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.”
One hand, jesus christ that is all kinds of fucked up. On the other, if the alternatives are starving to death or the mob beating your teeth out (we don’t know what forces these people into their position), anyone would he willing to do a lot of things they wouldn’t normally.
This world’s pretty fucked up. I remember being disillusioned of socialism back in the day (still am) but shit like this makes me wish there was some magical better system than our shitty capitalism.
Its true, the world is pretty fucked up and maybe they would starve but that is still no excuse: they (sexual tourists) could use their money to help them, instead they choose to exploit them. The people that have sex with minors and prostitutes that are vulnerable/poor are pieces of shit humans beings. I am all in favor for legalizing prostitution, as long as its not exploiting vulnerable people.
I mean there is something better than “shitty capitalism”. You can call it what you want, market socialism, social democracy, cool capitalism, but look to Norway for a pretty good example of what we could have:
2/3rd of Norway’s GDP is driven by the public sector, most of the hydropower is owned socially, trains are socially owned, 20% of housing is socially owned through housing coops, gigantic social wealth fund that could singlehandedly fund UBI from like half the returns it makes every year, they have almost 60% union density without a Ghent system like Sweden and Finland, very low income inequality, low on the hours worked per week by country list, high GDP per hour worked… I could go on.
And there’s more cool stuff like that in other countries around Europe too, Vienna’s approach to social housing, Italian and Spanish worker cooperatives, most of the electricity companies in Denmark being socially owned through cooperatives, 90% of Finland being a member in their grocery coops… like, there are so many examples of good things spread out everywhere - we just need the political will to do them more.