Trade in Truths

Our adventure to the border boonies was not without consequence. The next morning, Elizabeth Molina called me in a rage. The night club owner called RedTrabSex at midnight reporting our visit. Paramilitary men, apparently, stopped by shortly after us, putting the fear of God into Harold’s soul.

Molina was furious that we had not given her a heads up.

“You blew it,” said Molina, president of RedTrabSex. “Why didn’t you go through us? No sex worker, no club owner in Esmeralda will open up to you. I advise you to leave soon. You might have trouble with the paramilitary. The head of the sex worker association in Esmeralda is furious with you. Forget about everything. Get out of town.”

At first, her tirade gave me pause. Had I blown it in a greedy moment of tight scheduled reporting? But as I listened to her go on and on, I came to the conclusion that the real reason for her rage was that we had gotten access to a night club without RedTrabSex acting as ambassadors. We had failed down to bow down to the sex world Queen.

She knew that we were interviewing Lucia, one of the few female brothel owners in Esmeralda, that day. As I hang up, I knew, that she would mobilize rank and file to block that interview. I immediately called Lucia and told her we were on our way. When we reached the brothel, Las Hermanitas, Lucia’s sister parried us at the door.

“The girls won’t talk to you,” she said. “You don’t have permission from the sex worker’s association.”

“Where is Lucia?” I asked.

“She walked off that way,” she lied.

We drove the car up the street and round the block looking for Lucia but she was nowhere to be found. I called her again.

“On a taxi” she said. “Be right there.”

Our interview was on.

Luicia, unlike Harold, or Elizabeth, had full command of her ship. She introduced us to everyone as if we were long lost family members. The clientele, seeing Lucia’s approval, became comfortable with the camera. A number of sex workers refused to talk to us. They had been tipped off, Lucia said, with false rumors. Molina’s work, I am sure.

We interviewd a veteran sexworker, Alexandra, over 40, and a very young girl, Jacklyn. The latter said she was 20, looked less, and admitted to starting work at age 15. The province of Esmeralda has witnessed a surge of minor sex workers. Girls are starting the business as early as 12, according to Jacklyn, Lucia and Elizabeth.

Both women we interviewed worked at Las Hermanitas to support out of wedlock babies.

The brothel was sparse and overheated. Women performed in tight quarters that stunk in the aftermath of its activities. There was no running water. The rooms offered three buckets instead of a sink for washing. Small corner shelves supported personal belongings ranging from vanity mirrors to condoms to nail polish. Handbags containing health and identity papers hang on a single nail.

Las Hermanitas is one of two family run brothels. It operates in daylight hours. The second venue, Las Canitas, opens its doors for the night shift. Lucia and her mother, an aged woman with nutty skin, run the show. Their business is almost 50 years old. Relatives provide labor as bouncers, DJs and bartenders but not as prostitutes.

Yellow taxi cabs add a dramatic dash of color to the petrol blue and jungle green port city of Esmeraldas. But the city really should be red. Egalitarian epithets – comrade, sister, brother, colleague, compatriot – infuse every interaction with a sense of revolutionary respect. The strongest incarnation of the ghost of communism was our taxi driver Stalin.

Dear Stalin. A man of gentle moods and docile disposition hid beneath this commanding name, hardend by history. As we pulled away from Hotel Kennedy, Stalin kept a steady hand on the steering wheel, yet his voice wavered when asking: Why at night? Why indeed dear Stalin. En route, I explained to him the geopolitical scope of our project and its particular focus on sex workers.

"Aha," he said full of sudden understanding. "You want to capture them in their natural habitat."

Earlier in the morning, during a conference organized by RedTrab Sex, the national network of sex workers, I approached a young pimp who dressed the part. Pavel wore Georgio Armani imitation glasses and a neon orange polo shirt. A baseball cap did little to disguise the tight curls washed out by peroxide. At 22, Pavel is an administrator at club Sensation, earning $80 per week.

I persuaded Pavel to allow us access into his nightclub. Borbon is north towards the Colombian frontier, two hours away from Esmeraldas.

Stalin's car swerved and swung down a muddy half-built highway. Frogs ricocheted across the pavement. Crabs crawled crossroads. Cicadas complained at the heavy rains. We navigated pockmarked asphalt and cut across high grasslands. Mosquitos and chitchat distracted our minds from the worst case scenarios: muggings and murder. The police in Esmeraldas had warned us. Stalin kept a clenched fist.

We took precautions: two undercover policemen. Stalin's nerves were not of steel. If we left him outside the nightclub he could bolt back to Esmeraldas and leave us stranded in the greasy hellhole of Borbon. Rain had stripped the streets down to rubble. Puddles and potholes made driving past loitering men at a safe speed impossible. The yellow cab conspicuously lit the empty streets and solitary, locked down shacks.

The taxi pulled up to Sensation shortly after 10 p.m. Sargento Sanchez's patrol car was parked in the vicinity, watching the back of his undercover officers. Three marine patrons stormed out with scowls on their face pissed off at police for not warning them before busting into a brothel with a camera lady. Clients tempers boiled.

Some men pleaded for mercy from their wives, others threatened to take our tape and ban our entry to the brothel. I gave Pavel the kiss of Judas.

"We are here under invitation from Pavel and the owner of the establishment," I said. "They have the right to show and promote their locale."

The owner of the establishment broke a sweat as the customers' finger wagging, popping veins and aggressive language, shifted onto him. The anger boomeranged back on us soon enough. I was pushed. Amy got hassled but kept safely silent. American citizenship and accents are a major liability here.  I reassured two harried husbands that we respected their privacy and that we would not record faces.

Unconvinced, the men moved on to minor shoving and major cursing. The policemen watched bemused from their doorway, one arms crossed, the other thumbs hooked on his belt. So much for back up. While Amy shot undercover, I convinced Harlod Valencia, Pavel's uncle, to grant us an interview in one of the rooms reserved for sex workers. We talked about business.

Valencia bought the place three months ago for $25,000. The return of investment is slow. We were only allowed in because he had pinned his hopes on the press to boost his popularity. Before the clients revolted at the entrance, all he had cared about was whether the footage would appear on national television. I told him we were international press but that there was always a chance that national channels might pick us up.

"Sensation is a family heritage," said Valencia. "The idea," he said, "is not to make money but to offer a space where people who cannot obtain jobs find an income. We are an enterprise."

Sensation nets $100 to $150 dollars per week drawn from the labor of seven to 14 prostitutes and the demand of local and itinerant men. Harold took pride in the generous dimensions of the rooms (at most three meters by two), the availability of a fan, a sink and puppy printed sheets. He earns $1 for each client's fifteen minutes in a room.

As we shot Valencia, women walked in and out of rooms Short skirted, shirtless ladies wove their way through circles of men sitting on plastic chairs, sipping beers and playing cards. A hand was held. A man was led. Here, the toque – intercourse-- is worth $6. A session lasts ten to fifteen minutes depending "on a man's capacity to discharge himself."

One hour of sordid details later, we left Sensation and its seedy clientele. The mob mentality persisted as we walked out the door but some men visibly relaxed as we left and some even came forward with smiles and handshakes. Perhaps it was a last ditch effort to ingratiate themselves in the hope that we keep out their faces off national TV.

We dropped off our undercover policemen at the station. Sargeant Sanchez escorted us halfway out of town in the patrol car. When we parted, Stalin confessed that he wished the escort had lasted longer. The policemen were petrified at the club,he said. The fear was clearly transferred to our driver.

Click here for Stalin's video testimony.

Stalin stopped the car. We faced a barricade and a man in a ski mask…

Click her for video testimony.

Our first stop in Esmeraldas was UNHCR. This is where Colombian women displaced by violence turn to for help. Not everyone knows UNHCR exists. In fact, one of our interviews, Karen, had already spent a year and a half in Esmeraldas before discovering this safety net for asylum seekers. Karen is a single mother of two. Her daughter Daniela, a 14 year old girl, atrophied by cerebral palsy, lay in her arms limp and gargling with a slight grin that turned into a moan of discomfort as time passed.

UNHCR's Manuel Alcivar told us that Karen was representative of the women who pass through his office seeking refugee status. Violence in Colombia has amplified domestic violence to new levels of brutality within the home. Karen's partner locked her, chained her and beat her. As a mother, she perceived the psychological trauma such sightings of violence had on the only, silent witness: Daniela. She suspected her partner was paramilitary but was uncertain of his real identity.

"Paramilitary seduce women or take them by force," explained Alcivar. "Then, as heads of households, they force them to work. Then torture them, chain them and rape them.

Daniela's discomfort and the insecurity of her newborn, Marisa, gave Karen the courage to organize an escape. The owner of the house she lived in had a copy of the keys and helped her out of a lockdown situation. Bruised and beat-up, she took shelter in a church and then traveled on a clandestine speedboat to Esmeraldas with her daughters. For the last year, she has scraped a living from housework. Sex work, she said, was not possible given her daughter's condition but she reported recruitment efforts from a trafficking net when she was younger. A friend of hers, lured with promises of commercial success, died in the trade.

I´m writing to you from Esmeraldas. In the 16th Century Spanish conquistadores were said to have found emeralds the size of pigeon eggs when they landed here. Flash forward to today. While the hillsides are as green as emeralds, Esmeraldas is a industrial coastal town. When we arrived, our drive through town took us past welding facilities, auto repair shops and bus stations. Our hotel is a short walk to the ocean, but the shoreline is shared with oil tankers, cargo containers and the cranes needed to lift and load them onto the boats.

Upon arrival on Wednesday afternoon we hit the ground running. While in Quito we had made friends with a sex workers association called Red Trab Sex. They want sex work to be recognized as a legitimate profession with workers rights, health benefits that extend beyond gynocological exams, and appropriate pay. In Esmeraldas we spent the afternoon getting them to know them better. But more importantly, over shrimp cerviches and mucha agua, they got to know us. By the end of the evening they had invited us to attend the sex workers conference that they organized. Brothel owners, sex workers, police and health officials would attend. The major issue on the agenda is to make sex work legal. Currently, sex work is neither legal nor illegal, if contained behind closed doors.

Thursday was a jam packed day. At the sex workers conference we made a number of good contacts including Lucia, a women who is a brothel owner in Esmerelda. What is interesting about her is unlike the Red Trab Sex association of sex workers who believe that sex work should be considered a legitimate profession, Lucia believes that sex work is a profession that only people in desperate situations choose. She wishes that the demand for sex work didn´t exist and that women never had to be put in these positions.

In the evening, more shrimp ceviche. Then we hit the road with our trusted driver Stalin to our next shooting location in Borbon, el Jardin de Sensation, a brothel that granted us permission to shoot inside.

Now we´re in Esmeralda with a full day of shooting ahead.

Flight to Esmeraldas from on Vimeo.