by SARAH ROWLAND

Vacation planning has never been more convenient. For example, if Acapulco is your dream destination, you can just go online and tailor all your travel arrangements from the comfort of your own home: book a hot fare flight, send away for a custom-made fanny pack and, according to Diego Briceño-Orduz, preorder a child prostitute. You read right. With a credit card and the ability to crack cleverly coded wording like, "The price of this private resort includes ‘little bees,'" kiddie diddlers can have an 11-year-old sex slave waiting for them on the sunny shores of Mexico.

This is just one of the many disturbing tricks of the trade the local filmmaker learned while doing preliminary research for his documentary Souvenir Kids.

"When I went to Acapulco, it was a big shock to really hear the stories first hand from the kids and see how open it is," he says about his first trip in 2002.

Later that year, no longer able to ignore the growing problem, the Mexican government set up a special task force, designed to crack down on child prostitution and pornography, on- and offline. This gave Briceño-Orduz hope until he went down to the squad's headquarters.

"They didn't even have a computer," says the 32-year-old Concordia film grad. "In fact, they didn't even have a fax machine. So I was like, ‘How are they going to fight these guys?' It was a very David and Goliath situation at first. I found that people were trying to do something but were helpless. So I just thought, ‘We have to do something.'"

Briceño-Orduz was resolute about finishing his film, which explores the sexual exploitation of children in tourist traps. "There's a different set of values in those places that lingers and it's not the fault of one particular tourist," he says. "It's a by-product of tourism itself. Everything is commercial-based; people are willing to sell anything and people are willing to buy anything."

As determined as he was to keep shooting his doc, the reality was no CanCon, no funding. The Montrealer returned home somewhat defeated. Then, like a gift from the documentary gods, splashed across the front page of Le Journal de Montréal was a story about a big bust in Mexico, where a network of pedophiles were arrested for child prostitution. Two suspects were Quebecers.

"It was a surprise," he says. "I jumped up and called back my contacts to confirm. And they were like, ‘Yep, yep, it's true.' So I got enough money to go back. Even though I didn't really know how I was going to work it into the story. All I knew for sure was that it was going to help me convince some people here that I had some sort of Canadian angle."

He was right. CBC Newsworld agreed to partially fund Souvenir Kids, which will air on The Passionate Eye, Radio-Canada and RDI this spring.

"I think it will open a lot of eyes," he says. "People will realize that civil society needs to play a bigger role in protecting all kids."