At eight years old, when many boys dream of being superheroes or famous pro athletes, "Gustavo" had a very different profession in mind.
Growing up in the central Mexican state of Tlaxcala, he had already witnessed abject poverty. In fact, he had lived it. That's why it was hard not to notice some of the men from his town who seemed to have it all.
These men were human traffickers and Gustavo, then only a second-grader, says he already knew what that meant.
"I would hang out with them," he says. "They were all pimps. I would play soccer with them. I would see their late model cars, houses, money and women, lots of women."
The pimps, Gustavo says, were all from Tlaxcala, just east of Mexico City. It's the world where Gustavo grew up.
Now, serving time in a Mexican maximum-security prison, Gustavo, 35, agreed to talk to CNN if we didn't use his real name. He still has many enemies and sharing details about the underworld of human trafficking can put the former pimp's life in danger.
His father was a school teacher. His mother was a housewife. He was not abused, he was not abandoned nor did he come from a dysfunctional home.
He says: "What they were able to give me was never enough. They wanted me to go to school and study, but my ambition went far beyond their dreams."
Noticing he was not going to succeed in academics, his father helped him open a small clothes factory. Gustavo says he didn't do too badly, but he wanted more.
He migrated illegally to the United States and worked for about three months. He would make as much as US$700 a week, a fortune for anybody from his town. Still, Gustavo says, it was not enough.
Traffickers teach traffickers 'rules of business'
By then he began developing a plan: he would return to Mexico and go back to school. He was not interested in academics, but in girls. And his interest in girls was very different from other boys in their late teens. His intentions were far more sinister.
"I had already met some pimps and they taught me the ins and outs of the business. They taught me how to talk to a girl, how to get her excited, how to make her fall in love and how to approach her parents so that there wouldn't be a problem," Gustavo said.
It was just a matter of time. And soon after he met a girl at a county fair who would become his first victim.
Gustavo, 18 at the time, says he told her almost immediately he had fallen deeply in love with her and wanted to marry her and have a family. He showered her with gifts and made promises of eternal love. She agreed to elope with him only four days after meeting him, and move with him to Tenancingo in his home state. Within a month the girl was forced into prostitution.
She would be followed by many more. His modus operandi was always the same: make them fall in love with false promises, have them leave with him and force them into prostitution by threats, coercion and/or physical and verbal abuse.
