Mayor Federico Gutiérrez banned prostitution in tourist areas after an American was caught with two young girls in a hotel room
Yenifer is standing with five other girls on a corner in the San Diego neighborhood, a 15-minute walk from Medellín and Mayor Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez’s office in City Hall. They all have tattoos, show a lot of skin, and look like teenagers. In fact, they’re all minors who have been forced into prostitution. Yenifer insists that’s her name, but it’s clearly a lie. She also claims to be 15 years old, which does seem true because she has the body and face of a child. She seems nervous and giggles a little, revealing blue braces on her teeth. She’s wearing a purple miniskirt and matching tube top that don’t cover the butterfly tattoo on her hip. Yenifer says she started at 9 p.m. and will be “working” until 4. a.m. It’s now 9.30 p.m. and raining. It’s going to be a long night.
Yenifer lowers her gaze and says she started doing this about two months ago “because of some problems.” Her friends almost look like regular teenagers, standing around and playing with their phones. Yenifer says she doesn’t have a pimp and services three or four clients a night, mostly Colombians. A half-hour with Yenifer costs about $26 dollars, the going rate in San Diego. She charges the occasional foreigners triple.
“What happens when they ask how old you are?”
“Depends on what they want.”
The causes of child prostitution are poverty and corruption in law enforcement. If those aren’t addressed any other measures will just make life worse for the victims.
And Colombian cops are insanely corrupt. Notoriously corrupt. I lived there for a few years, in bogota. There was an area nearby where I lived called “El Bronx,” where everyone knew what it was. A drug and prostitution den, where cops stayed away (i guarantee you that was due to bribes)…until they got off duty and went to score or fuck.
I was dating a Colombian girl who wanted to go down there and see what it was about, but I pushed back. Shortly after I left the country, I saw in the news that the place finally ended up getting raided and they found countless dead bodies and everything else you can imagine.
And in my time in the country, dudes going to a brothel to hang out and drink was…super common. I hated it, but I was dragged to one on multiple occasions without knowing where we were going. One time I was on a bunch of acid and had this dude we were hanging with yapping in my ear all night about what kind of shady shit goes on there, how they kill people who don’t pay, etc. Meanwhile, I’m nips deep in a heavy trip and had literally like $1.50 in my pocket that I didn’t tell anyone about until the morning when I could finally get out of there. I gave it to a cabbie and told him to get us as close to my house as he could.
You’re very right, corruption is rampant and the root cause of issues like this. I paid off cops on numerous occasions. It was literally expected. I literally paid the cops to give my drugs back. Insane. But after they’d shake me down, they’d always say what’s up when they passed. It’s a big, unwieldy problem, unfortunately.