Trade in Truths

We arrived to Lago Agrio behind schedule. Valentina, our Italian guide from UNHCR, punched numbers into the phone and reschuffled the day's agenda.

Our first meeting was with a Carmelite sister that chairs the anti-trafficking roundtable. Short-haired and stocky, this Colombian woman chronicled on camera her own adventures in and out of brothels trying to pinpoint and save trafficked minors.

It is a tricky task. The brothel industry follows a "fresh faces" protocol. This means that women and girl follow a fast-paced itinerary across the country's brothels. Lago Agrio, Guayaquil, Santo Domingo, Esmeraldas, San Lorenzo are some of the traditional stop-overs.

She cried at the memory of a ten-year-old and seven-year-old working at a beer bar surrounded by seedy men. Cantinas and Chongos are teeming with minors from Colombia and Ecuador, she says. Men demand tight girls and pay for it. Police fail to interfere and pin the perpetrators with the law. Mafias target social workers and buy the men in blue.

The boom of the Petrol industry in the late sixties meant that Lago Agrio developed along the lines of an old Western Movie with bars and brothels on every block. In the last decade, the Colombian conflict an dollarization turned the town into a hub for all types of trafficking: white gasoline to refine cocaine, small arms, drugs, women and girls.

Displaced Colombian women and minors without papers are particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation, UNHCR representatives explain. To work in Ecuador, you need refugee status. This process takes an average of 18 months in Lago Agrio. Single moms, for 18 months, have no legitimate source of income and at least three mouths to feed.

"Sometimes you are forced to do things out of necessity," said a new arrival.

In the afternoon, we joined the Red Cross in door-to-door visits of women who fit this profile. The faces of these women scream poverty, not prostitution. Their children are pure, under five years old, and full of unbridled joy and love for their mothers. A child's moment of sickness means a night of work for medicine. The love of these single moms understands only the need of their children.