THE SEX TRADE
Sean Flynn explores the labyrinth of Philippine sex clubs—a paradise for adventurers where the girls are plentiful, cheap, and have no other choice. The first installment of a three-part investigation into the global sex trade - GQ, August 2005
PART I: PLEASURE, AT ANY PRICE
The fat guy smoking Pall Malls, he says he almost married one of those girls. Honest. He met her in a bar one of the last times he was in the Philippines and fell in love, almost bought her a ring and took her home. It didn’t work out, though, and he doesn’t say why because it doesn’t really matter. He shrugs.The skinny kid with the knobby head understands. Same thing happened to him, sort of. She was 19, beautiful, didn’t wear makeup or anything. She was so…what’s the word? Simple. You know? “Just give her the American necessities and those are, like, her luxuries,” he tells the fat guy. “Let her live like a queen.”
The fat guy grins. His front teeth are missing, and he’s got hair like an oil slick, long and black and greasy. Oh yeah, lots of those girls want an American husband, and they’re not picky, either. “As long as you’re not married and you’ve got an income,” the guy says, “you’re good to go.”
It’s four o’clock in the morning in a Japanese airport, thirteen hours out of Detroit Metro, on a layover in Nagoya before the last 1,700 miles to Manila. The fat guy and the skinny kid found each other in the smoking lounge as if they had picked up a shared scent, a couple of misfit white guys dragging halfway around the planet.
Then another, a fellow traveler in a red running suit, walks over. He’s fiftyish and pudgy with gray hair and enough of a beard to cover a weak chin. He’s never been to the Philippines before, he tells them, just heard the stories about the bars and the girls, and now that he’s divorced, what the hell, treat himself. Still, he’s a little nervous about the whole thing.
The skinny kid knows that feeling, too. He was nervous his first time. It’s kind of weird, the way you can buy a girl for a couple of bucks, a different one every night, every hour if you want, walk around town with her and not even pretend it’s anything more than a cash transaction. “I walk into this place with my arm around this local girl, you know, and there’s all these guys sitting around looking at me,” he says. “And I’m thinking, I’m gonna get my ass kicked, you know?”
The fat guy’s grinning again. He knows where this is going.
“But then they’re all like, ‘Hey, American, come and drink with us!’ ”
“Oh yeah,” the fat guy says. “And after ten minutes, you’re not talking to them. You’re talking with them.”
They all nod, even the guy in red.
“Seriously,” the skinny kid says. “They love Americans.”
*****
There’s a girl on a small stage in a bar called the G-Spot Lounge in Angeles City, a sprawl of cinder block and tin about an hour northwest of Manila. She’s wearing a sky blue bikini that matches the powder Mamasan swabbed on her eyelids, along with enough blush and mascara to make her whole face itch. She hasn’t worn makeup since her first Communion, and then not so much.
She has a birth certificate that says she’s 19. It’s false, and obviously so, because she’s only 13, but nobody cares, because in the dark, under all that rouge and shadow, she looks old enough. All the girls—the other ones onstage, the ones waiting tables, the ones cuddling up to customers, sweet-talking foreign men into buying them drinks—look old enough, which isn’t very old at all.
An American man is yelling at her. “Hey, you!” he says. “Yeah, you. Dance! You’re getting paid to dance.”
She doesn’t really know how to dance, and the high-heeled boots she’s wearing make it even harder to fake it. Her arms are in close, holding her own bare torso in a loose hug, and she shifts her weight from foot to foot, gently twists her shoulders from one side to the other. Is that dancing? Is it close enough? Do they even care, the men watching, the Koreans and the Japanese, the Americans and the Aussies, the fat guys and the skinny kids sucking on stubby bottles of San Miguel?
Mamasan, the bar manager, will pay the girl 120 pesos to wear her bikini from six o’clock in the evening until three o’clock in the morning. She is supposed to dance for half an hour, then go work the room for a while and wait for her next shift onstage. If one of the men in the club buys her a drink, Mamasan will cut her in for fifty pesos, put it toward her debts: 1,300 for the boots, thirty-five more for a week’s laundry. Or maybe one of the customers will buy her for the night, give Mamasan 1,000 pesos—“bar fine,” they call it here, a term that’s both a noun and a verb—to take her out of the G-Spot, maybe to another club or a restaurant first but probably just to his hotel room. The girl would get half of that, about $9 American.
It’s her first night at the G-Spot. She’d gone looking for work a few days ago—up Fields Avenue, past Club Fantastic and Camelot and Stinger, past the sidewalk shops selling shirts that say I FUCK ON THE FIRST DATE and I’LL BUY DRINKS FOR SEX, past the shoeshine boys and the peddlers with their bootleg Cialis, past all the other bars looking to hire dancers and waitresses and GROs, which is short for guest-relations officers, which is long and awkward for prostitute. “Must have happy personality,” the signs say, because no horny tourist is going to bar-fine a girl who isn’t any fun.
The mamasan at the G-Spot asked the girl how old she was, and she said 19 and showed her the birth certificate that couldn’t possibly be legit, and Mamasan hired her, gave her the boots and the bikini and rubbed makeup on her face and put her on a stage. That’s how it happened, just like that: A little girl walks into a bar and gets a job.
“Hey.” Big Daddy again, out there beyond the strobe of the stage lights. Papasan, the guy who runs the G-Spot. His name is Thomas Glenn Jarrell, an Ohio native who did a tour in the army before settling in a dirty little city that is moderately famous simply because it has bars, dozens of them, and girls, thousands of them, and only eighteen bucks a night. “You’re getting paid to dance!”
Seriously, fat guys and skinny kids tell each other in Japanese airports, they love Americans.
The girl blinks the itch from her eyes and lets her arms fall to her sides and wiggles her hips. Is that dancing? Is it close enough?
*****
Change her name. It doesn’t matter. Make her a little younger or a little older, but never too old. Dress her in a red bikini or a slip or a pleated plaid skirt. Wrap her naked around a pole or put her in a room with a big glass window and a flock of other girls, bored and trying not to look it, waiting to be picked like lobsters from a tank. Move her down to Manila and pay her more, or move her up the coast to a shack on the National Highway and pay her less. Put her thousands of miles away, in Tokyo or Moscow, or put her on the other side of the globe, in Costa Rica or Mexico. It doesn’t matter. The story will be the same, the beginning sounding like the setup to an old and dirty joke: A girl walks into a bar…
So many girls walk into so many bars today that no one even tries to count them all. Cataloging every prostitute on the planet with any accuracy is no more feasible than counting leaves in a forest: The business is by definition largely underground and extremely fluid, the workforce mostly unregistered, untraceable, and ever changing. Instead, there are only guesses, estimates, and extrapolations, worst cases and best cases depending on who’s counting and where and why. Statistics for individual countries, individual cities, even specific red-light districts, vary wildly from lowball official figures to almost incredible numbers conjured by aid groups and activists. Thailand, for instance, a notorious and well-studied sexual playground for foreign men, has either 75,000 prostitutes, as the government claims, or depending on which aid group is tossing out numbers, nearly 2 million who generate up to 14 percent of the country’s gross domestic product—parameters calibrated so widely as to be virtually useless as an accounting tool. The sex-trade data are so imprecise that researchers and government agencies shorthand the global total to a generic tens of millions of women and girls generating tens of billions in cash.
The actual numbers are irrelevant, anyway. A Filipino bar girl doesn’t care whether she is one of 50,000 (the low end) or 800,000 (the high end), and a john in a Russian brothel doesn’t concern himself with the millions of women he could theoretically be renting, because the ten or twenty at hand are more than enough. The global sex trade, as pure a commodities market as pork bellies or soybean futures, need only be measured in broad sweeps of demand, which is apparently insatiable, and supply, which is seemingly endless.
Within those uncountable numbers are stories of horrific brutality, of women smuggled into foreign lands, beaten into submission, forced to work off infinite, impossible debts. There are stories, too, of breathtaking naïveté, of young Moldovans giddy because they’ve got contracts to work as cocktail waitresses in Kabul, of peasants in Mindanao who believe a low-rent gangster when he promises to make them cabaret stars in Manila or Tokyo, of foolish girls who actually want to be prostitutes because they’ve seen a bootleg tape of Pretty Woman.
The great bulk of the business, though, is far more prosaic, a function of simple economics, the ageless enterprise of women willingly selling their most easily marketed assets. It can be condemned by feminist theory and religious mores, and the key adverb—willingly—is terribly relative, especially considering that there is almost always a middleman, a mamasan or a pimp, taking a cut. Yet oppression is also a relative term: For people with limited options, the few that remain don’t seem so unreasonable. And in any case, business is booming. In an age of easy international travel, when borders are not much sturdier than lines drawn on a map, both sides of the trade—supply and demand—have become industrialized.
If viewed from above, from high in the stratosphere with the whole blue earth rolling and spinning below, the currents of the sex trade would be as obvious as the clouds, swirls of people moving from country to country, continent to continent. There are two dominant streams, intertwining, twirling around each other but moving in opposite directions. The women and the girls are swept out of poor places, from parts of South America and Asia and the former Soviet Union, into wealthier nations and cities, Moscow and Tokyo, Turkey and Dubai, Germany and the United States. The men—“ ’mongers” or “hobbyists,” in the fraternal jargon of the hardcore sex traveler—generally drift in the other direction, from rich to poor, from the United States and Australia and Britain and Japan and the rest of the First World into the Second and Third Worlds. There are small and curious eddies, like the Brits—“whorists,” the tabloids call them—who’ve discovered “tottie tours” through Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, or the drip of Arabs who fly to Chisinau, in desperately impoverished Moldova, to patronize the brothels. But the strongest currents flow to the most entrenched bazaars: to the resort cities of Brazil, Cuba, and a few Caribbean islands; to Central America; and, of course, to Southeast Asia—historically, Thailand and Cambodia and, rising fast over the past twenty years, the Philippines. Many of those countries, particularly in Asia, became destinations in part because they have long cultural histories of prostitution. According to several studies, more than half of Thai men paid to lose their virginity, and more than 400,000 visit brothels each day, estimates that no one seriously disputes. The Philippines, a nation that is at once matriarchal and rotten with machismo, has a similar tradition, an indigenous demand that drives a local market. “It’s simply the norm that you have two kinds of women—those you respect and those you can buy and play around with,” says Aurora Javate-de Dios, the executive director of the Asia-Pacific chapter of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, based in Quezon City.
And that norm has grown into a massive service industry for foreigners. In Balibago, a few dusty blocks of Angeles City on the south side of what used to be Clark Air Force Base, there are 117 bars and a handful of massage parlors, one gaudy facade next to another next to another. “It’s all here: alcohol and sexy young women,” the neighborhood’s semiofficial Web site (www.balibago.com) promises. “Recreational sex is the sport of choice. You can enjoy full privileges with one or more attractive young females regardless of your age, weight, physical appearance, interpersonal skills, wealth, or social class.” On Burgos Street in Makati, the high-rent district of Manila, the girls upstairs at Jools wait by the door until men walk in and the lights snap on, and then they all pop up and pose, and the girls at High Heels squeeze onto a melon-wedge stage and sway roughly in sync while others work the high-top tables with red velveteen trim—you bar-fine me?—and all the girls at all the other clubs on that strip do the exact same thing. A few congested miles away, in Quezon City, is Air Force One, an enormous neon box the size of a midwest convention center, with inlaid floors and a red-curtained stage and narrow hallways lined with small rooms named for every American president (the George W. Bush cubicle is particularly popular) and girls stocked in two glass-walled displays—first and business classes for the younger and prettier, economy for the older and uglier. And along the northern coast of Subic Bay, in a speck of a town called Calapandayan, underage girls wave from a balcony in striped tube tops while across the street, in a place called Muff Divers, a dozen more girls do a limp waggle for five surly Australians.
The bars are everywhere, and there are girls in every bar. Yet none of the girls are technically prostitutes, because prostitution is illegal in the Philippines. A bar fine, in the national patois, is merely proper compensation for a club to let a girl out the door for a few hours, after which consenting adults can have at it—a ridiculous semantic wink that allows the industry to thrive with official deference if not outright sanction. (“I’ve had [aid workers] tell me you can’t stop it because to do so you’d have to arrest half the senate,” says one Western diplomat in Manila.) Indeed, much of the rest of the tourist sector is in on the gag. A guard with a machine gun at Ninoy Aquino International Airport sees a man in a suit with an American passport, grins, nods. “You have a good time, yes? You get some girls, yes?” A driver for the Makati Shangri-La, a five-star hotel, volunteers that he can procure an authentic virgin out in the provinces. Her parents will want 100,000 pesos, but she’ll be a real cherry girl, guaranteed, not some university coed faking it for a night because she’s short on tuition.
At this point, there is no financial incentive to enforce the laws, anyway. No one knows exactly how much the bars and the girls contribute to the $2 billion tourist trade—immigration does not ask men if they’re entering the country to get laid—but it is substantial. An estimated 300,000 Japanese sex tourists visit the Philippines each year; and in 1997, a boom year for tourism, 13,000 Australians traveled to Angeles City alone, a figure reportedly second only to Americans. (And there really is no other appreciable reason to go to Angeles City, other than the bars.) Factor in the businessmen with a few hours to kill, multiply by hotel rooms and restaurant tabs and bar bills… It adds up.
Moreover, the bars and the brothels provide jobs in a country that doesn’t have nearly enough to go around. Almost a million Filipinos leave the country each year to find employment, and more than 10 percent of the gross domestic product is cash sent home by overseas workers. Most go off to be domestics and laborers, a few are skilled professionals, and some—again, no one knows exactly how many—are imported to be prostitutes in wealthier countries. Until earlier this year, Japan alone granted more than 70,000 visas annually to Filipinos to work as “cultural entertainers,” a euphemism so transparent that international pressure finally forced the number to be cut to 8,000. For those who remain on the archipelago, where nearly half the population lives on less than $2 a day, there are menial jobs in the city and field work in the provinces, neither of which is abundant or pays more than a subsistence wage.
Or there are the bars. There are thousands in the big cities and little villages, and dozens that sprouted next to the American naval base at Subic Bay and alongside Clark Air Force Base in Angeles City. Soldiers and sailors and airmen used to come by the thousands, flush with American dollars to spend on cheap beer and pretty girls, and the pretty girls came by the thousands, too, because the money was so much better than anything else they could do, and sometimes—not often, but with the same frequency that sells lottery tickets—a soldier or a sailor fell in love with a girl he met in a bar and married her and took her away. It went on like that for decades, so durable and so vast that it became famous, so famous that even after the bases closed, men kept coming, Americans and Australians and Koreans and Japanese, with their dollars and yen, traveling all the way into the middle of the Pacific just to hump the local women. There are so many tourists bringing so much money that a silly term is invented to make it all legal, and eventually the whole country—the hotel clerks and taxi drivers and airport guards—is winking and nodding, because in a way they’re getting a little taste of the action, too.
And then it’s simply the norm.
*****
There is another girl, a woman, actually, because she’s 23, who works at another club, a different kind of club in Manila, more subdued, classier, the sort that features girls with business cards. The cards are a mottled gold and pink, and they have her cell-phone number in the bottom corner and her name—Wine, that’s all, just Wine—above her awkwardly translated and slightly misspelled title, CLIENT’S LIASON ENTERTAINMENT OFFICER.
Wine wears a cocktail dress, size zero because she is tiny, not quite five feet tall. At the start of each shift, she sits with all the other girls in the showroom behind a wide pane of one-way glass in one of the upholstered chairs that are set in long rows, like the littlest theater at the cineplex, and there is a small screen, set low into the front wall, playing videos to keep her from going mad with boredom while she waits. When customers come in, Mamasan draws open the curtains on the other side, and dim light filters in so Wine knows to look up, but she can’t see anything on the other side, only shadows. She can count how many men are looking in and sometimes, if one of the silhouettes is especially large, she’ll get up and slip out the back.
Most times, though, Wine smiles and tries to look pretty, which she is, and tries to be charming, which is difficult through a sheet of soundproof glass. If a man selects her, Mamasan will push a button on an intercom and call her name, and then Wine will come into the hallway and try even harder to be charming. She will kiss him on the cheek and slip her arm through his, like a new girlfriend on a third date. Mamasan will lead them—Wine and a client, maybe two other girls and their clients, maybe two girls and one client—through a warren of hallways, which are darker and narrower away from the lobster tank, to one of the fifty private rooms. There are banquettes along two or three of the walls, short cocktail tables, a television set, and a karaoke machine.
The club is not a brothel. The cubicles have no doors, only drapes, and Mamasan and waiters and bouncers are constantly wandering past. Some men, especially the Asian men who make up most of Wine’s clients, will pay good money to have strange women sing karaoke with them, 800 pesos an hour, of which Wine collects 250. Her client will buy drinks, of course (Wine is a scotch gal), and if he’s feeling frisky, he’ll drop an additional 400 pesos to have Wine change into a loose and low-cut slip so he can lick salt off her body for a tequila shooter. “Not the naughty parts,” Wine says. Only here—she points to her neck—or here—a spot above her left breast—or here—the curve of her hip. She always offers the body-shot option, the same way used-car salesmen offer rustproofing, because she gets paid an extra 150 when she lets a man lick her. A lot of clients paw and grope her anyway, so she may as well collect some pesos for her trouble.
If a man is particularly taken by her, he can pay Mamasan the bar fine, 10,000 pesos—$180, give or take, ten times the price of an Angeles City girl—half of which goes to Wine. But Wine says she does not leave the club with clients. Okay, maybe she does once in a while, but only for dinner in a nice restaurant or a few hours in a casino. She says she is not a prostitute. Her English gets noticeably worse. She changes the subject.
Wine has worked at that club for almost three years, which is unusual only because she admits it. (Dorothy says she has been there for two weeks. Maki says she has been there for two weeks. An astonishing number of girls say they are 19 years old and have worked at their particular bar or club for exactly two weeks, like a default code that says I’m legal and experienced, but barely.) She comes in four or five nights a week at seven o’clock and stays until three or four the next morning. On a good night—actually, her best night ever—she will spend five hours with clients. If they all spring for body shots, she will gross 2,000 pesos. Of that, Wine will owe 100 pesos for laundry, 200 for makeup, and an additional 300 or so for food. So if she’s very charming and very lucky, Wine will walk out just before dawn, sticky with salt licks, with 1,400 pesos. Thirty bucks, give or take.
It is the best job she has ever had.
She has a 7-year-old son to support. Wine got pregnant when she was 15, gave birth at 16, started working soon after. Odd jobs, menial jobs. She peddled cosmetics, sold bananas from a cart, worked the cashbox at a cockpit. None of them paid well. When she was 19 she told her boyfriend, her baby’s father, that she wanted to be an entertainer in Japan. He said no. But she knew someone who had a friend who knew a guy—it’s always that complicated—who managed girls who wanted to go get one of those 70,000 cultural- entertainment visas. Wine needed the money more than she needed her boyfriend, so she signed up.
Her manager put her through six months of training, schooling her in rudimentary Japanese culture and etiquette, teaching her the basics of the language, explaining the mysteries of the wider world, like how to behave on an airplane. That all cost money, naturally—“credits,” Wine says, when she actually means debts. So did coaching her to pass the Artist Record Book test, which required her to sing three songs—one fast and two slow—ably enough to qualify as a “cultural entertainer,” a threshold Wine concedes is not set particularly high because she cannot, in fact, sing very well. Then there was paperwork to arrange, and plane tickets and housing—thousands and thousands of amorphous expenses, all on credit.
She says she spent six months in Kyoto working at a club controlled by local gangsters. That was a good job, too. The mamasan looked out for her, she says, kept her away from the yakuza heavies, never forced her to do anything she didn’t want to, like go out on dates with any of the clients. A lot of the other girls did, though. The Russians and the Romanians? Total whores. When Wine talks about that part of the job, she only screws up her pronouns a couple of times, says I before she stops and says she and changes the subject. Mostly, she says, she hustled drinks from lonely businessmen and rasped Britney Spears songs onstage.
After six months, after paying her living expenses and all of her debts, subtracting everything she owed, she cleared 40,000 pesos, or about $700.
Wine got the job at her current club not long after she came back from Japan. She never meant to stay here so long, but the money’s good, better than she’d get anywhere else. She could make even more, work six nights a week, if it weren’t for the hangovers. She’s trying to cut back on the booze, trying to switch over to fruit shakes like the other girls, which is why she’s only having one magnificent tumbler of scotch tonight, not counting the two she had with the guy who was in a couple of hours ago.
*****
Two years pass. The girl from the G-Spot is still only a girl, 15 now, almost 16, which is how old she looks in the twilight on a bluff above Subic Bay, thirty miles southwest of the bars in Angeles City where she used to work. She’s wearing a red T-shirt and a thin silver chain that reflects gold in the sunset, and she has dark eyes and dark hair, but her skin is a faint shade lighter than most Filipinos’ because her father was a white man, an Australian.
He was a businessman in the north of the country, and he bought fabrics, bolts of silk, from a pretty lady in a market. He kept buying her silks, and soon, maybe even in the first week, he fell in love, crazy in love, that’s how the girl says it because that’s how her father said it. After three years, when they were living as husband and wife, they had a baby daughter—the girl—and later two sons.
When the girl was 4, the family moved to Quezon City, in metro Manila, to be closer to her mother’s relatives. The girl had her own room in a two-story house next to a garment shop her father owned, which, along with an ice plant he also owned, paid the bills. She was happy. Her father told her she would grow up to be a doctor.
Then her mother met another man. He was a bad guy, compared with her father anyway, in trouble with the police, in and out of jail, always smoking shabu, the Filipino version of crystal meth. Not long after, the girl’s parents split up.
They still saw each other, though. According to the girl, her mother would go to her father and ask him for money, say it was to buy food and to raise the girl and her brothers, but she’d use it to post bail for the thief or buy him more shabu. The girl’s father knew, but he gave her the pesos anyway. “My father,” she says, “he is so crazy in love with her.”
Until it hurt too much to be crazy in love. On December 15, 2000, the girl’s father hanged himself in his apartment.
She ran back north for a while, lived with one of her father’s friends, but seven months later she went back to her mother and the man, who by then was her stepfather—a junkie and a criminal sleeping in her father’s bed in her father’s house. He was strict, wouldn’t let her out of the house, and he would hit her, hit her little brothers. “My stepfather, I think he has something wrong with me,” she says. “Why does he do these things to me? Why doesn’t he let me be a child?”
Her mother took the worst of the beatings. In the summer of 2002, the stepfather threw his wife to the floor, grabbed her by the hair, dragged her into the bathroom, and tried to drown her in the tub. He pulled a knife, held it to her throat, and swore he would kill her. Then the police came, swarming into the house, waving their guns. Days later, when the police said they couldn’t hold her stepfather any longer, she packed a bag and headed north again.
She bounced from relative to relative for a few months before going to Angeles City. She had family there, an “uncle” who’s actually her mother’s cousin. She asked if she could live with his family, and he said no, he couldn’t afford another mouth, but she asked again and then a third time, and he finally said yes, okay, she could stay. But she felt guilty because she knew she was a burden. And she worried about her little brothers, left behind in Manila to fend for themselves. “So after so many days,” she says, “I decide to work in a bar.”
That’s how it happens. That’s how a girl 13 years old walks into a bar and gets a job.
She worked nine-hour shifts, trying to dance in her bikini, blue one day, maroon the next, eye shadow always matching and always too thick, then coming off the stage, talking to customers, coaxing drinks out of them, fifty pesos a shot for her own pocket. She did not like her job. Some of the men who drank at the G-Spot seemed nice enough, but mainly they were old (everyone seems old to a girl of 13) and fat and horny, the sort of schlubs who read the Web site and believed it because it happens to be true: You can enjoy full privileges with one or more attractive young females regardless of your age, weight, physical appearance, interpersonal skills, wealth, or social class.
“Do you know the word blow job?” she asks. “And…I don’t know the word, when you lick the pussy?” The girl blushes, looks away. “I saw some very bad, disgusting…yuck,” she says. “I saw it because I have eyes.”
On her third night at the G-Spot, she says, a Japanese businessman and his Filipina assistant bar-fined her, paid a thousand pesos to take her out into Angeles City. Mamasan told the Japanese guy that his date was a cherry girl, which normally would tack a premium onto the price—“cherry popping” is popular among certain connoisseurs of degeneracy—but her tone was firm, a cautionary instruction—don’t fuck her—instead of a promise. And he did not try. He asked her how old she was, and she said 18, and he didn’t believe her, so she said 16, and he did not ask again. Then he took her around the corner to a casino, and the girl just watched while he gambled. She was relieved when he told her to go.
Fifteen years ago, and for decades before that, most of the men in the bars were Americans, the soldiers and sailors on leave or stationed at Clark and Subic Bay. In the ’80s, Aurora Javate-de Dios of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women was in Olongapo on business as the troopships unloaded and thousands of servicemen streamed off the naval base and into the city. She could feel their eyes, all those men looking at her the way they looked at all the other Filipinas. “That was kind of a humiliating moment,” she says. “ ‘Oh, so this is how it feels to be commodified.’ ”
When the U.S. military decamped a few years later, it was assumed by many Filipinos that the sex trade would go with them, that the former bases would be redeveloped with hotels and restaurants, provide decent jobs, and attract less salacious tourists. That has happened to some extent at Subic Bay, but much less so in Angeles City. “We had hoped it would end, but it did not,” Javate-de Dios says. “Apparently, the culture and the infrastructure were enough reason for other investors to come in. In fact, now it’s more terrible because it’s international.” The dynamic has been reversed, the supply of bars and girls no longer a reaction to a specific demand—horny American soldiers who were sent there by the shipload—but a self-sustaining industry that creates its own demand. Americans still wander the streets of Angeles City, but so do Koreans and Brits and Australians and Germans.
The moneymen tend to be foreigners as well. The legal papers are fuzzy (which, in turn, makes the legal responsibilities fuzzy, too), but the alleged Pooh-Bah of Fields Avenue is Richard Agnew, a former constable with the Royal Ulster Constabulary. He moved to the Philippines in the mid-’90s and over the following years started running a small empire of clubs—Nero’s Forum, Misty’s, and at least three others—and the nicest hotel in the neighborhood, the Egyptian- themed Blue Nile Executive Club. An Australian, Terrence George Matthews, and his purported partner, an American named Thomas Glenn Jarrell, apparently owned the G-Spot, Club Fantastic, and other clubs. The girl thought so, anyway. She recognizes Jarrell’s picture now. “That’s Papasan,” she says. That’s the guy who yelled at a child for not dancing well enough.
The girl worked four more nights before anyone else paid her bar fine. This time, she says, it was an Australian man with a Filipino wife. Odd, two couples bar-fining an underage girl in a club that serves single men almost exclusively. The Australian had started talking to her in the bar, and she told him how her father had been Australian, too, which was enough for the man to invite her out to dinner. They just talked, the three of them, all through the meal, and when they finished, the Australian thanked her and told her to go home.
She went back to the G-Spot instead, where another man approached her, took her gently by the arm, and asked her to point out Mamasan. The girl did. The man, still holding the girl’s arm, took her to Mamasan and said he wanted to pay her bar fine, started dickering over the price, argued, wanted to know exactly how much for the girl.
Cops were everywhere after that, bursting through the door, guns drawn, yelling at everyone not to move. The girl was terrified, but all the adults were likely more dumbfounded than frightened: Police raid the bars in Angeles City about as often as Mount Pinatubo explodes, which is hardly ever. Why would they shake down the G-Spot now?
Because activists from an international nonprofit had been in town for more than a week, crawling through the bars, snooping for underage girls. This wasn’t hard to do: UNICEF estimates there are approximately 100,000 minors currently working as prostitutes in the Philippines. The guy who dickered with Mamasan was an undercover cop, one of a squad put together after the activists pestered federal police for help. On November 28, 2002, the National Bureau of Investigation and the Angeles City police raided five bars. The cops took the girl and four others, all 17, out of the G-Spot, and three others—two 17 and one 13—from Club Fantastic. Jarrell, Matthews, and four Filipina floor managers were arrested. As for the other three clubs, the aid workers could have been wrong—maybe they saw some girls who only looked like they were too young to be working as bar girls.
Or maybe the clubs got lucky. Maybe the young ones had the night off.
*****
Change the details. Shuffle the dates, stage the raid in July, when the girl was still in Manila watching a thief beat up her mother. Put the cops in a dozen bars that night, let them grab a hundred underage girls, arrest four foreign papasans and ten mamasans. It doesn’t matter. The next day, the story would be the same: A girl walks into a bar…
For the girl, though, it matters. In a miserable life, she was blessed with small kindnesses and fortunate timing, by a mamasan who protected her cherry-girl status even as she sold her out the door, by missionaries who appeared like wraiths, by a raid orchestrated after she’d spent only a few nights in a bikini. If she’d been off that night, if she’d been out on a bar fine when the police came through the door… For her, the details matter.
Yet for Fields Avenue, for Balibago, for Burgos Street, for Makati, for all the other girls in all the other bars and clubs, the details are irrelevant. The girls who were swept away that night could be replaced in the morning. The six girls who were 17 when the cops came? In a few months, all of them would cross that mystical barrier, the age of consent, turn 18, and become, by the flip of a calendar page, legal adults with all the free will in the world to dance in a bar for fat, horny foreigners.
The lure is so strong. Even the youngest among them, the girl with not even two weeks’ experience, couldn’t stay away. After the raid, she was sent to a group home run by PREDA—the People’s Recovery, Empowerment and Development Assistance Foundation, in a villa on a hill above Subic Bay—which a Columban missionary named Father Shay Cullen cofounded thirty years ago after a pimp in Olongapo tried to sell him an 11-year-old. The girl was there for a year. She had a bed in a dormitory, food, school lessons, therapy.
She went back to Angeles City anyway. Took two other girls with her, too.
“My feelings and my mind were mixed-up,” is the only way she can explain it. She was too frightened to go back to the G-Spot, so she scouted all the bars and then settled on Bahama Mama’s because it had the chubbiest girls loitering outside and, consequently, the fewest men inside. At first she was bored, but after a few days she thought it was fun, like a game, dancing with her big sisters—the senior dancers’ names are always preceded by ate (ah-teh), a familiar form of “big sister”—and any man who paid her bar fine received only the pleasure of buying her margaritas. She’s still a cherry girl. Her friends left, but she stayed for a couple weeks, and would have stayed longer if Father Shay hadn’t gone looking for her, handing her picture to the police and the tricycle-taxi drivers, loudly announcing that she was a lost child, shaming people with an immunity to shame into looking for her. She finally turned herself in.
No one’s looking for Wine. She’d like to get out of the club in Manila where she works, open her own place, something nice down in the Malate district, near the embassies and the waterfront. She’s got it all figured out, explains it between sips of scotch, how she’ll have three rooms, an Internet café out front, karaoke in the middle, billiards in the back. No go-go girls. No bar fines. Classy. A nice dream. A girl can dream, right?
She takes another drink, rattles the ice in her glass. She knows it’ll never happen. “How long will I work here?” she says. “Until my hair is white.”
And the arrests? The foreign men hauled off in handcuffs? Change those details, too. Put them in shackles for the cameras, drag them out in chains while the missionaries watch. Shut down their bars. Accuse them of pimping minors, of hiring children to wear bikinis, all of which the Philippines has laws against. It doesn’t matter. “We have laws against trafficking, protecting women and children,” says Javate-de Dios. “But they’re almost always breached in practice.” She shakes her head. “You could say our criminal-justice system sucks. Really, really sucks.” The business is simply too big, the money too good.
On paper, Thomas Glenn Jarrell—who the girl says was the papasan at the GSpot—faced an apparently serious charge of “willfully, unlawfully, and feloniously” employing a minor as an erotic dancer. His bail was set at 30,000 pesos—$600. To no one’s surprise, he posted it. In the almost three years since his arrest, he has not been prosecuted for anything involving the club.
Change the details again. Have a couple of local families complain that their daughters were hired as waitresses in Richard Agnew’s clubs and then ordered to have sex with foreign tourists. Make the girls young—13, 12, 11. Let one of them tell a reporter, “I was a virgin, and I didn’t want to go, but I was told I would lose my job if I didn’t do it, so I went with him.” Let the British papers loose on him, call him sleazy, say he’s pimping children. Presume him innocent, but line up all the witnesses; get his employees and get his business partner to say he’s the boss, that Agnew owns all the clubs around here. Gather so much evidence that the Philippine police raid his clubs and throw him in jail. Let him sit there for so long facing such an awful charge that he asks to be deported just to make it go away.
All of that happened in September 2003, about the time the girl was drinking margaritas in Bahama Mama’s. Agnew denied owning any clubs, still denies it, says he’s only a manager, that other people, local people, ran the operations, that he thought all those girls were 18. And it was technically true: His name appeared on none of the clubs’ legal papers. And it was true that when he was locked up, he signed papers admitting to owning part of those clubs, but he says he was coerced, that the Filipino cops were all corrupt, that he had to admit something, anything, just to get out of jail.
And yet he’s still there in Angeles City, managing bars, bragging about his charity work. Those cops he swears were all corrupt seem to like him very much. The charges were dropped, and in January 2005 a chief from the Philippine National Police presented Agnew with a plaque in gratitude for his contributions to the tourist trade. It was a small moment in a bigger ceremony, one of those details that get buried in the back pages of the newspapers, and one of the only details that actually matter.
****
PART II: THE GREAT SEX MIGRATION
Zina and Veronica are on a train traveling east, though the direction doesn’t matter, because north or south or west would take them just as surely away from home and toward somewhere else, which is the only place they want to go. They think they are dreaming. They think this, finally, is what it must feel like, dreaming, being cradled in the sway of a railcar, steel track sliding beneath them, something like a future waiting beyond the border, faint and indistinct but shining brighter than anything in their past.They have never dreamed before. Ask them. Ask Zina and Veronica what they dreamed about when they were girls, after their father left them with their alcoholic mother and an alcoholic brother in three dank rooms along a mud rut of a road in a smudge of a country called Moldova, and they will look at you with wide, blank eyes, as if you’d asked where they stabled their unicorns. “We didn’t have a dream, because it was impossible,” Zina will tell you. “When you come home from school and there is no food, you can’t dream.”
When they finished their primary studies, Zina and Veronica wanted only to work, any kind of work, so they could earn money to buy food, but no one would hire them—they were only 15, and it wouldn’t have mattered even if they’d been older, because there weren’t any jobs anyway. So they planted vegetables in the patch of dirt inside the garden wall and collected apricots from three skinny trees, and they hoped winter would come late and stay mild, because the house would get so cold they would have to close off the largest room and huddle together in the two remaining rooms that, small as they were, the stove could barely heat. They lived like this until Zina was 27 and Veronica was 24, and they expected they always would.
Then, one December day when they were cold and hungry, a woman knocked on their door. Zina and Veronica recognized her from their childhood, only she was dressed better and looked well fed, as if she had some money in her pocket. She told the sisters that she had been to Russia, that there were jobs there, that Zina and Veronica should go at once. They could be vendors in a market in Krasnodar, one of the biggest cities in southern Russia. Or they could wash windows, as Russia has many wealthy people who insist on looking through sparkling-clean glass.
Zina and Veronica thought this was preposterous. True, thousands of people had left their village, Costesti, and some of them must be doing well, making money. See the new houses rising along the crumbling main road, grand and sturdy, two stories of block and timber with arches above the windows? That’s how you could tell who had a son on a construction crew in Lisbon or Moscow, a daughter mopping hotel floors in London or Dubai. But they could not go to Russia. They had no passports, no money, no place to stay. The woman said she had friends, Gypsy friends, who would get them passports, lend them money for the train, and give them a place to live.
No, they could not go. Who would take care of Mama?
The woman told them they could send Mama money from Russia. How could they take care of Mama if they had no money?
Zina and Veronica said no again. The woman left, came back, had the same conversation, left again, came back again. She did this for two weeks, kept coming until Zina and Veronica decided she must be right, that they should go to Russia and earn money. It was agreed, then. The Gypsies helped them get their papers in order and booked their passage, and now, finally, they are on a train heading east.
Are they dreaming? Or are they only less desperate?
The train stops in Krasnodar. More Gypsies are waiting for them, as if they know exactly whom to look for—Zina with her huge brown eyes and high cheekbones, Veronica with her short hair and pug nose—as if they know exactly which carriage the pair will climb down from. The Gypsies put the sisters in a sedan and drive them to a two-room apartment. Six other girls are already there. This is where Zina and Veronica will live.
The Gypsies tell them it will take two days, maybe three, to find them an open stall in the market and clear it with the police, with whom the Gypsies suggest they are extremely friendly.
Two days pass. Zina and Veronica do not leave the apartment.
On the third day, the Gypsies tell them there are no openings in the market. No one wants any windows washed. “But you still owe us money,” one of the Gypsies says. “So you will do other things. You will be prostitutes.”
Zina and Veronica panic. No, they say, we will not be prostitutes, we will not do such an awful thing. They say they are sorry for the trouble they have caused, for the money they have borrowed. They say they will go back to Moldova and find a job, any job, to pay back the Gypsies, pay back every cent.
The Gypsies beat them.
The Gypsies say, “We will cut your fucking hands off.”
The Gypsies say, “We will bury you alive.”
The Gypsies beat them some more, keep beating them until Zina and Veronica believe that they will, in fact, cut off their hands and bury them alive, beat them until there is no more foolish talk about going back to Moldova, beat them until, as Zina says, “we were destroyed.”
The next day, Zina and Veronica are sold to a strip club. Every night, they dance naked on a stage and have sex in the back rooms with strangers who do not care about their bruises. There are old men and young men, rich men and working men, and Zina and Veronica do not know how many, because there are too many to count.
*****
And how many women? How many like Zina and Veronica, forced into prostitution not by circumstance or poverty but by deception, threats, and violence? How many are trafficked from villages to cities, from poor countries to wealthier ones, lured by false promises, bought and sold like chattels?
No one knows. Among the tens of millions of bodies swirling through the global sex trade—the bar girls, the street whores and the escorts—they are surely a minority. Yet the victims, the Zinas and Veronicas, can’t be counted because they are nearly always invisible, even in plain sight. Hire a prostitute in Amsterdam or Frankfurt or Los Angeles and you will not know if she has been trafficked. She will look like every other woman in that brothel or on that street corner, her situation no more apparent. A woman such as Zina will not tell the men who pay to have sex with her that a Gypsy has threatened to cut off her hands, because she believes he will. She will not confess her fear because she is afraid. She will not go to the police because she believes they are corrupt, and she will not run away because she has no money and no passport and she’s not sure exactly where she is anyway. And because she will not do any of those things, she eventually will confuse her fear with shame, her captivity with complicity, and her shame will make her silent, a slave mistaken for a whore.
The U.S. State Department estimates that between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked—that is, transported by force or fraud—across international borders every year, 80 percent of whom are women and girls and most of whom are destined for the sex trade. UNICEF puts those numbers at between 700,000 and 2 million, also mostly women and also mostly in the sex trade, which it says is the third-most-lucrative black-market business on the planet, behind only weapons and drugs. The International Labour Organization calculates worldwide profits from sex trafficking at $27.8 billion a year, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation says the transnational trade (moving people from one country to another) is worth $9.5 billion.
The problem with those numbers isn’t that they’re wrong so much as they’re impossible to verify. “You have to remember, victims don’t stand in line and raise their hands to be counted,” says Ambassador John R. Miller of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Trafficking in Persons. “So any estimate, I would say—I would hope—is an intelligent guesstimate.” The body counts are mostly for the benefit of journalists and policymakers and grant dispensers, anyway, none of whom tolerate ambiguity particularly well. (The reports out of Miller’s office, even with their fuzzy figures, generate an annual flurry of MODERN SEX SLAVES headlines that would likely never be written if the number were to be reported as a more honest yet less enthralling “a lot.”)
There are only hints at the true magnitude, anecdotes and fragments of hard data. For example: In late June, federal agents and state police escorted more than a hundred Korean women out of massage parlors and spas in San Francisco, most if not all of whom were allegedly forced into prostitution to repay enormous debts to smugglers who got them into the country. In Turkey—a country so flush with prostitutes imported from the former Soviet states that they’ve been given a generic brand name, Natashas, as if they were an exotic subspecies—authorities reportedly identified more than 200 trafficked women last year alone. Two months ago in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, police pulled eighty-eight women out of a hotel massage parlor, including twenty-eight Vietnamese and four Chinese believed to have been trafficked into the country.
All these are just the faintest echoes of a much, much larger trade, tiny blips of radar pinging off a mountain shrouded in fog. But how big is the mountain?
Narrow the focus. Train the lens on one tiny country, Moldova, a ripple of vineyards and croplands barely the size of Maryland, a scant 3.4 million people wedged between Romania and the Ukraine. In the fourteen years since it became an independent nation with the breakup of the Soviet Union, Moldova has been decimated by sex trafficking; it is a place of desperately poor women made easy prey for a black market with a voracious demand for Eastern (read: white) Europeans. Yet even here, in a country so small that it has become a petri dish of sorts for the causes and effects of trafficking, there are still only clues. From the beginning of 2000 through May 2005, for instance, the International Organization for Migration provided counseling, health care, job training, and the like to 1,571 Moldovan women who’d been trafficked out of the country and then escaped or were rescued and returned home (another thirty-five were either trafficked internally—say, from a village to the capital, Chisinau—or were foreigners brought into the country to work as prostitutes). “That’s only a fraction” of the actual victims, says Martin Wyss, who is in charge of IOM’s Chisinau office.
So narrow the focus even more. Crop out the big cities and all the little towns and villages and leave only Costesti. Shrink the whole globe to the cluster of mud roads and stone houses where Zina and Veronica once briefly dreamed of washing Russian windows. There is a social-service agency here called Compasiune, which means “compassion,” and it is run out of an old concrete community center by a sturdy middle-aged woman with short gray hair named Elena Mereacre. She was born in Costesti, and her parents were born in Costesti, and for many years she was the village librarian, so she knows almost everyone who lives there, and she will help anyone who asks: old people who need food and young people who need to learn how to use computers and kids who just need something to do and, especially, women like Zina and Veronica. She recognizes them as soon as they return, knows what has happened to them even before they tell her. “You didn’t even have to ask,” she says. “It was written on their faces.”
She recognizes those faces because she’s seen so many exactly like them in Costesti. Since 2000, Compasiune has taken in fifty-three women and girls who’d been forced into prostitution. That’s the hard count from one village of about 10,000 people—the equivalent of every girl on the Hope, Arkansas, high school cheerleading squad, softball team, and soccer team, plus the basketball team’s starting five, being snatched away. And it is still only another ping through the fog. How many women never came home? How many came home and were too ashamed to ask for help, too ashamed to be labeled a prostitute in a place where it is not uncommon to raise a bloody sheet the morning after a wedding, the flag of the virgin bride? “Multiply by five,” a Western diplomat in Moldova says, “or ten. You won’t be wrong, because no one knows.”
*****
There are days, and not enough of them, when Ion Bejan drives north out of Chisinau to the village where he was born, where his parents’ house still stands, vacant now but immaculate, every table and dish exactly where it should be, where it’s always been. A nearby family of Baptists keeps it that way for him, like a museum, like a sanctuary. Bejan goes there to settle into a chair and close his eyes and empty his mind for a little while, maybe walk the edge of the fields he rents out to tenant farmers and allow his past to wrap around him like an old, worn blanket. “It restores my soul,” he says. He stays only a few hours, because the drive back to Chisinau is long and his wife and kids are waiting and he has to be in an office early the next morning…at which point his soul will begin to be depleted again.
Bejan is the cop in charge of countertrafficking in Moldova. He has twenty-seven officers working for him, but he ultimately is the one responsible for arresting the traffickers and chronicling their crimes. He is a block of a man with enormous, thick-fingered hands and coal black hair swept back on a big, square head, a physical specimen apparently designed to intimidate. Yet he is gregarious by nature and capable of being quite gentle, which his job often requires because the victims he interviews, the women he needs to testify against the bad guys, have been so horribly traumatized.
The woman imprisoned for four years in a cell of a room, nine feet square, with a toilet and a shower and a mattress, forced to have sex with fifteen to twenty men every day, never allowed beyond the door—how does a cop coax her to trust him? “She didn’t see the sunlight for four years,” Bejan says. “She did not think, did not feel. She did everything automatically.” Or the woman sold to a Turkish pimp for $3,000 who got pregnant because men pay more to have sex without a condom, after which the Turk, enraged that she hadn’t taken her birth-control pills, beat her unconscious and gouged the fetus from her belly and held up the bloody mess as a warning to the other girls he owned—can she be soothed enough to tell that story in a courtroom, to say it out loud and make it real again? Or the young girl who believes the handsome stranger with the fancy car and some money in his pocket when he says he loves her, who believes she’s found a rich boyfriend even after he sells her to a brothel across the border—how can a cop convince her that she’s wrong, that a trafficker isn’t the same as a boyfriend?
And how many times can he hear such stories before his soul begins to wither and he has to drive north to his sanctuary, before he has to escape, if only briefly, into his past?
In his past, Bejan did not want to be a cop. In his past, he was a dutiful Soviet citizen who did three years in the navy on a sub hunter out of Odessa and then went on to the university in Chisinau to study economics. He worked as an accountant while he continued at the university, earning an engineering degree next, then starting over in law school. The Soviets were good like that, giving away educations to smart young men such as Bejan.
And then there weren’t any more Soviets. It happened so fast, or seemed to, the sprawling empire collapsing, all the republics suddenly set free or cut loose, depending how one looked at it. Independence is a beautiful theory, but it can be ugly in practice, especially in the beginning, when the rules aren’t clear and the old economy collapses before a new one takes root. It did not go well for Moldova. “Unfortunately,” Bejan says, and in such grand understatement that he allows himself a grim smile, “there were some mistakes made during this transition.” The nation he watched being born—prior to 1991, Moldova had never really been a sovereign nation—seemed less a democracy than a kleptocracy, “chaotic and barbaric,” he says. State-owned factories and businesses were grabbed by the apparatchiks who ran them for the Soviets, stripped down, cashed out. Gangsters backed by a contingent of Russian soldiers would soon claim an industry-rich strip on the eastern border, Transnistria, as a separate, outlaw republic (which still exists, albeit unrecognized by anyone but the Russians). Unemployment soared. The villages—which is to say, most of the country—were devastated. In Costesti, about 6,000 people in what was then a village of 13,000 were promptly unemployed. The croplands were turned over to private owners, but so what? No one had a tractor or fuel or money to pay laborers. The new currency, the leu, was supposedly in such short supply that it was distributed to the outlying areas as photocopies, and no one worried much about counterfeiting because there weren’t any copiers. Overnight, Moldova became the poorest country in Europe.
That’s when Bejan decided to become a cop, to take his university degrees and get himself assigned to the Ministry of Interior investigating economic crimes. It was both practical—the man needed a job, after all—and patriotic, a small and possibly futile effort to help save his new nation from looters.
Legions of other Moldovans, on the other hand, decided to leave. Thousands of them every month, tens of thousands each year, as many as a million in a decade, so many fleeing so fast that there was no way to keep track of them all. Most found legitimate work abroad, but some were just as surely trafficked, tempted with the promise of a job and then beaten into submission. It’s obvious now—of course women eager to leave a poor, broken little country would be easy prey for gangster pimps—but no one noticed at the time. No one cared. Each victim was merely another drop in the flood spilling across the border.
Until they started coming back. “Not by the dozens,” says Bejan, “but by the hundreds, and some of them in coffins.” He remembers seeing a critical mass in 1997 and understanding then what had happened, what was still happening. But there was nothing he could do, nothing any cop could do. Trafficking wasn’t a crime in Moldova, and it wouldn’t be for another five years.
*****
This is what an international trafficker looks like: female, petite, hair cut pixie-short and rinsed with cheap sienna dye, wearing a black jacket with a hood that she can zip up around her face, pull her entire head in like a turtle. Her name is Lilea Prajac, and she is 32 years old. Also, she cries easily.
Bejan has produced her like a prop, brought her from a cell in his station in Chisinau so she can confess her crimes—alleged, technically—to a magazine writer. He has already sketched the basics, explained how Lilea recruited girls in the rural north for a woman in Chisinau who then shipped them to brothels in Turkey. Lilea was paid $100 to $300 a head, more for the pretty girls with big breasts, less for the ugly and the chubby, and she says they all knew they would be prostitutes. Bejan is not convinced of that—indentured whoring is an impossibly hard career sell, after all—and in any case, he says a recruit would be beaten if she changed her mind en route. Nor does he know how many women Lilea and her colleagues sent out of the country in the past eight months, though the day she was arrested in April, a 19-year-old and two 25-year-olds were booked on the five o’clock flight to Istanbul.
An officer escorts Lilea into Bejan’s office. Bejan comes out from behind his desk and speaks to her softly, as if she were a frightened child. He tells her an officer is going to put handcuffs loosely around her wrists, not because she’s dangerous but because he thinks the glint of steel against her black sleeves will make a better picture for the foreign photographer. Apparently, anyway. Everything is being said in Romanian, and by the time each word is translated, the cuffs are out and Lilea’s lip is quivering and the photographer is saying, No, this really isn’t necessary, but by then it’s too late: Lilea’s face disappears inside her zippered hood, which begins to puff like a nylon lung because she is sobbing.
On paper, in the black and white of official statistics, Bejan and his men have destroyed the trafficking syndicates operating out of Moldova. From 2002, when such crimes were finally made illegal, until April 2005, they arrested 839 people for trafficking in human beings, trafficking in children, or pimping. In that same period, 179 were convicted of one or another of those crimes (which, in a bit of self-congratulatory statistical computation, is exactly equal to the official number of “trafficking networks liquidated”).
Off the page, in the gray shades of actual cases, they’ve grabbed a lot of people like Lilea. In the brief moments after she’s been photographed and before she’s crying too hard to speak, Lilea explains how she used to support her crippled son by driving to Moscow and buying $1,000 worth of goods to sell in her village, for which she would have to pay $500 to bring past the guards at the border. Talking girls into Turkish brothels simply paid better. A crime, sure, both legally and morally. But can she really be considered an international gangster, in league with arms dealers and drug smugglers? Or take the other woman Bejan arrested at about the same time, Raisa Goreanscaia Axenti, 70 years old and the alleged ringleader of a three-person crew who smuggled people out of the country with bogus documents identifying them as members of the National Federation of Artistic Gymnastics—a headline the next day read SLAVE TRADE NETWORK UNCOVERED IN MOLDOVA. Really? Is she Moldova’s Ma Barker? Or is she an old lady making a few bucks by, according to Bejan’s dossier, “recruiting people…whose wish was to leave the country”?
Bejan and his men are earnest, but they are utterly ineffectual. No one disputes that international trafficking is controlled by seriously bad guys who by definition constitute some level of organized criminal networks—after all, it requires at least two people to get someone out of Moldova and into a foreign brothel. The problem in a place such as Moldova, though, is catching and convicting them, moving beyond the flunkies and the lackeys like Lilea, who are arguably as pitiable as the girls they snare. This is not Bejan’s fault. Even if he and his men are squeaky-clean (and aid workers and foreign legal advisers believe they are), the rest of the country isn’t. The U.S. State Department, in its most recent summary of trafficking in Moldova, reports that it is “widely suspected”—diplomaticspeak for “We know it’s true because it’s so damned obvious”—that trafficking investigations have been limited, “due in some instances to pressure from complicit officials at higher levels in the government.” In the same paragraph: “Despite continued allegations of trafficking-related corruption among some law-enforcement officials, the government took no action against these officials.” There are corrupt cops, corrupt prosecutors, corrupt bureaucrats, even a village mayor who reportedly collected $50 for every pretty girl he put on a bus to Macedonia. Meanwhile, there are actual hard-core gangsters roaming Moldova.
Against all that, Bejan has only twenty-seven officers—the drug unit, by comparison, has a hundred—who are badly paid, barely trained, and ill-equipped; until the Americans gave him six Mitsubishi 4x4s and a couple of sedans, his squad traversed Moldova’s decrepit roads in one Soviet-era jalopy and public buses.
“They can only go after the low-hanging fruit,” one Western trafficking expert says.
And if they try to go for the big, ripe fruit?
“Best case, you’re fired,” the expert says. “Worst case, you’re dead.”
Even the arrests the antitrafficking cops do make—all 839 of them since 2002—are in the end largely pointless. Moldovan law is officially brutal on traffickers, with sentences starting at seven years in prison and maxing out at life. In practice, no one does life. In fact, hardly anyone does time at all. Of ninety-five convictions last year for “crimes related to trafficking in human beings,” a mere sixteen were for trafficking in adults and seven for trafficking in children; only thirteen of those traffickers were sentenced to prison, and none for more than sixteen years. The rest, 75 percent, were for the far less serious charge of pimping, which seems odd considering Bejan’s men arrest more than twice as many suspects for trafficking as pimping.
“The judiciary is one of the most corrupt entities in the country,” says a diplomat who’s worked in Moldova for years. That’s an enormous institutional problem, yes. But break it down, reduce the appalling statistics to an individual case, to a single woman beaten and raped and sold overseas, rescued and come home, now finally brave enough to testify. Stand next to her when the judge reduces the charge to pimping. Then listen when she tells him, “I was a victim. And now you’ve made me a whore.”
Now go tell other victims they should testify, too.
*****
There’s this kid in Chisinau, a boy maybe 10 years old, begging outside the Hotel Dedeman or in the park across Pushkin Street, in the plaza by the little cathedral. He lurches around, one hand out, and he grunts more than he speaks—mister uh uh uh mister uh uh—because he’s stoned out of his skull on glue fumes. He’s there every night and most mornings, too, like a tiny zombie, dirty and alone and only half-conscious.
There’s another kid just like him on Varlaam Street, down by the bus station, and a small flock of them haunting Stefan cel Mare park, and…hell, they’re scattered all over Chisinau, all over the country, abandoned by parents who’ve left Moldova. Bejan guesses there are 25,000 such children in Moldova, a figure that is both low and apparently nothing more than a cop’s intuition. Diplomats say a more reasonable estimate is over 125,000 who’ve been either orphaned or, more commonly, left behind by parents who’ve gone abroad, either for legitimate work or escorted by traffickers.
“The effects of trafficking,” Bejan says, “will be felt for ten, fifteen years.”
He means those abandoned kids, but only partly. All this has happened with alarming speed: In only fourteen years, sex trafficking has wreaked—is wreaking—enormous damage not only on individual women but on the entire country. By one estimate, 80 percent of the trafficked women who manage to return are either too old or too reproductively damaged to have children, and the physically healthy ones often suffer such severe mental and emotional traumas that they’re incapable of proper parenting anyway. Combine that with the general exodus, officially between 600,000 and 1 million since independence, and Moldova is threatened with a long-term population crisis.
It is as if the country is collapsing in upon itself. The capital city is weakly rebounding, but the outlying areas are a medieval shambles. The unemployment spike that followed independence never receded (officially, rates vary from 6.8 to 11.1 percent, but nobody in Moldova really believes that; aid workers and migration experts put the rate at closer to 50, 60, even 70 percent), and that, in turn, bred all the other textbook social ills—alcoholism and domestic violence and divorce—that thrive among the poor. Then the working-age population fled, which only exacerbated the problems: Moldova’s sole natural resource is its land, but it’s useless if there are no laborers to tend the fields. And while foreign workers send back almost half a billion dollars every year, hardly any of that money is invested in new businesses to nudge the economy along.
And so the cycle continues, a disaster feeding upon itself and, in turn, feeding the sex trade. Moldova is still the poorest country in Europe. People still want to leave, are still desperate to leave, so desperate they’ll leave their children behind to do it. And some of them—again, no one knows exactly how many—will be snatched by the traffickers.
A decade ago, it was easy for the traffickers. No one was paying attention. Sex slavery? Who’d even heard of such a thing? The newspaper ads for waitresses in Italy or dancers in Bosnia requested “pretty girls with no hang-ups,” but what did that mean? Why would a hungry girl in a village without running water or electricity have any hang-ups, other than wanting to eat? Over the past five years, though, as it became clear the cops and the courts couldn’t stop the trade, Moldova’s been awash with prevention programs (paid for almost exclusively by the charity of nonprofits and foreign aid). The International Organization for Migration arranged a screening for nearly every schoolgirl of Lilya 4-Ever, a Swedish film about a fictional Russian girl trafficked into prostitution. La Strada, another aid group that shares o∞ce space with IOM in Chisinau, set up a hotline for girls to call if they’ve been offered an overseas job that sounds too good to be true. Counselors tell them to ask basic questions: Will they be given a contract? Will they be allowed to call home?
More than 10,500 girls have dialed that number since September 2001. The staff at La Strada are certain some traffickers have called, too—just look how the ads have changed. “Local contracts!” they promise. “You will be able to call home!” (Context is everything, of course. Olesea, who was sold to a brothel after being lured to Moscow for a construction job, was indeed allowed to call home. Once a month, she told her mother all was well, that she was having a great time, that she would send money home soon. Then the pimp pointing a gun at her head made her hang up the phone.)
The promises are so easy to believe because the girls are so eager to leave. Liuba Revenko, the program manager for Winrock International, another aid group working in Moldova, got a call from an airport security guard in late 2001, shortly after the Americans invaded Afghanistan. He told her there was a charter plane on the tarmac scheduled to fly to Kabul and seventeen girls in the terminal waiting to board.
Revenko drove to the airport. The guy who chartered the plane had gotten spooked and disappeared, leaving the girls behind. They were all young, none more than 20, most of them blond, all quite pretty. And they were pissed. “Their first reaction to me was very negative,” Revenko says. The girls told her they had real jobs waiting for them, and they waived their contracts at her to prove it. “Crappy pieces of paper,” she says, not worth the ink that printed the words: The girls all believed they were going to work as cocktail waitresses in Kabul.
How do you tell them they’re wrong, that they’ve been played for fools, that they’re lucky—lucky!—their plane never left the ground? They won’t believe it. They won’t believe where they were going is worse than where they are.
*****
Zina and Veronica are in the apartment in Krasnodar late on a winter afternoon. The Gypsies are telling them to go to work, go to the strip club and dance naked and have sex with strangers. They have done this every afternoon for more than a year. Sometimes the Gypsies say that if the girls behave, if they do what they’re told and don’t make trouble, they will be allowed to go home soon. They never say how soon, though, and soon never comes.
Zina feels different today, worse. She doesn’t know why, but her heart is pounding. She can’t breathe, and she is sweating even though she is cold. She tells the Gypsies she’s sick. She tells them she can’t go to the club.
The Gypsies beat her. She knew they would, because they have beaten her and Veronica and all the other girls so many times before. Only it’s worse now. She is beaten bloody, almost unconscious. One of the pimps drags her to the door, throws her into the street. “I can’t do anything with you,” he says. “Just go away.”
Now she is alone. Zina has no money, no passport, nowhere to go.
So she goes to the police.
This is a terrible risk. The Gypsies told her long ago that the police would never help her. Even if the police aren’t corrupt, what will they see when they look at her? A whore? A petty criminal who snuck into the country with no papers? Zina’s been in Russia, been in that club, for a year. Now she’s a victim? How can she explain that?
How can any woman anywhere explain such a thing? One of the reasons it is impossible to quantify the victims of international sex trafficking is the very fact that it is international. Laws and mores shift from country to country, and the serious crime of sex slavery is always masked as either a petty local nuisance or a perfectly legal business. In Germany, for instance, authorities last summer were building wooden huts to accommodate the 40,000 prostitutes expected to flow into the country for the 2006 World Cup, if only to keep them from scrogging in the bushes. Common sense—as well as several studies that show a correlation between legalization and trafficking—suggest at least some of those women were forced to show up. But how does anyone sort out the willing from the unwilling? By asking?
Zina tells the police her story, how she and Veronica came to work in a market and were sold to a strip club, how the Gypsies beat them and forced them to be prostitutes. The police see her bloody face and believe her. They take her to the club, tell her to point to her sister; then they take Veronica and Zina away from the Gypsies and send them home to Costesti.
Nothing has changed. The house is still cold, and Mama’s still sick, and there still aren’t any jobs. They tell the neighbors that, yes, they’d been in Russia but they didn’t like it so they came home, and maybe some people believe them. But then the Gypsies drive out from Krasnodar, and they come to the house, rile up the angry little dog chained to a post inside the gate, pound on the door, push inside, drag Zina and Veronica off the stoop and into the garden where they will plant vegetables in the spring. The Gypsies beat them in the yard. “You ruined our business!” they scream. “You cost us money!” It’s four o’clock in the morning and bitterly cold, but the neighbors come out to watch. None of them do anything, though. Everyone’s afraid of the Gypsies.
The Gypsies leave as abruptly as they came. The next morning, Zina and Veronica tell the villagers who watched that it was simply a business dispute, nothing more. No one believes them. So one thing changes: Their neighbors think they’re prostitutes.
It’s never easy for a victim to come home. Some of them, usually the ones who’ve been rescued and repatriated, don’t want to be home, insist they want to go back to their “boyfriends,” their pimps. Change the context just a little and psychologists would call it battered woman syndrome, or maybe Stockholm syndrome. “It’s not because she’s afraid,” says Ana Revenco, the president of La Strada’s office in Moldova. “It’s because she doesn’t know what to do with this freedom.”
Yet freedom is relative. Trafficked women go home to husbands who call them whores, to children who no longer recognize them, to babies they can no longer cope with. They return to the same villages where their traffickers—the lackeys and thugs who sent them abroad—still live, where they are intimidated and shamed and stigmatized. They come back diseased and pregnant and racked by anxiety and nightmares. And even if psychologists can treat them, even if job counselors can train them, they’re still stuck in Moldova. “So sometimes they are leaving again, hoping it will be better,” says Alina Budeci, a social worker at La Strada. “How do you tell a young girl not to do it, not to go? Too many of them see it as their last, best hope.”
Zina and Veronica want only to leave Costesti. They move to Chisinau, where they decide they want a profession because that is the first question everyone asks when they look for jobs: What is your profession? Except the man hiring dishwashers in a small restaurant. He doesn’t care if they have a profession, and he pays them enough to cover the rent on the tiny room they share. Most weeks, they have enough left over to buy food.
They end the story there. But there’s more. Veronica should tell it, but she won’t. Elena Mereacre, the woman who runs Compasiune, whispers it later.
Veronica was in love. With a priest, Russian Orthodox, a man she met in Chisinau. They were going to be married. The priest could never understand, though, why Veronica wouldn’t take him back to her village, introduce him to her mother. So one day he went by himself, and the villagers saw the stranger and asked who he was, and he told them, and they told him about the Gypsies who beat Veronica in her garden. Then the priest went to Veronica and asked her why she’d been beaten.
Veronica told him.
Was she dreaming? Or was she just desperate for someone to understand?
The priest left her that night.
*****
PART III: WHERE THEY LOVE AMERICANS…FOR A LIVING
There’s an expat in a bar called the Blue Marlin, which is on the ground floor of a pink hotel in downtown San José, Costa Rica. He used to be a detective, did a bit of vice, enough to know how the world works, how people think. It’s late, and he’s drinking gin.“These girls,” he says, waving his glass at the chicas. The place is packed with chicas. “They average out at, what? An eight and a half ? Nine?”
He’s partial to Latin women. Make it seven.
“Okay, seven. But, c’mon, a lot of them are beautiful.”
Conceded, assuming your taste runs to python-tight clothing. And, you know, prostitutes.
“Now look at the guys.” Another sweep with the glass. Almost every man in the place is a gringo. “Guys like them, to get a girl like one of these in the States, they’ve gotta have three things. They’ve gotta have a good job. They’ve gotta have a lot of money. And they’ve gotta be a nice guy.”
The expat takes a drink, studies the gringos again. “All these guys,” he says, “they’ve probably got one of those things. They might even have two of those things. But I guarantee you, none of them have all three.”
*****
When you’re not drunk and the place is almost empty, this is what it looks like: There are tables just inside the door to the right, three rows of them between the windows fronting the street and the wooden rail that keeps people from tumbling off the raised platform that holds the main bar, which is huge, two peninsulas poking out in the shape of an upside-down U. There are TVs bolted to the walls and tuned to sports channels, because this is ostensibly a sports bar, and there are fish—stuffed fish, carved fish, and sculpted fish—mounted above the liquor shelves and dangling from the ceiling, because the “World Famous” Blue Marlin is also ostensibly a fisherman’s bar, even though it’s hours away from any place where you might actually catch a fish. Also, it’s a gringo joint: There’s a crinkled American flag, like the ones newspapers printed after September 11, taped to one wall, and dozens of shoulder patches, left behind by American cops and firemen, tacked up behind the bar—San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, New York City, Boynton Beach, Waynesboro, a hundred other little towns you’ve never heard of. Eleven o’clock on a Monday morning during the Costa Rican rainy season and it’s all white boys at the bar, eight of them, except for one wobbly local named Fernando that the security guys keep trying to pour out the door.
Seven girls sit on stools in the back corner, smoking cigarettes and looking bored. Six more are off the to the left, just beyond the casino, in the lobby of the Hotel Del Rey. They’re working, but not very hard. Not much to choose from this early—not for them, not for the men. Wait a little while—say, five o’clock—when the sun’s still clawing through the rain clouds over San José and before the streets are lousy with beggars and peddlers. By cocktail hour, the place is jammed. There are a few ticos and the biggest Asian kid you’ve ever seen, but the rest of the men here are gringos. There are young guys in tank tops and old guys wearing socks in their sandals and a whole mess of graying middle-aged guys in polos and floral-print shirts. They’ve got the bar surrounded three deep, and most of the tables are gone, too.
And they’re not even half the crowd.
The chicas—Christ, there’s a lot of them. Black girls and brown girls and beige girls and even a couple of white girls, brunet and blond and redheaded and skinny and chubby and tall and short and stacked and not-as-stacked, and every one of them single.
Are they looking at you? Hell yes. A hundred brown eyes turn on you the second you walk through the door, trying to catch your attention before you even get past the security guard with the metal detector, like you’re Brad Pitt or something. When’s the last time that happened at the Bennigan’s in Parsippany? Never, that’s when.
Which is exactly why all these men are here. “San José: the very best place in the world to get laid, I am convinced,” an aficionado who calls himself La Muerte (literally, Death) wrote a few years back in one of the bajillion or so field reports that pop up when you search “Costa Rica sex” on the Internet. Even then, in 2001, the Blue Marlin was legendary among a certain sort of gringo tourist—the sort who likes a wide selection of pretty, inexpensive women in a safe place where the bartenders speak their language. But why stop at the Blue Marlin? That’s just one joint in a city of 300,000. There’s Key Largo and Atlantis and all the other bars, and the strip clubs that hang billboards—THE NEW NIGHT CLUB KUMAR: OH, YES!—in English along the highway from the airport, and the street corners and parks parceled out by gender and age and fetish. Cheap blow jobs from old whores with drug problems? The Red Zone, a few dirty blocks around the Central Market. Teenagers? There’s four by the pay phones at the edge of Parque Morazan. Transvestites, transsexuals, queers? They’ve all got their own turf close by, and the cabbies all know exactly where they are. “It’s very easy to become like a kid in a candy store when you first go to San Jos é,” as Death says. “There’s so much available talent down there, and it’s all done in wide-open public spaces. That’s a great feeling, but don’t lose your good sense in the original bliss.”
Yeah, don’t lose your good sense. Get a seat—one of the hightops by the bar rail is open. Have a drink. Take your time. The girls aren’t going anywhere. Sure, every few minutes one leaves with a guy, wiggles out the back toward the hotel lobby or out the front to a cab, but the selection never noticeably thins. The chicas, all freelancers and all 18 (or at least with papers to prove it), always outnumber the gringos. That’s the point.
They won’t pester you if you don’t want them to. They’re not like those girls in the Philippines who swarm your table, jabbering in broken English. You buy me ladies’ drink? You bar-fine me? Or the ones in Thailand. They’ll grab your junk right out on the street. You ready? Oh, you feel ready. Total whore scene. No, at the better bars in Costa Rica, at the Blue Marlin, you’ve got to give a girl a signal, make eye contact, let her know you’re interested. When she slides up next to you, she’ll ask if you’re alone or if you want some company. She’ll be charming and gently aggressive, in a way you only wish the women back home would be. So talk to her. She’s not going to ask you for any money, not right away. “Take your time, be selective, and get to know the chica before you do any negotiating,” Death says. “Look for someone with a personality to go along with the looks—someone who smiles and seems to enjoy being around you.”
Thing is, they all seem to enjoy being around you. Prostitutes are good like that. The best ones make you forget they’re even prostitutes, make you think you’ve stumbled into the greatest singles’ bar in the world. That girl you’re talking to, she’ll tell you that you’re handsome and sexy and intelligent, and she’ll make you believe it no matter how fat or dumb or ugly you are because she knows you’ve got a hundred bucks burning a hole in your pocket. Back home, you’d spend that on dinner and a movie, and for what? A kiss on the cheek? Down here, that gets you laid, and by a woman who pretends she doesn’t think you’re a pig.
Have a few more drinks, let it get late, way into the early morning. The gringo crowd is clearing out now. Too many chicas and not enough customers. The tall one in the tight white pants, the one who’s been eyeing you for the past hour, she’s at the table asking for a light, but she’s speaking in Spanish, so you don’t realize what she wants until she grabs a pack of matches from the ashtray.
“Where you staying?” She knows a little English, enough to get by.
“Why?”
She smiles. Bad teeth, but otherwise pretty: slender, long dark hair, coppery skin that makes her halter top seem even whiter. “Where?”
“Holiday Inn.”
“Nice hotel.”
No, it’s an average hotel with an intermittent ant problem. What’s nice about it, though, is that it’s a Holiday Inn. If you’re coming to Costa Rica to hump prostitutes, a room in the world’s family-friendliest hotel is good cover. Tell your wife or girlfriend you’re staying at the Hotel Del Rey and you might as well be sleeping at Heidi Fleiss’s offshore discount whorehouse. The Del Rey’s Web site is respectable enough—“Children under 12 stay free” is a nice touch—but the bad shit, the stuff that’ll get you in trouble, starts on the first link that comes up on Google. (“Hotel Del Rey and Blue Marlin Bar, the best known Sport-Bar and Casino of Costa Rica, are San José’s number one meeting spots, specially for single men looking for sexy girls, and night live activities.”) No, better to stay at the Holiday Inn. It’s just on the other side of the park, and the staff doesn’t care who you bring back. They see it all night, every night, gringos tottering in with hookers.
The girl keeps talking, asking questions. Small talk. Where you from? Married? Girlfriend? Want one? Lie to her. Or not. Like she cares. Ask her questions. Where’s she from? Cuba. How old? Twenty-one. What’s the tattoo, the one crawling up the small of her back?
“It’s a panther,” she says. “But the little girl kitty is lonely, and she needs a big, strong male tiger.” She means you, even though you’re neither big nor strong and have never been mistaken for a tiger.
It sounds better in Spanish.
*****
The Costa Rican government, of course, would prefer that its wedge of the Central American isthmus not be so well regarded among American men trolling for sex. The tourist board is much more enthusiastic about their beaches, rain forests, and volcanoes, and the country’s official slogan—no artificial ingredients—would seem to have nothing at all to do with picking up prostitutes in bars. True, every horny American who comes down here is renting a hotel room, eating in restaurants, probably drinking, maybe gambling, and definitely paying the $26 departure tax on his way out; at least some of the money he’s spending on sex goes back into the local economy. But what self-respecting country wants to shill for those dollars? “You might be sure that this type of tourist are not wanted here,” says one Costa Rican official. “We only want the people that want to spend a ‘Pura Vida’ time.”
Yet the whoremongers came in droves anyway. And by the early 1990s, they’d branded Costa Rica with a reputation as a sex haven—a reputation that stuck and then exploded near the end of the century. Why that happened isn’t complicated. For one thing, prostitution is legal, or at least isn’t illegal: The business isn’t taxed or regulated like, say, casinos or bars, but there is no law against an adult selling his or her body for cash. So you’re not going to come down to San José and get busted by an undercover cop. Prostitution is also indigenously rampant and culturally, if quietly, acceptable—70 percent of those who pay for sex are locals—so you don’t feel all that awkward with your arm around a whore.
For another thing, Costa Rica is close, a four-hour flight out of Atlanta. The hard-core-sex destinations—Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines—require major investments in airfare and flying time, twenty-two hours to Manila on a direct flight, twenty-three to Bangkok. Costa Rica, on the other hand, can be done in a long weekend. It’s relatively safe, fairly well developed, and friendly toward Americans. Plus, with the notable exception of San José, it’s a lush little emerald of a nation with plenty of other plausible reasons to visit. Tell your wife you’re going fishing with some buddies, spend a night at the Holiday Inn, two more in Jacó or another one of the beach towns now overrun with prostitutes, then fly home and brag about all the big ones you caught. Who has to know?
Exactly how many tourists come here every year looking for sex is impossible to determine; “get laid” isn’t one of the boxes that can be checked off under “purpose of trip” on the immigration form. But there are clues. Of the 500,000 or so Americans who visit the country each year, for instance, 25.8 percent are single men. There are also at least eleven companies that offer either complete package tours to San José, including airfare, or lodging, transportation, and women once you land. Solo Adventures bills itself as “a Full Service Travel Agency specializing in pre-designed adult companion packages to all regions of Costa Rica for the single (body or mind) Gent.” Bendricks International Men’s Club will fly you down, put you up in one of eight luxury resorts for three nights, and supply “companion escorts” for $1,695. “You can enjoy the private company of South American women who can satisfy even the most active imagination in one of the world’s great adult travel vacation destinations for men,” the Bendricks Web site says. (The company won’t say how many men they take down each year. In fact, the guy behind the desk in the Miami office won’t say anything at all—he just shakes his head at every question.)
But the commercial tours account for just a fraction of the gringos renting women in Costa Rica. (Only the truly inept and incompetent need to hire a middleman anyway.) Aside from the dedicated sex tourists, there are legions of part-timers, guys who come for some other reason and take a side trip, so to speak. The problem is, how to separate the dedicated ’mongers from the dabblers? The group from Chicago that flies down to San José every summer, outed last year by the local ABC station and its hidden cameras, would presumably lean toward the dedicated-’monger camp, considering there is absolutely nothing to do in San José other than gamble, drink, and pick up prostitutes. (ABC7’s ominous tagline—“ the Shameful Obsession”—would suggest as much, too.) The so-called Michigan Boys, on the other hand, might tilt toward dabbler. They hold a legitimate annual fishing tournament, one that in 2004 drew 167 contestants—including a suburban police chief, a school-board president, and a judge—only it was based at a resort that happened to be stocked with prostitutes. “The problem with our trip,” one of the organizers told WXYZ-TV in Detroit, which followed the Michigan Boys to Costa Rica, “is that some of the guys go there and party, and they talk too much. And then somebody hears in a bar about [it]—wife or sister-in-law hears—and it’s sad because not everybody goes there and does it.” Yeah, that’s the problem—they talk too much. Not surprisingly, though, every other guy that WXYZ asked about the trip denied cavorting with whores. (Warren, Michigan, police chief Danny Clark actually said, “I did not know that they were hookers.”)
Or ignore the statistics and junkets. Just look around. Stand at the edge of Parque Morazan and watch the parade of white guys with young brown girls. “This place,” says that American expat former cop, “has to be the number one destination in the Western Hemisphere for horny, middle-aged moron-loser-gringos jacked up on Viagra.”
Take these American guys in the bar overhanging the lobby at the Holiday Inn—three of them, clean-cut, midthirties. They staggered in on separate flights, which is apparent because they’re swapping reports on how crowded each plane was. This is some kind of reunion for them, and they’re sitting around, waiting for seven more friends to show up.
Rain is coming down hard outside. “I remember a lot of heavy rain last year, too,” one of them says.
“Yeah,” the second one says, “and I remember a lot of heavy screaming.”
They all bust up at that.
“Seriously, I had no intention of doing anything,” the second guy goes on. “I swear to God. But when those two girls grabbed me and said, ‘We’re drinking tonight,’ man, that was it. That was it.”
A fourth gringo shows up, then a fifth, a sixth. Same pattern every time: flight report, bitch about the rain, recap last year’s highlights, always with dramatic emphasis on the last syllable or three.
“I know this massage parlor, anything you want. An-nee-thing.”
“I had this girl, a hundred thousand colones”—200 bucks, give or take—“and I had her for the whole night. The whole night.”
It goes on like this until the last two guys show up. They’ve got American girls with them, one a wife, one a girlfriend. Now the boys are talking about…rain forests and rafting. And dinner. They’re going to the restaurant at the Hotel Del Rey, where the food’s pretty good.
One guy looks spooked.
“Nah, don’t worry,” his buddy tells him. “They don’t bother you in the restaurant.”
“Yeah,” another guy says. “They just stand outside and watch you. And wait.”
*****
The academic debate over whether prostitution is a good idea is pretty simple in its extremes. On one side are the abolitionists—some feminist and religious groups and, since 2003, the U.S. government. They believe that selling sex is always wrong, inherently demeaning, a fundamental violation of basic human rights. Whether they’re philosophically correct is irrelevant to the actual world. The global sex industry, ancient and entrenched, employs/exploits/enslaves (the verb you choose is a function of your politics and the circumstances of individual prostitutes) tens of millions of women and girls, and generates hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Abolishing it, purging the planet of every escort and bar girl and streetwalker, and prosecuting or shaming every john into submission is no more feasible than eliminating agriculture or the auto industry.
On the other side are libertarians, a tiny minority of prostitutes who prefer to be called “sex workers,” and, one would suppose, a good percentage of the men who pay for sex. They believe that consenting adults should be free to do whatever they damn well please, though probably the pragmatists among them will concede that the business should be regulated to ensure everyone’s health and safety.
That argument is worse than irrelevant: It’s just silly, a utopian notion bordering on idiotic.
Sure, there are a handful of brothels that enforce strict rules on condoms for the men and health checks for the women. But those are a minuscule proportion of the business, the vast majority of which is carried out in dirty hotels and strip clubs, in cars and on street corners, and almost entirely cash transactions between strangers who prefer anonymity—the very definition of unsafe and unregulated. In poor countries with thriving sex industries, enforcing any semblance of order would be impossible. Even if police corruption and criminal gangs magically vanished, places like Thailand or the Philippines have neither the manpower nor the financial incentive to monitor hundreds of thousands of prostitutes and johns. Even developed countries who attempt some form of regulation and encourage prostitutes to register have had dismal results. In the Netherlands, for instance, fewer than one in ten of an estimated 25,000 prostitutes have chosen to be officially licensed. Believing that will change, that it can change, is naive. Most prostitutes—the ones controlled by pimps or traffickers, the minors, the illegal immigrants—aren’t in any position to ask for government help, and the ones who are usually don’t want an official record of a profession they hope will be temporary. For all the blather about empowering sex workers, few women want prostitution on their résumés.
Moreover, legalizing it in any particular place—in other words, eliminating the risk of arrest and diminishing the immediate social stigma (at least for the men) —almost always increases demand, which in turn requires an increased supply. And since there are never enough local women clamoring to be prostitutes, especially in developed nations, they have to be imported. In the early 1990s, for example, an estimated 75 percent of Germany’s prostitutes had been shipped in from South America (a demographic that, since the fall of the Soviet Union, has been largely replaced by women from places like Russia, Romania, and the Ukraine). Common sense, as well as government statistics and a 2005 U.S. State Department report, suggests that at least some of those women were trafficked (that is, lured with the promise of legitimate jobs or simply forced) into the country by outlaw pimps—one of the problems legalization is theoretically meant to solve. What Paraguayan peasant—even if she truly wants to be a whore in Europe—has the money and the connections to get there and go into business for herself?
Or take the Czech Republic, where, for a decade, prostitution has been a misdemeanor offense so widely unenforced that it was de facto legal (and a pro-legalization bill is currently awaiting a vote in parliament). In 2004 the Interior Ministry counted almost 900 brothels, 200 in Prague alone—dramatic growth for an industry that, one expert observes, was “almost nonexistent” in that country a decade ago. On weekends, the Czech border town of Cheb (population 32,000) is flooded with 10,000 German men who sample the prostitutes from Russia, the Ukraine, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania—all countries listed by the State Department as sources of trafficked women. And the profits, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, are collected by fifteen criminal gangs.
And then there’s Costa Rica. For such a beautiful little country that markets itself so aggressively to ecotourists and fishermen, it can’t seem to shake its reputation as a sex paradise. San José has long been the hub; Death called it “the very best place in the world to get laid” way back in 2001, after all, and apparently both the Chicago contingent and the Michigan Boys have been chartering down for more than ten years. Yet rather than being contained and controlled in the capital city, prostitution has expanded across the country, growing along with the crowds of tourists that have increased from 435,000 in 1990 to 1,450,000 last year. Prostitutes now shuttle to the ports on both coasts where cruise ships dock, and they’re part of the scenery in most of the beach towns.
Fifteen years ago, a tico named Jorge used to drive two hours over the mountains with his family to Jacó, a surf town on the Pacific coast and the closest beach to San José. Look at the place now. On a slow night in low season in the Beatle Bar—another joint that’s “World Famous,” which is apparently code for where a gringo can get a whore—twenty prostitutes are wasting their time on seven white guys and a couple of coeds who don’t stay long. When it closes, the girls move down the strip to Monkey Bar. Farther down is Pancho Villa, where the kitchen in the downstairs club is open late, and the entrance to a strip club upstairs is around the corner. Two young guys, pale and preppy, come out with their arms around a couple of tall black women and grab a cab. Then three chicas—16, tops—stumble up the street in spike heels. (“You can always tell the prostitutes,” Jorge says. “They always look like they just got out of the shower. A really long shower.”)
There are no reliable estimates of how many are working in the country—since they’re not required to register, they can’t be counted, and the trade is highly seasonal—but the consensus among aid groups and Costa Ricans is that there are more than enough and more than before. The conservative guess is that half of those working the gringo crowd are foreigners, women imported from Nicaragua, Cuba, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and all the other Latin American countries with worse economies and fewer tourists. The U.S. State Department, meanwhile, lists Costa Rica as a source and destination country for trafficked women, as well as a transit point for women trafficked from the Southern Hemisphere and Eastern Europe into the United States and other wealthy nations.
And that’s in a place that would prefer the horny gringos stay home.
*****
The barroom discussion about prostitution, on the other hand, isn’t a debate at all. It’s straight rationalization. It’s the expat cop sitting on a stool, waving his glass of gin at all the gringos, channeling their thoughts:
To get a girl like one of those in the States…
It’s complete bullshit, of course—millions upon millions of working stiffs have beautiful wives and girlfriends, and there’s no shortage of rich American assholes with models on their arms—but a particular class of whoremonger will convince himself it’s true. That’s the point of being in a place such as the Blue Marlin as opposed to paying a crack addict $20 for a blow job—believing that those girls, the pretty, flirty ones in a clean bar, actually like you. Sex tourism is built on that very premise: These girls, the chicas and the Eastern Europeans and the Southeast Asians, are different from American women, more loving, less judgmental, oblivious to your gut and your hairline and the fact that you’re the sort of guy who hires women to have sex with him. Norman Barabash, a nebbishy fellow from Long Island whose company, Big Apple Oriental Tours, guided American men to the bars of Angeles City in the Philippines before the New York attorney general’s office shut it down, put it bluntly on a promotional tape:
“Filipinas are not only the most beautiful girls in the world, but also they’re among the most passionate,” he said. “And best of all, you don’t have to date them for five months to find out if they like you enough to give you their passion. Five hours, or five minutes, is more like it. While the ladies back home are working out their hang-ups with their therapists, you’ll be having the time of your life right here in mind-blowing, and everything-else-blowing, Angeles City.”
Change Filipina to Latina and the rest of it’s interchangeable. Bendricks has its prattle about “women who enjoy exuding an aura of sexual vibrancy.” Solo Adventures promises “stunning sensual women providing warm, friendly, and very personal intimate service.” The Web pages of freelancers extolling the purportedly genuine sensuality of Latin women run into the thousands.
Ken Franzblau, a consultant for Equality Now (the women’s-rights organization that started the campaign to get Big Apple shut down), has been calling tour companies for almost a decade, posing as a potential client, listening to the pitches, even checking references with satisfied customers. It’s been a nine-year tape loop playing over the phone. “It’s talked about, I guess, like the guys in Ponce de León’s expedition talking about the Fountain of Youth,” he says. “ ‘You won’t believe it. Women throw themselves at you, as much sex as you want. You’ll feel like Tom Cruise.’ They always say you’ll feel like Tom Cruise. Except for the guys who are really old. They’ll tell you you’ll feel like John Wayne.”
The level of self-delusion is stupefying. In April, for instance, a guy who calls himself “Jacó Lover” posted a report on his second trip in two years to the Costa Rican coast, where he got the “total GFE”—girlfriend experience—“for $100, including spending the night.” The highlight: “She happily let me eat her very pretty pussy, and if she wasn’t having an orgasm, then she was a damned good actress.”
Golly, you think?
“There’s a part of them that’s lying to themselves and creating this fantasy and believing these girls actually like them,” says Donna M. Hughes, a professor at the University of Rhode Island who, for sixteen years, has been studying prostitutes and the men who pay them. “They’re really just deluding themselves. And I really think that keeping the online diaries is a way of reliving the fantasy. They can edit out any sign that she didn’t enjoy this and didn’t want to be with this guy.”
Which, unless she is as rare among prostitutes as virgins, she didn’t. To believe she did is to ignore a basic truth of human nature: No one really wants to be a whore. A statistical summary of women in prostitution is a chronicle of human wreckage—economic, physical, and chemical. A 2003 survey of prostitutes in nine countries—Canada, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, the United States, and Zambia—headed up by a clinical psychologist named Melissa Farley revealed women who’d suffered astonishing rates of childhood sexual abuse (from 34 percent in Turkey to 84 percent in Canada and Zambia) or physical abuse (39 percent of Thais to 73 percent of Canadians); current or past homelessness (84 percent in the United States); and current drug problems (75 percent in the United States and 95 percent in Canada). The results of a 1999 UNICEF study of child prostitutes in Costa Rica between the ages of 11 and 16—and since most prostitutes start before they turn 18, it’s relevant—were worse: 80 percent had been sexually abused before their twelfth birthday, 62 percent had been physically abused, and 60 percent smoked crack daily. And the most telling statistic from Farley’s survey? Almost every prostitute she talked to wanted out, from 68 percent in Mexico to 92 percent in, of all places, Thailand, the world’s premier sex destination.
.
“I tell you what,” says Franzblau. “If these guys knew how many of these girls are thinking about sticking a knife in their back while they’re having sex with them, they’d be amazed. Forget amazed. They’d be staying home.”
But they don’t know, so they keep coming. Who cares what the tourist board says? The hotel clerks, the bartenders, the cabbies—they’re all part of the fantasy, all in on the hustle. No one looks at you funny down here if you want to get a girl for the night or just for an hour. No one calls you a loser if you pay to get laid.
There’s a tico named…well, forget his name. He used to be in the business of taking horny gringo dollars, used to manage a club, and he doesn’t want to piss off his old boss. Then again, he’s not too happy with how this is all turning out for his country. “Remember Bush, the first one, when he said ‘the New World Order’?” he says. “In the New World Order, we’re the playground.”
Grab a cab at the airport, and even if the driver speaks no English he’ll say, “Chicas, sí?” and he’ll know you understand. Tell him you want to go to a club, and he’ll drop you off at a strip joint like the one the tico used to manage, and he’ll collect a thousand colones from the club owner for delivering you. Americans, the tico says, are like “Attila, you know, the Hun,” but they’ve got dollars. Pay the cover—ten bucks, including two drinks—and watch the show: strippers, then a live lesbian act, then $2 lap dances, then an amateur act…all in an hour and, damn, it’s only a Tuesday night. Resist the hard sell for a private dance in the back, two bucks a minute, six minutes minimum. Then quit resisting. Follow her into a bland room with a wastebasket full of tissues and Wet-Naps. “Tip enough,” the tico says, “and they’re all hookers.” Want to take her out of the club? One-fifty to the house, one-fifty to her.
Maybe the national economy doesn’t need the money, but the club does. The girl does. The cabbie does. The maid changing sheets at the Holiday Inn does. The tico’s friend who runs a local tanning salon does. Eliminate prostitution, that friend says, and you eliminate 60 percent of his clientele. No, better to keep it legal, keep it out in the open.
Just don’t talk about it too much. For all the bravado, for all the Web chatter, for all the Attila swagger, the gringo whoremongers are exceptionally shy. The guys in the bar don’t want to talk. Be a nosy stranger, ask an obvious question—“Whaddya doin’ down here?”—and they’ll give you a stare that’s either blank or surly. The ’mongers who brag so loudly on the Internet don’t use their real names. Even the out-of-business tico club manager would prefer not to have his name in a magazine no one in Costa Rica will read.
“You know why?” he says. “Because you’re touching the darkest part of the human soul. You do this in your own country, you’ll have shame.
“Your shame,” he says, “brings you here.”
*****
On the immigration forms American Airlines passes out on its flights from Miami to San José, in fine blue print just below the usual blocks for your name and passport number and address, there’s a curious line in both Spanish and English: “The penalty for sexual abuse towards minors in Costa Rica implies prison. Law #7899.”
When you get off the plane, there are posters taped to each of the kiosks where the immigration officers stamp your passport. They show the large, sad face of a teenage girl and, smaller and down in one corner, a pair of white man’s hands poking out through what appear to be the bars of a prison cell. “Her soul torn to pieces,” the text reads, “and you…behind bars.” Farther on, next to the door out of customs, there is a life-size cardboard stand-up of a tico—a cabbie, presumably—holding a sign. “Dear tourist,” the sign held by the sign says. “In Costa Rica, sex with children under 18 is a serious crime. Should you engage in it, we will drive you to jail. We mean it.” Finally, in the cabs that line up outside the terminal, there are versions of the same sign, again with “We mean it” underlined with a red slash.
Welcome to Costa Rica, where it is illegal to rape children. Where it is necessary, in fact, to remind every single tourist entering the country that it is wrong to rape children.
The reason those signs are posted, of course, is that Costa Rica has a reputation as a place where you can rape the kids, though it’s rarely put that bluntly. Pedophilia? Okay, yes, agreed: It’s very, very bad, and Costa Rica, like most developing nations, has suffered its share of foreigners preying on its kids. But read the signs again: “under 18” is in bold for a reason, one that is more demurely referred to as having sex with underage prostitutes, the estimated 5,000 to 10,000 teenagers in San José alone who’ve yet to reach the legal age of consent. Considering that the UNICEF study of young prostitutes found they turned their first trick at the average age of 14, it’s a huge problem.
In 2002, for example, the FBI, along with the Fort Lauderdale Police Department and the U.S. embassy in San José, set up a bogus travel agency called, unsubtly, Costa Rican Taboo Vacations, which promised, in magazine and Internet ads, to supply tourists with “companions” between the ages of 14 and 27. The feds say they were swamped with requests for information, and between December 2003 and August 2004 they arrested eleven people who’d paid deposits or booked trips—with what they believed was a legitimate commercial company—to have sex with kids. Among them: a South Carolina real estate agent and his wife who wanted a pair of 16-year-olds; a Hollywood, Florida, cop who also wanted two 16-year-olds; and a New Jersey middle-school teacher who paid $1,610 for a package that was to include two 12-year-olds.
That’s one example, the results from one fake company. Now eliminate the middleman, the cash deposits, the hard evidence. Just fly to Costa Rica, get drunk, meet a girl on the street. She’ll say she’s 18. Is she lying? She’s got an ID. Is it fake? How can anyone possibly tell? And will the local cops bust the guy who guesses wrong? Do they, in fact, mean it?
Paul Chaves is the man in charge of the Sexual Exploitation Unit in the Ministry of Public Security. He remembers, with something between bitterness and bemusement, when Costa Rica got slammed in the mid- 1990s by the foreign media shooting video of underage prostitutes in downtown San José. ABC, NBC, the BBC, even Spanish television. The government ministers would deny on camera that there was a problem, then the reporters would roll the tape, add some line about “trouble in paradise”—devastatingly effective television. “I know how the media works,” Chaves says, and several times, because he has two brothers in journalism, which he also says several times.
He also knows that those foreign reporters were right and that his government was wrong—tactically and morally—to say otherwise. So now he’s saying the opposite. Confessing it, really, so aggressively and often that he seems almost to be doing penance for the whole country. He’s a small, blustery man of 36, quite proud of his accomplishments since he took over the Sexual Exploitation Unit two and a half years ago. (His 120-man department also covers juvenile gangs, auto theft, and, oddly, copyright infringement.) When he started, only six of his men worked the sex beat, he says, sharing one car and never leaving San José. Now he has more than forty officers on the job, covering the entire country. Why, just that day his officers rousted a woman who was pimping girls out of a beauty salon. “Pimps and pedophiles,” he says. “Those are my two enemies.”
But not prostitutes. He is sympathetic: “Some girls who are doing this are students selling their bodies part-time.” He is philosophical: “I don’t think it would be worth going after prostitutes. Nonsense. Anyone can sell her body to someone else.” He is practical: “To try to police what women do with their bodies, or what men do with their bodies, we would be a police state.”
Valid points, all. He would acquit himself well in the academic debate. But what about the real-world debate? What about those 16- and 17-year-old prostitutes, the ones the TV crews caught on video and the ones who are still in the park by the Holiday Inn? Don’t they come with the territory? Isn’t that why those signs are cluttering up the airport, making all the legitimate tourists skittish?
“Sometimes,” he says, “I have my doubts.” Thoughtful pause. “Any man can make a mistake.”
So, no, all those airport signs—apparently, they don’t mean it.
Chaves hails a cab. It’s a long ride to his home on the outskirts of San José. He talks the whole way. About his 120 officers. About how helpful the United States and Britain have been. About his hatred of pimps and pedophiles. About his government finally admitting it has a problem with both.
The cab stops at his house. The chief of the Sexual Exploitation Unit tells the driver, who doesn’t speak English, to go on to the Holiday Inn, then says good night. He gets out and closes the door.
The cabbie flips on the dome light, reaches back with his right hand. There’s a small pink card between his fingers for a place called Scarlett’s Gentlemen’s Club.
“Titty bar?”
He knows enough English to get by.
