Thread: In Venezuela, they were teachers and doctors. To buy food, they became prostitutes. B

The inevitable results of socialism..

In Venezuela, they were teachers and doctors. To buy food, they became prostitutes.

BY JIM WYSS
jwyss@miamiherald.com

SEPTEMBER 22, 2017 12:08 PM

ARAUCA, COLOMBIA At a squat, concrete brothel on the muddy banks of the Arauca River, Gabriel Sánchez rattled off the previous jobs of the women who now sell their bodies at his establishment for $25 an hour.

“We’ve got lots of teachers, some doctors, many professional women and one petroleum engineer,” he yelled over the din of vallenato music. “All of them showed up with their degrees in hand.”
And all of them came from Venezuela.

As Venezuela’s economy continues to collapse amid food shortages, hyperinflation and U.S. sanctions, waves of economic refugees have fled the country. Those with the means have gone to places like Miami, Santiago and Panama.

The less fortunate find themselves walking across the border into Colombia looking for a way, any way, to keep themselves and their families fed. A recent study suggested as many as 350,000 Venezuelans had entered Colombia in the last six years.

But with jobs scarce, many young — and not so young — women are turning to the world’s oldest profession to make ends meet.

All 12 women who work at this brothel in Arauca, Colombia are from Venezuela. As Venezuela’s economic crisis continues to grind on, many Venezuelan women have turned to the sex trade in neighboring Colombia to make ends meet.
Jim Wyss Miami Herald

Dayana, a 30-year-old mother of four, nursed a beer as she watched potential clients walk down the dirt road that runs in front of wooden shacks, bars and bordellos. Dressed for work in brightly colored spandex, Dayana said she used to be the manager of a food-processing plant on the outskirts of Caracas.

But that job disappeared after the government seized the factory and “looted it,” she said.

Seven months ago, struggling to put food on the table, she came to Colombia looking for work. Without an employment permit, she found herself working as a prostitute in the capital, Bogotá. While the money was better there, she eventually moved to Arauca, a cattle town of 260,000 people along the border with Venezuela, because it was easier to send food back to her children in Caracas.

The previous night, her sister had traveled by bus for 18 hours from Caracas to pick up a bundle of groceries that Dayana had purchased — pasta, tuna, rice, cooking oil — and then immediately jumped on a bus back home.

“If you had told me four years ago that I would be here, doing this, I wouldn’t have believed you,” said Dayana, who asked that her last name not be used. “But we’ve gone from crisis to crisis to crisis, and now look where we are.”

"The Venezuelan people are starving and their country is collapsing," President Donald Trump stated before the United Nations on Sept. 19, 2017. He later called on other countries to do more to address the crisis in Venezuela under the dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro which "has inflicted terrible misery and suffering on the good people of that country."

The White House

With inflation running in excess of 700 percent and the bolivar currency in free fall, finding food and medicine in Venezuela has become a frustrating, time-consuming task. Dayana said she often would spend four to six hours waiting in line hoping to buy a bag of flour. Other times she was forced to buy food on the black market at exorbitant rates. Hunger in Venezuela is rampant.

That has fueled a scramble to earn hard currency — Colombian pesos or, even better, the U.S. dollar, which is the legal tender of Ecuador and Panama.

Dayana said that on a good night she makes the equivalent of $50 to $100, selling her services 20 minutes at a time.

“Prostitution obviously isn’t a good job,” she said. “But I’m thankful for it, because it’s allowing me to buy food and support my family.”

Gabriel Sanchez, 60, started a brothel in Arauca, Colombia after he lost his job in a car repair shop in Venezuela.
Jim Wyss Miami Herald

Selling sex is legal in Colombia, and even small towns have red-light districts where authorities look the other way. So while immigration police were actively hunting down Venezuelans selling trinkets and panhandling in Arauca’s central square, the women along brothel row said they were rarely harassed.

Marta Muñoz runs the Casa de la Mujer, a municipal program that focuses on women’s health and rights. She said that prostitution is something of a blind spot for local authorities who are more focused on blatant crimes, like child trafficking, rape and the abuse of minors.

“I know that some of them are being paid unfairly and being treated very poorly,” Muñoz said of the Venezuelan prostitutes. “But how do we protect them without strong public policies?”

Sánchez and others in the sex industry say Venezuelans dominate the trade now because they’re willing to work for less pay.

“I would say 99 percent of the prostitutes in this town are Venezuelan,” he said. All 12 of the women who work for him are from the other side of the border.

It’s not just a border phenomenon. Fidelia Suarez, the president of Colombia’s Union of Sex Workers, said her organization has seen a dramatic influx of “Venezuelan women and men working in the sex trade” across the country.

While it’s impossible to quantify how many might be working in the trade, Suarez said her organization is trying to safeguard the vulnerable migrants.

“We want to make sure they’re not being harassed by authorities or taken advantage of,” she said. “Being sexually exploited is very different than being a sex worker.”

In a sense, Venezuela’s economic crisis has been so severe that it has even upended long-held social norms.

Marili, a 47-year-old grandmother and former teacher, said there was a time when she would have been ashamed to admit she’s a prostitute. Now she says she’s grateful to have a job that allows her to buy hypertension medication for her mother back in Caracas.

“We’re all just women who are working to support our families,” she said. “I refuse to criticize anyone, including myself. We all have to work.”

Bars and brothels line the street in Arauca, Colombia. Those who work in the sex industry, say almost all of the prostitutes are from Venezuela — another indication of that country’s deep economic crisis.
Jim Wyss Miami Herald

Both Marili and Dayana said they told their families how they make a living. “I don’t like to keep secrets,” Dayana said.

Even Sánchez, the 60-year-old brothel owner, says he was forced into the business by the Venezuelan crisis. Like many Colombians, Sánchez moved to the neighboring country 30 years ago, when the oil rich nation was booming economically and Colombia was mired in violence.

There, he had solid work in Caracas repainting cars. When the crisis killed that job several years ago, he began smuggling Venezuelan wood and its cheaper-than-water gasoline into Colombia.

Eventually, things got so bad he decided to return to Colombia permanently. He and his wife opened the brothel, called “Show Malilo Night Club.” Sánchez’s nickname is Malilo.

“This place is mine, thank God,” he said of the modest building, strung with Christmas lights to provide ambiance. “But it hurts me deeply what’s happening over there.”

Marili said the couple had been lifesavers — giving her a place to stay and a way to make a living.

“Not just anyone will lend you a hand,” she said. “These people are humanitarians.”

There seems to be no end in sight for Venezuela’s economic pain. Last month, the Trump administration restricted Caracas’ ability to borrow money from American creditors, which will undoubtedly deepen the crisis. And yet, President Nicolás Maduro has been digging in, avoiding the economic reforms that economists say are necessary.

Dayana dreams of a day when she’ll be able to go home and start a small clothing boutique. Asked when she thought that might happen, she shook her head.

“No one knows,” she said. “We just have to be patient.”

Follow me on Twitter @jimwyss



Dayana and Gabriel Sanchez stand in the back of his brothel, “Show Malilo” in Arauca, Colombia Jim Wyss Miami Herald
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article174808061.html

The socialist corruption of the past 8 years in the US is similar to the corruption in Venezuela but did not reach the scale of the corruption that full blown socialism achieves. Venezuela is a perfect example of the direction that this country was taking.. A few political elites financially feed off of and enrich themselves at the expense of the "workers". IMO
Venezuela’s ex-prosecutor Luisa Ortega accuses Maduro of profiting from nation’s hunger

Venezuela's Chief Prosecutor Luisa Ortega Diaz, second left, talks with her counterparts during a meeting of Mercosur trade bloc prosecutors, in Brasilia, Brazil, Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2017. Brazil's attorney general is sharply criticizing the recent ouster of his counterpart in Venezuela. Attorney General Rodrigo Janot said Wednesday that the removal of Ortega Diaz from her post was "an institutional rape" and that it eroded the independence of Venezuela's justice system.Eraldo Peres AP

BY JIM WYSS
jwyss@miamiherald.com

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA Venezuela’s former chief prosecutor provided more explosive details about high-level corruption in the government on Wednesday, accusing President Nicolás Maduro of profiting from the nation’s hunger crisis.

Speaking in Brazil at an international meeting of attorneys general, Luisa Ortega said she had documents that appeared to link Maduro to a Mexican company that provides products to Venezuela’s state-sponsored food-distribution program.

Ortega said the company, which she identified as Group Grand Limited, “is presumably owned by Nicolás Maduro,” although it’s registered under other names.

She also said Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht had paid Diosdado Cabello, a powerful Venezuelan government leader, $100 million in bribes. Those payments were made to a Spanish company that is owned by Cabello’s cousins, Ortega said.

Odebrecht, the scandal-plagued Brazilian construction firm that has confessed to bribing governments throughout the hemisphere, won $300 billion worth of contracts in Venezuela, Ortega said, and at least 11 of the infrastructure projects were never finished. Analysts said the total price-tag seemed inflated.

“I am going to give [evidence] to authorities in different countries — the United States, Colombia, Spain — so they can investigate,” she said. “In Venezuela, there is no justice. It’s impossible to investigate any act of corruption or drug trafficking.”

While she didn’t provide any evidence during Wednesday’s speech, she asked the international courts to review the cases because the “rule of law has been dismantled” in Venezuela.

Ortega, a longtime government insider, was fired on Aug. 4 and replaced by Tarek William Saab. On Wednesday, Ortega claimed Saab was the subject of six investigations for allegedly defrauding Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA.

Ortega and her husband fled Venezuela on Friday and Maduro has said he will be asking Interpol for their arrest on corruption charges. During a nationally televised address Tuesday, Maduro called Ortega a “liar” and said the only thing his administration had done was “work hard.” On Wednesday, Saab said Ortega’s allegations “lacked merit” and accused her office of burying corruption cases.

The allegations that Maduro might be profiting from the nation’s hunger are incendiary in a country that boasts the world’s largest crude reserves but where food and medicine shortages are rampant.
Hunger and the collapsing health system have been some of the main drivers of anti-government protests that have left more than 120 people dead in recent months.

Reacting to Ortega’s statements, Henrique Capriles, the opposition governor of Miranda state, asked her to “get to the bottom” of the corruption scandal.

“The people need to know who is stealing their money and how much they’ve robbed,” he said in a statement. “If they hadn’t stolen the income of Venezuelans, we would never be in this economic situation of shortages, hunger, and poverty.”

Ortega, who had been attorney general since 2007, was considered an administration hard-liner until recently. She’s thought to be one of the officials targeted by the Obama administration when it imposed visa and financial-transaction bans on unnamed individuals involved in squashing anti-government protests in 2014.

In 2015, Ortega suggested she was hiring a lawyer to defend herself against the presumed U.S. sanctions. The U.S. State Department, citing privacy laws, said it could not comment on Ortega’s visa status.
Her first high-profile rebuke of the Venezuelan administration came in March, when the Supreme Court tried to dissolve congress. Since then, she also has accused the government of systematically violating human rights as it clamped down on protests.

Asked by reporters in Brazil on Wednesday what her next move would be, Ortega said she would be returning to Colombia where she has been offered — but not yet accepted — political asylum. Despite speculation, she said she has not been offered political asylum in the United States.

Ortega said she expected to be vilified in Venezuela and said she had received death threats since leaving her country. If anything should happen to her, she said, “the Venezuelan government is responsible.”

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nati...168977357.html