Chelo Alvarez-Stehle- Sands of Silence

Published: March 7, 2012, 7 a.m.

b"Chelo Alvarez-Stehle is a journalist, documentary and new media producer who has worked for over 14 years exposing stories of human trafficking through her creative and outreach work. A Spaniard, she worked in Japan in documentaries for NHK and became Tokyo\\u2019s and then Los Angeles\\u2019 correspondent for Spain\\u2019s El Mundo daily. Her writings on trafficking have been published worldwide. In 1997, Chelo's first published interview on this issue received the publishers\\u2019 award, enabling Anu Tamang, a Nepali survivor just rescued from in India, to attend school for the first time in her life. In 2002, the article was turned by Canal+ into TIN GIRLS, a feature documentary film on sex trafficking in the Himalayas, for which she was assistant director, interviewer and consultant. After production of TIN GIRLS, Chelo co-founded the Masala Project, an income-generating spice factory for trafficking survivors in Nepal. Then, in 2011, Tamang received the Hero to End Modern-Day Slavery Award by Hillary Clinton during the official release of the U.S. State Department Human Trafficking Victims Report."