Calamar , Colombia. Out Of Options, Venezuelan exiles turn to prostitution to feed their families. Back in Venezuela, they were teachers, police officers and newspaper carriers, but were forced to flee their homeland in search of work and money to survive.
But the women, without identity papers, ended up working as prostitutes in sordid bars in Colombia, saving all they can to provide for their families back home, still in the throes of economic crisis. Mother-of-three Patricia, 30, was beaten, raped and sodomized by a drunken client β but she keeps on working in a brothel in Calamar, in the center of the country. Alegria is a teacher of history and geography but in a Venezuela gripped by chronic hyperinflation, she was earning less than a dollar.
She initially worked for three months as a waitress in the east, a job which offered room and board, but Alegria was never paid, getting by on tips. Six people, including her four-year-old son, were relying on her. Eventually, even those were confiscated, so Alegria made her way south to Calamar, which is located in an area scarred by decades of armed civil conflict. The region is a hub for drug-trafficking, and a bastion of dissident former FARC guerrillas. Some 60 other Venezuelan women do the same work here.
In she lost her job as a newspaper distributor in Venezuela. Trusting her three children to her mother, she went from city to city, from one job to another. Without a passport, Joli crossed the border without a suitcase, only with the clothes she was wearing. Inflation is set to hit a staggering 1. Some 1. In June, her year-old niece, Milagro, joined her at the brothel.
But she persisted in the absence of a better alternative to help her brothers, her two-year-old baby and her sick mother, who later died. Beside the financial hardships and obvious unpleasantness of the work, many women struggle with hiding the truth from their families. So, she tells her family she works in a bakery but, is sick of lying. On top of that, the tropical climate exposes them to infections such as dengue and malaria. Then there are sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies that result when clients refuse to wear condoms.
