The Yachak, literally the one who knows,  oversees delivery accoridng to Andenean custom.

After lunch, I visited FLACSO, the main social sciences university in Quito, to interview a researcher who worked years on the subject for her thesis. The studies are mostly qualitative and conclude that the women traffic drugs out of love.  By 4 p.m. I was armed with questions and hailing a cab towards the women’s jail, where 85 percent of the inmates are there for drugs.

At the jail, my questions quickly hit the limits of the director’s knowledge. His attitude hardened in the absence of answers. We exchanged  twenty minutes of verbal sparring and stare downs. He questioned my right to the information. I questioned his right to withhold it.  The interview was off to a bad start. While the anti-narcotrafficking unit gave me carte blanche, the women’s jail met me with resentment and red tape.   

I shut my notebook shut and apologized for wasting both our times.

“I can help you with general questions,” he relented.
The frontal fact-based approach had clearly backfired so I switched tactics. I spent the next hour spiraling in from the least relevant to the most sensitive information. Slowly but surely he opened up as I became the sympathetic cast of one to all of his jail director achievements and frustrations.

By 5:30 p.m. he had forgiven my direct ways and invited me back on Saturday to take photographs.

Hitler gave us the redlight district tour: La Casa de Citas, Las Munecas, El Boricua, La Pantera advertised their presence with loud graffiti, lewd murals and neon lit nudity. Some were little more than shacks. Only La Casa Blanca, a freshly painted hillside villa with an armed guard and silver SUVs outside parked, aspired to an air of distinction. Every time my camera flashed, Hitler hit fifth gear in fear of being identified.

At 11 p.m., our driver reversed his pickup truck taxi down a steep riverside road. Klo-Klong. The taxi boarded the Gavala moored in the water. Gavalas are floating metal contractions that look light but are solid enough to support the weight of several cars. We crossed the river. The only lights on the water came from car headlights and the carnival colors spilling out of waterfront clubs.

Gavala transporting passengers across the Aguarico river

We crossed over to the neighborhood of Aguarico. A few months ago a shoot out broke out between police and residents who had an arsenal of small weapons for trafficking. Now, Hitler explained, most of the crime comes from this neighborhood but they are not committed in the neighborhood. Still, he started and stopped the car with unease every time we drew near a nighttime establishment. To our surprise, many had shut down.

The area of Aguarico, unlike the rest of Lago Agrio, felt like a ghost town. The roads were rough. Petrol tanks doubled as trash containers outside rundown homes. It was hard to believe that this was narcotrafficking nexus. The occasional clue came from suspiciously high quality cars given the context. It could have been any community in the world beyond recrimination.

From Colombia, Puerto Nuevo is a short boat ride across the San Miguel river. It is a FARC weekend destination. The town has approximately 250 families, seven brothels, one school and a health center that opens four days per month.

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.

In a town with 7,000 petroleum workers, military men, police and vendors, there is a high demand for sex. Evidence is in the pool halls, karaoke lounges, discoteques and brothels. And only twelve miles to the Colombian border, the town offers financial opportunity for women desperate to flee violence and war.

In the first half of 2008 alone, over 270,000 Colombians were displaced by rebels, right-wing paramilitary groups and drug cartels. I do not know how many of that number are women or of that number how many ended up resorting to sex work. But a 2005 study found that at least 70% of the sex workers in Ecuador are Colombian.

On the plane the stewardess tells us there are 84 passengers. I count five passengers who are not men.

Our Virgil into Quito’s nastiest scenes is a cab driver, Miguel. For a living, Miguel shuttles prostitutes from the brothels to hotels, motels and parking lots. He works at Night Katz. Twelve taxi drivers work with him. Initially, there were twenty five men hired for these runs. More than half in the group got laid off for sexually abusing or robbing the call girls after work. Miguel is one more spider in a vast web of facilitators and exploiters.

We finished our reporting day at 9 p.m. in Queens. A black bouncer blocked the blue lit doorway. Posters silhouetting curvy girls and trumpeting prices -- $10 a pop, or fifteen minutes -- plastered the walls. We crossed a second doorway and met the administrator, a man who previously worked at a New Jersey mattress company. He welcomed us inside and gave us the greenlight to film. Monday nights are low key.

At the club, we met a Colombian girl, who had all the elements of our missing profile for the story. She was very traumatized and determined not to speak to us. Off camera, she shared elements of her family's experience at the hands of guerrilla. It was not a happy story. She teared up six times. I encouraged her to tell it for the sake of other women in that situation but she would not budge.

"It didn't make sense," I told her. "She had shared her story off camera for nothing. Why would she not share it on camera for something: the help it could bring to others?"

For a moment, that argument seemed to hold weight. It was the first one out of many that she actually mulled over. Despite three moments of hesitation, she stood her ground. We gave her our number in case she changed her mind. We'll see how that goes. Miguel is now pitching sources that want to sell us such stories. The answer was no and an explanation of basic ethics that hold even when access is difficult.

Accessing Colombian sex workers is one side of the obstacles coin. The other side of the coin is the hermeticism, bureaucratic jargonese and red tape that one needs to cut through when dealing with the NGOs theoretically meant to help this people. The story is there but many forces sabotage our access, close the valves of information flow. Sources sidestep the issue fearing a diplomatic controversy with Colombia or a backlash from the men who represent the cause of displacement (guerrillas, paramilitary, abusive relatives.)

The night ended at Dragonfly in Quito's red light district. The bar was on the same block we circled earlier in the evening looking for minors, transvestites and Colombians working the streets. Amy shot footage from the front seat while Virgil gave us the scoop on the streets who's who: crack whores, drug dealers, underage girls, narcotrafficking night club owners, ad nauseam. Virgil was a breakthrough after many roadblocs. But into what?

Yesterday, we had an intensive interview with a Margarita, a sex worker from Colombia who works for Lucia. Margarita perched on the edge of the company bed in her professional work quarters for the interview. The 5' x 7' room felt like water-free aquarium with the green walls and aqua sheets. In the space, I felt the claustrophobia a fish snatched from the ocean and dumped into confining glass walls would feel.

Unlike many sex workers who sleep in the same beds as they work, Margarita lives with her grandmother in Esmeralda. She agreed to let us film in her apartment the following morning, on the condition that we not mention her work. We made arrangements to meet the following morning in front of the Gran Mision Esmeraldas al Encuentro de Cristo -- a church overlooking the central square.

We slept, then awoke. Stalin picked us up and drove us to the meeting point.

Outside the church young boys and girls huddle, giggling and joking. Dominique gets out to scour the area for Margarita. I sit in the car guarding my camera and watching the crowds.

On a bench across the street from the church, a middle aged man in a day-glo green tank top and white shorts catches my attention. Seated on his lap is a young girl, probably eleven or twelve years old. Next to him sits another girl, a little older, who stares at the sidewalk, not getting nearly as much attention as the other. Both are wearing jeans, pink tank tops; their is hair is pulled back in tight cornrows. Given the man's age, my initial assumption is that this father is dropping his daughters off for the church's Saturday activities.

Dominique still isn't back. I continue to watch this trio. The girls bear no resemblance to the man. The way he looks at them is not at all paternal. I am disgusted, sickened. These girls are too young. I resist the urge to call him out on his predatory behavior. Dominique returns. Margarita is nowhere to be found. We drive around the block two more times before concluding Margarita changed her mind.