Chelo Alvarez-Stehle- Sands of Silence

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’s and then Los Angeles’ correspondent for Spain’s El Mundo daily. Her writings on trafficking have been published worldwide. In 1997, Chelo's first published interview on this issue received the publishers’ 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.