Julio Ledezma had been chief of police in La Junta, a town of 8,700 in northern Mexico, for barely three months when a pair of strangers paid him a visit.

They said an aide to the mayor had sent them, and they bore gifts: a briefcase stuffed with cash and a truck for Ledezma's personal use.

The light is fading from the dusty Baghdad sky as Hassan Mahsan re-enacts what happened to his family last summer. We're standing in the courtyard of his concrete-block house, his children are watching us quietly and his wife is twirling large circles of dough and slapping them against the inside walls of a roaring oven. He walks over to his three-foot-tall daughter and grabs her head like a melon. As she stands there, he gestures wildly behind her, pretending to tie up her hands, then pretending to point a rifle at her head. "They took the blindfold off me, pointed the gun at her head and cocked it, saying, 'Either you tell us where al-Zaydawi is, or we kill your daughter.'"

After the collapse of communism in 1989, millions of former Soviet bloc residents migrated abroad, breathing life into one of the oldest criminal enterprises—the trafficking of humans into sexual slavery.

The Lloyd Investigative Fund’s first grant goes to Petra Bartosiewicz, in support of her investigation for Harper's magazine of the disappearance of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist who, in 2003, was reportedly abducted near her home in Karachi, along with her three American-born children.