragoza writer Begoña Oro, author of books for children and teens, and contains 16 pages of illustrations and interactive texts.
