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COSTA RICA |
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Sex Trade Is Thriving in Costa Rica
By Tim Rogers, Special
to The Miami Herald
The slumping global economy is having a
stimulus effect on Costa Rica's famous
sex-tourism industry, as a growing number of
unemployed women -- from Colombia to the
Dominican Republic -- flock to San José to
seek a living in the world's oldest
profession.
In popular prostitution hot spots such as
the Hotel & Casino Del Rey and Key Largo,
local prostitutes compete with an influx of
foreign women from Nicaragua, Colombia,
Dominican Republic, Venezuela and even
Russia. The increase in numbers and variety
of working women here has reaffirmed Costa
Rica's position as an international hub for
prostitution, which is legal and regulated
by the government since 1894.
But not everyone is happy about the
increased competition, which, along with a
contracting economy, has required some
prostitutes to lower their prices by as much
as 40 to 50 percent.
"Business is bad. The problem is
competition. Sometimes I don't even make
enough to take a taxi home after work,''
said Costa Rican prostitute Mayela, as she
lingers by the bar at Key Largo in search of
a client.
Like many prostitutes, Mayela, a 36-year-old
single mother with an unfinished education,
first starting selling her body for sex in
her early 30s to support her children. After
several years of prostitution, she made
enough money to buy a small house and get
her three daughters into decent schools. She
eventually found an unskilled assembly line
job at a factory, which paid less than
prostitution but got her out of the skin
trade, which she despises.
But when she got laid off earlier this year,
Mayela said she had no choice but to return
to wearing short skirts and working long
nights.
"Now there are like 90 percent more girls
working here than before,'' Mayela said of
the scene at Key Largo. "And most of them
are foreigners.''
Even veteran foreign prostitutes notice the
changes.
"There are a lot more Colombians now. Before
it was mostly Ticas (Costa Ricans) and Nicas
(Nicaraguans),'' said Elena, a Russian
prostitute who was brought to Costa Rica by
a Belgian man five years ago to work in a
strip club.
Some of San José's women of the night came
to Costa Rica with more ambitious
professional plans in mind. Ana, 34, said
she worked in the fashion industry in
Colombia and came to Costa Rica to find
similar work when the economy started to
slow in her native country. When she
couldn't find a job in Costa Rica, she
turned to prostitution.
Though tourism in Costa Rica has fallen 15
percent this year, the scene at the Del Rey
and Key Largo - the heart of San José's
so-called "Gringo Gulch'' - seems resilient
to the downward trend. On a recent Saturday
night, both spots were packed with hundreds
of North American men, who flirted at the
bar with curvy women or shuffled drunkenly
and uninhibitedly on the dance floor to live
music.
But while business in the Gringo Gulch
appears lively at first glance, some women
say more men seem interested in window
shopping than making a purchase. A Costa
Rican prostitute named :Cindy'' says many
men are looking for a fantasy bar experience
where voluptuous women coo and paw at them
for several hours, but fewer are actually
paying to go upstairs afterward.
Jacobo Schifter, a professor emeritus at
Costa Rica's National University of Heredia
and author of Mongers in Heaven, an
investigation of Costa Rica's sex tourism
industry, reports that the self-indentified
sex-tourism mongers have created their own
subculture, identity and even philosophical
positions on issues such as sex and
relationships.
For many, Schifter notes in his book, the
behavior becomes addictive. Costa Rica, he
says, becomes a monger's ``crack'' and sex
with prostitutes becomes their fix to help
them "escape reality.''
While there are no official statistics,
based on Schifter's research, he estimates
there are between 10,000 and 20,000 sex
workers in the country, and 25,000 to 50,000
sex tourists who visit each year, 80 percent
of whom are U.S. citizens.
Fundación Rahab, a Costa Rican
nongovernmental organization that started in
1997 and has helped some 500 women leave the
profession and find alternative work,
acknowledges it's harder to convince the
current population of prostitutes to stay in
their program with the economy in recession.
"It's harder to convoke groups now, and it's
harder for the women to get out of
prostitution because they say, `what I am
going to live on if there's no work?' ''
said Laura Sisa, Fundación Rahab's program
coordinator.
As for Mayela, the Costa Rican woman who
returned to prostitution after losing her
factory job earlier this year, she said she
is willing to make the personal sacrifice to
protect her daughters from following in her
footsteps.
"I sat my daughters down and told then what
I do,'' she said. "I told them they have to
study, and that's expensive. But I work hard
so none of them will end up here. That would
be the worst.''
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