A Futile Fine

Forced into clandestinity? Sex workers wait for clients
on a Bogotá plaza.

To the list of unenforceable and destructive laws, you can add the proposal by a congresswoman to impose a fine for purchasing sexual services.'

A sign in La Candelaria offers 'erotic massages.'

Prostitution has existed - legally or illegally - since time immemorial, and a fine isn't likely to change that. In Colombia, it's legal - or at least depenalized - in certain designated areas, known as 'tolerance zones,' altho that has done little to limit the industry. But fining johns will only push this already troubled and dangerous lifestyle deeper into clandestinity and give cops yet another opportunity to illicit bribes.

The fine, invented by Liberal congresswoman Clara Rojas, is supposed to finance programs to help 'victims of prostitution' leave the business, may be a well-intentioned effort to help prostitutes, many of whom undoubtedly suffer abuse and exploitation, and some of whom are trafficking victims. However, many prostitutes don't consider themselves to be victims at all, but sex workers.

"It wasn't created to help or protect sex workers," said Fidelia Suárez, president of the syndicate of sex workers. "We are not victims or disabled people, but people who made our own decisions to do this work. Fining those who pay for sexual services amounts to penalizing the whole (sex worker) population.

"It is stigmatizing and discriminatory."

'Rough Girls.' Advertising for webcam
workers on a post near private universities.

And the fines, which would start at around 3 million pesos per infracción and increase every two years from then on, would amount to a prohibition on sexual servicies - if the law were actually enforced. It wouldn't be, of course, particularly since most clients of prostitutes appear to be blue collar men who earn little. Rather, they'd find it easier to just pay off the police.

There are better ways to help sex workers who want to leave the profession, such as offering them counseling, alternative work training and help with substance abuse issues. Police and social workers might also offer assistance to the underage girls who openly prostitute themselves in some areas - and carry out sting operations to catch their clients.

Colombia's sex workers also have another issue on their hands - a reported flood of Venezuelan prostitutes who have come here fleeing their collapsing country. In response to a court case involving a group of Venezuelans working in a brothel near the border, sex worker organizer Suárez said Colombians should support their Venezuelan colleagues and opposed expelling them back home.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The Female Solution?

Where are they off to? DEA agents on the move. (Image: YouTube screen grab)

United States Drug Enforcement Agency guys reportedly attended sex parties sponsored by Colombian narcotraffickers.

In early 2013, Honduras' ambassador in Bogotá resigned after revelations of sex parties with prostitutes inside the embassy.

A few years ago, US Secret Service agents started an international scandal by hiring prostitutes in Cartagena during the run-up to an international summit meeting in Cartagena.

The key factors here? Machismo and testosterone.

A New York Daily News cover about the
Cartagena Secret Service scandal.

Hiring prostitutes and attending sex parties may or may not be wrong, depending on your moral code.
But they certainly do generate scandal, and they can place agents in compromising situations and make them vulnerable to blackmail and extortion.

Fortunately, there is an easy solution to these male-generated problems: Hire only female agents and officials.

Women are of course not immune to sexual improprieties. But the endless parade of prominent men apologizing and resigning for involving their private parts with the wrong people suggests to me that there's something uniquely male behind this.

On the other hand, removing men from all responsible positions in government, business and even science might be difficult. And the U.S. government's solution: imposing a zero tolerance policy for paying for sex, might also be unrealistic, considering how ingrained the sex-and-partying culture appears to be.

Or, perhaps U.S. government bureaucrats believes they can re-engineer human nature and stop thos macho guys, far from wives and girlfriends, from noticing exotic women?

Perhaps a more realistic policy would be to accept commercial sex as a realistic part of male behavior, legalize and destigmatize it, so that it ceases to become a potential source of blackmail and extortion. That might, at the same time, also improve working conditions for the prostitutes involved as well as making it possible to ensure that those working women are not also on the tab of spies, narcos or terrorists.

And, while they're in the business of decriminalizing behavior, why not also consider decriminalizing drugs, as well. That would eliminate the whole need for those corruptible DEA agents in the first place.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Sex Work: From Problem to Solution?

The Cartagena Hilton, where a White House advance team member may have hired a prostitute.

In April 2012 U.S. Secret Service agents produced a huge scandal by hiring prostitutes while preparing for Pres. Barack Obama's visit to Cartagena, Colombia.

Sex workers leader Fidelia Suárez.

Bizarrely, the scandal overshadowed the international summit meeting Obama was attending - and dragged on and on, as details dribbled out about the agents' activities with the hired ladies of Cartagena.

But throughout the whole episode and after, the Obama administration repeated one point: Nobody directly employed by the White House had had a dalliance with a prostitute. Now, however, an investigation by the Washington Post newspaper finds that one minor White House advance team worker may have brought a prostitute to his room in the Cartagena Hilton Hotel.

Sen. Armando Benedetti.

The worker, a 25-year-old Yale University students, was a 'volunteer' paid on a per-diem basis, in charge of coordinating car transport in Cartagena. Hilton Hotel records indicated that he had received a female overnight guest. The worker, whose father had contributed almost $24,000 to the Democratic Party, denies having hired a prostitute in Cartagena, and in another case in Cartagena a prostitute was registered to the wrong room.

In any case, the Post's reporting suggested that U.S. government investigators had been pressured to leave out information about any White House connection to the scandal.

What two consenting adults do together is their own business, especially where prostitution is legal. But in this case, one of them was responsible, in at least a small way, for the safety of a president. And, even where it's legal, the prostitution industry inevitably has connections to organized crime.

But you can bet that if the U.S. government workers had associated with narcotic cartel leaders instead of prostitutes, the issue would have received much less attention.

The sex workers advocates in a recent march for workers' rights. 

The new polemic comes at a time when Colombian prostitutes are speaking up, at least a bit, and asking for labor protection like any other job. Senator Armando Benedetti has introduced a bill intended to guarantee benefits and protections for sex workers. A court recently ruled that sex work is a profession like any other. During a recent discussion about the issue sponsored by El Tiempo, a spokeswoman for a prostitutes' organization described abuses by police and exploitation by brothel owners.

The proposed law would, among other things, provide health benefits to prostitutes and their immediate relatives.

"The idea is that you (sex workers) have the rights of every other worker and aren't mistreated," Benedetti said.

But everything related to sex work continues to be sensitive.

"The problem with this type of project is that some think that I'm promoting prostitution, and the sex workers think that I want to end their profession," Benedetti said.

"When you talk about sex work, you talk about work," said Fidelia Suárez, representative of the Association of Women Seeking Liberty, an organization of sex workers. "We are not the problem, we are part of the solution."

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Of Vaccines and Conspiracies

Vaccine victim? A girl is carried into a hospital in Carmen de Bolivar, Colombia.

Vaccines are one of the great achievements of medicine. They've been fundamental to making scourges such as polio and smallpox little more than terrible memories. Vaccines employ a very simple principle: The immune system remembers, and upon exposure to a killed or disabled pathogen, the immune system develops defenses against that virus, bacteria or other microbe.

So, it's strange that vaccines - probably more than any other routine medical treatment - have generated lots

A girl gets vaccinated against the HPV virus.
(Photo: elcarmen-bolivar.gov.co )

of opposition - particularly in the United States (where most conspiracy theories seem to be born). And Colombia is not free of such thinking - as the ongoing controversy over the Human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine being given to young Colombian girls shows.

The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls HPV "the most common sexually transmitted infection (STI)." According to Cancer Research UK, HPVs cause about 90% of cervical cancers.

Dr. Carlos Francisco Fernández, director of the Colombian Association of Scientific Associations, says that each year cervical cancers kill about 6,000 Colombian women. But when a girl in Arauca Department got sick after receiving a second dose of the HPV vaccine, it caused national news. Of course, it's not impossible for vaccines to produce side effects. However, that girl likely also ate things which could have made her sick, played with other kids who could have transmitted illnesses and had certain genes which predisposed her to diseases.

At the end of May, dozens of young girls in Carmen de Bolivar started fainting. Soon, they were hundreds, exhibiting strange symptoms with no apparent cause. It's far from the first example of such mass sicknesses, particularly among groups of young girls and women, who are much more empathetic than males. With no apparent cause at hand, the media fixated on the HPV vaccine which many of the girls had received months previously. No matter that there was no real reason to connect the vaccine to the strange behavior. In fact, many of the girls had probably drunk the same water or eaten the same foods or seen the same movies before the fainting phenomenon. But, as far as I've seen, the media has not paid attention to those possible causes.

In fact, doctors found high levels of lead in the blood of several of the girls. HPV vaccine does not contain lead. Lead is a reasonable possible cause of health troubles.

In the United States vaccines in general have become the target of conspiracy thinkers, who blame them for many kinds of infirmities, particularly autism, despite having no evidence. In fact, autism, like other childhood diseases, commonly manifests itself about the same time that kids get vaccinated, creating an understandable but illogical association in the minds of distraught parents. The HPV vaccine, because of its sexual aspect, gets more than its share of criticism.

But blaming a vaccine for later health problems, when there's no rational cause and effect, is irresponsible fear-mongering.

When one event happens after another, all it means is that one thing followed another, not that the first thing caused the other. Saying differently without evidence is irresponsible and a real disservice to people's health.

Semana reports that experts from the Mayo Clinic in the U.S. visited Carmen de Bolivar and concluded that the girls' symptoms were something like mass hysteria. Among other things, they pointed out that girls who had not received the vaccine also experienced the fainting symptoms.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The House of the Female Orgasm

But not THAT sort of house. This house is in La Candelaria, a few doors south of Bogotá Bike Tours, where Frenchman Thierry Harribey has turned his home into an informal art gallery with periodic exhibitions.

The one which just ended today is by Cartagena artist Lila Isabel Miranda and is about that elusive and culturally-charged phenomenon: the female orgasm. According to an article in El Tiempo, Mirando enclosed herself for weeks with two women models to take the photos on which she based the paintings.

The female orgasm has become something of a symbol of women's sexual liberation. But, ironically, sex researchers believe that women probably inherited it from men, since it only a reproductive purpose only for males.

The exhibition's curators said that during the inauguration, when the artist offered kisses and affection  all around and talked about topics including masturbation, lots of the young visitors turned red with embarrasment. Also, one day a young man visiting the exhibition declared he was coming out of the closet as gay.

A visitor writes: 'Thanks from all women.'

"Which do you make: sex or love?"

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The Mating Game

True Love?

Someone left this advertisement in Bogotá Bike Tours' shop the other day.

But marketing sex or romance with colombianas to foreigners is nothing new. 

Google 'women Colombia' and you get stories like 'How to pick up women in Medellin' and websites like Calibrides, ColombianCupid and InternationalIntroductions - all on just the first page of results.

In contrast, Google 'men Colombia' and the results are topped by the National Education Ministry (whose initials are MEN), a story about Colombia's tallest man and news reports about the U.S. Secret Service's prostitution scandal in Cartagena.

Apparently, this virtual fascination with Colombian women does translate into real world results. I've met many couples consisting of a foreign man from a wealthy country and a Colombian woman, and very few of the reverse.

Theories I've heard for this situation include:

* 'Colombian women are more attractive than are Colombian men'. I wonder whether this is even biologically possible.

* Cultural norms: Foreign men are attracted to Colombian women because of Latin women's reputation for being loyal and unassertive. On the other hand, relative few foreign women would seek a Colombian man, with their  reputation for machismo and skirt-chasing.

Height: Latin women, including colombianas, are relatively short. Men generally seek shorter women, and women taller men.

Wealth: Altho this is changing, Colombia is still much poorer than are most developed nations. Many women still look for wealth in a partner, while many men seek women with less money so that the men feel they are in control, or feel like the sugar daddy.

Age: While the populations of developed nations are aging, Colombia and the rest of Latin America have many young people. Men generally look for younger - sometimes much younger - partners, while most women seem to want a partner who is older than they are.

But even with all of these factors, I'm still surprised that the proportion is so overwhelmingly one-sided. By my observation, there must be ten times as many couples consisting of a foreign man with a Colombian woman than the reverse.

This phenomenon isn't limited to Colombia, of course. In Texas, I knew a middle-aged, thrice-divorced man who traveled regularly to Mexico for his sales job. In some lonely restaurant, a young waitress caught his eye. He smiled at her and invited her to dinner. At dinner, he talked to her non-stop. She didn't understand a single word, but just smiled when he smiled, laughed when he laughed.

When I met them, they were living together in Beaumont, Texas, just a few blocks from the homes of his previous wives. They seemed happy enough: He had landed a young, attractive wife who was unlikely to assert her independence. She had found a good-natured husband with lots of material goods she could never have dreamed of back in Mexico - but they hadn't bothered to learn each other's languages.

Unfortunately, of course, these relationships can turn exploitative. There are many cases of young women being lured overseas with promises of love and marriage only to find a nightmare of abuse, captivity and exploitation. And I've also heard of cases of women who manipulated wealthy men into giving them their property and then abandonded or even murdered them.

But, like my Texas friends, I've seen many of these relationships that appear to be happy enough - which may say something about the shallowness of human nature.


By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

And What About the Women?

The seemingly endless stream of stories about the U.S. Secret Service agents' antics with prostitutes in Cartagena have detailed:

How many men were involved, and how many women. 


How much they paid.


What Cartagena's brothels are like. 


The impacts on the agents' careers. 

But nobody's asked about the women whom the agents paid for sex:

A story in today's New York Times details the experience of one of the prostitutes, whose pay dispute with an agent she'd just slept with. The woman comes off as assertive, but also vulnerable: she almost left without payment, said that the episode had left her anxious and crying and had made her decide to abandon Cartagena.

The reporter apparently didn't ask how the woman had become a prostitute, altho her proud self-description as an 'escort' suggests she did it voluntarily, as does her price - several times the monthly minimum wage for a single night's services.

El Tiempo also cites rumors that some of the prostitutes were minors, which is of course illegal in Colombia. The ICBF, the child protective authority, says it will investigate.

According to the U.S. State Department's 2010 Human Trafficking Report "Colombia is a major source country for women and girls subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically forced prostitution." Undoubtedly, there's also domestic exploitation, as this report called Human Trafficking in Colombia: A Modern Slavery says. But, according to the report, some women who migrate within Colombia to work as prostitutes do so "on a voluntary and free way: they can decide the length of stay, type and number of clients to meet and work schedules."

I've also interviewed several prostitutes who appeared to be satisfied with their work, at which  person with limited education can make much more money than she could in a shop or as a street vendor.

When prostitution - or just about anything else - is prohibited, it just gets pushed underground, where prostitutes become even more vulnerable and fearful of seeking help.

Perhaps the best solution is for prostitution to remain legal and regulated, with assurances that women who want to leave 'The world's oldest profession' have the option of doing so.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The Crossed-Legs Campaign

Campaigners in full crossed-legs campaign mode on the Plaza Bolivar. 

The people of this small, poor town in Nariño Department were sick and tired of the road from the nearest city turning into a muddy trap every time it rained. And their appeals to the government for aid hadn't helped. So, the women of Barbacoas chose a tactic they felt sure would get the attention of men in power: a no-sex strike.

Men carry a person on a stretcher past trucks
stuck on a muddy highway. 

The town's women started their 'crossed legs movement' last June. This week, they are demonstrating on Plaza Bolivar, in front of Congress, the Supreme Court and Bogotá's City Hall.

The women said the campaign wasn't popular with their husbands - especially at the start.

"Sure, they got angry at first," said Carmen Alejandrino Perez, "but since then they've understood that we're fighting for a just cause."

The women said they considered theirs a battle for education, employment and health services for their community.

'For the dignity of the town of Barbacoas.'

The 56-kilometer drive from the city of Junin takes about 12 hours under the normally poor road conditions, the women said. But when the rainy season turns the road into a swamp it can take days, because they have to stop overnight mid-way.

The region's economy depends on gold mining, demonstrators said. The area also suffers from drug crop fumigation, which often also damages food crops, and violence by armed groups. But the women said that "for our own safety," they couldn't say whether it was guerrillas, paramilitaries or narcotraffickers who threatened them.

A crossed-legs campaigner in action.

Even the town's men said they supported the enforced abstinence.

"Sure, there's frustration, anger and sadness," said Jorge Ortiz, "when you look for what you like most, and they don't give it to you. But after a while we realized that the women are fighting for something great and just. And that's why we're here."

He said that the publicity the women's no-sex strike had generated had already brought half the 200 billion pesos required to build the road.

"We're hoping to get the other 95 billion pesos we still need," he said.

The women made another prediction: that the town's birth rate would soon plummet.

Trying to right an overturned truck.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Hanky Panky in the Park

But what's going on inside?

Bogotá's sprawling Simon Bolivar Park attracts thousands of people every weekend to picnic, listen to music, play football, and, apparently, do naughty things behind vinyl walls.

That has moved the park's authorities, ever-vigilant to defend public morals, to prohibit tents in all of Bogotá's parks.

A crowded Simon Bolivar Park. 

For many foreigners, tents in city parks look strange. But it makes sense: the tents are useful for protecting belongings from thieves, hiding from the sun and rain, and taking an afternoon nap.

But, apparently, some couples were doing more active things behind those vinyl walls. One park security guard estimated to El Tiempo that four out of ten tents were used naughtily. He didn't explain how he'd generated that statistic.

This week, the District's Institute of Sports and Recreation (IDRD) - which evidently frowns on some types of recreation - prohibited tents in all of Bogotá's parks, except for La Florida, and there only with special authorization.

Tents are so popular in the park, and good for so many legit uses, that the blanket prohibition seems unfair. Couples getting naughty inside tents are only a problem when they bother other people - and in those cases they should be easy to identify and slap with a fine and some embarassment. The park authority might even designate a specific area, probably in the woods, for such activities - a sort of park red light district.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours