Pandemic famine forces thousands to work sexually in Mexico

MEXICO CITY (AP) – Difficulties caused by the coronavirus pandemic have forced former sex workers in Mexico to return to the business years after they left, made it more dangerous and reduced some to having sex in cars or sidewalks due to lack of available hotels.

Claudia, who like most interviewed sex workers asked to identify only by her first name, had stopped working on the street a decade ago after marrying one of her former clients. But when her husband lost his job at the start of the pandemic, the couple fell four months back in renting their apartment.

The only solution Claudia saw was to get back to work on the street.

“It was an income to eat, to pay the rent we have to have,” said Claudia, who now only has ten months ’rent. “It’s hard to go back and see so many of my co-workers from the old days, from my time, do the same thing again … to see all the problems.”

Laura, a 62-year-old transgender woman who started working on the streets of Mexico City 40 years ago, has a daily battle to stay housed. If you have a guest that day, you may be able to afford a cheap hotel room to spend the night. If he doesn’t, he sleeps on the street.

Laura said many of her clients have lost their jobs and can no longer afford it. At one point, he had to pawn his phone, his only contact with some of his regulars.

“Some days you have nothing to eat. … Maybe eat one day and not the next, “Laura said. As for avoiding the coronavirus,” I trust God “and hand sanitizer.”

Things are even harder for older sex workers like Laura, because thousands of new sex workers have taken to the streets as the pandemic forced restaurants and shops to close.

Elvira Madrid, who leads the pro-women Street Brigade activist group, said her group found 15,200 sex workers on the streets of Mexico City in August, about twice as many as before the pandemic. .

“The surprise was that there were more. On every street corner, it was amazing, ”he said.

Madrid estimates that 40% of people on the street are now women who had left the profession but had to return due to the pandemic, another 40% are new to the profession and 20% are sex workers in part-time or occasional.

“Many of the others (the other 40%) had been waitresses who had never worked in the sex trade before,” she said. “You know, when restaurants closed, people have to eat and give their children what they need. And then single mothers: most of them worked in shops, clothing stores, bars, cosmetics ”.

“They cried because they said,‘ I don’t want to do this, but I have to feed my kids, ’” Madrid said. “But there was another 20% that surprised us more. They were housewives, women with grocery bags doing it for 50 pesos or whatever they needed to buy food. They were not protected (they used condoms) because they were not considered sex workers. “

Madrid said it knows 50 sex workers in Mexico City who died of COVID-19. She and her lifelong companion, young organizer Jaime Montejo, captured it themselves and died last May. Sex workers who congregate outside a subway station believe Montejo caught the coronavirus while helping them, and Mexico’s Day of the Dead party last fall erected an altar in the plaza where many of them work. they.

Madrid estimates that sex workers have lost 95% of their income due to the pandemic.

Conditions that have always been harsh for women who trade in Mexico City (the violence of customers and gangs who take advantage of prostitutes and corrupt police shakedowns) worsened even more during the pandemic.

Partial closure rules forced many hotels to close and others raised the prices charged by sex workers. This left some earning the equivalent of just $ 3 or $ 4 from each customer.

Madrid said that after hotels closed or increased prices, some people began renting rooms or shop windows to sex workers, who found that landlords were recording them with customers and demanding payment in exchange for not posting videos to Internet.

Now, Madrid said, women need to take clients wherever they can.

“Everyone finds out where they can to have sex, in cars, on the sidewalks,” he said. “They have started looking for a safer place to work, because the hotels closed.”

Most hotels have reopened, but many have increased prices.

Despite fewer customers, lower incomes and more risks, thousands of women see no choice in the midst of the pandemic, but stay on the streets of the capital, spending hours waiting in the hot sun or dark corners. And many days they still go home to hungry families with no income at all.