When I tell people who have never spoken with a sex worker that I study sex work, they often respond with a knowing, sympathetic look and proceed to tell me about a documentary on sex trafficking in India, or say how much they loved Liam Neeson in Taken. I respond that I study consensual sex work, and the notion that most sex workers are trafficked is a misconception. In my interviews with over two hundred sex workers in four Latin American countries, I wish I could say none substantiated the trafficking myth—some do, but such cases are the exception. Instead, stories of economic need, single motherhood, and disgust with the sex but gratitude for the lifeline sex work has provided are so common that they’ve become routine. The actual prevalence of sex trafficking is unknown because of how few reliable quantitative studies exist. One of the most robust, a multipart study conducted in Cambodia, estimated that between 3.8 and 11.9 percent of female sex workers in the country were trafficked. These numbers are appalling, but far from a majority.
Writing about the sex industry often takes the form of sensationalized stories that, when examined closely, fall apart. The subheading of a recent article in The Free Press proclaims that “Biden’s border policies have led to an explosion in the forced prostitution of migrants in the United States.” Without quoting a single sex worker or trafficking survivor, the author relies in part on the unsubstantiated claims of the anonymized founder of a Texas nonprofit called Shepherd’s Watch, whose “evidence” includes ads for sex workers in Spanish with women’s faces obscured “to prevent anyone guessing their age”—never mind that the women might want to keep their identities private—and the account of a man observing the parking lot of a motel. The article’s takeaway? America must secure the border to stop trafficking.
When travel is involved, our ideas about prostitution become even more fantastical. Whether it’s a woman migrating to work in a brothel or a man traveling to purchase sex, we picture a female victim exploited and denuded of agency. Feminist anthropologist Laura Agustín challenges this trope in her book Sex at the Margins, which reveals how many people willingly migrate to sell sex to improve their economic situation; the opportunity to see the world in the bargain doesn’t hurt. Similarly, in Gringo Gulch, an ethnography of sex tourism in Costa Rica, sociologist Megan Rivers-Moore argues that sex workers, sex tourists, and the state are all using each other to get ahead. As the cost of living rises globally, and expats colonize cities like San Juan and Medellín, sex work fills in the gaps for people abandoned by the neoliberal state. Meanwhile, developing countries trying to compete on a rigged global playing field exclude sex workers from public spaces to avoid “dirtying” tourist destinations, yet they quietly benefit from the foreign dollars sex workers attract.
In resisting the trafficking moral panic, proponents of sex work decriminalization sometimes overemphasize free choice and risk minimizing the existence of coercive dynamics. Among the thirteen migrant sex workers I interviewed in Guatemala, four were victims of trafficking upon first arriving in the country. In my study of sex tourism in Colombia, I’ve heard many credible stories of child sexual exploitation. If sex work is work, one still has to make sense of the tension between respecting sex workers’ agency and recognizing the economic coercion so many face. The pesky fact is that the majority of Latin American sex workers I meet as an academic and sex workers’ rights advocate want to exit prostitution. Rather than serving an argument against decriminalization and for more policing, however, these cases of coercion reinforce the need for a labor-rights approach. Jobs done by poor people involve exploitation. What’s required by the sex industry are labor laws that give workers power against employers, less restrictive migration policies, and strong social programs that combat poverty.
Sexual Disneylands
Medellín, Colombia, made international news in January 2024 when an American tourist was caught with two girls, aged twelve and thirteen, in his hotel room. El Poblado, the tourist zone of Medellín, is infamous for its Parque Lleras, where young women circulate in the hope of attracting wealthy gringos. Although most are adults, the city has struggled to address the rise in minors involved in paid sexual activities. In response to this scandal, the newly reelected mayor, Federico Gutiérrez, issued a decree in April 2024 prohibiting sex work in the park altogether. He faced immediate backlash. Like most of Latin America, sex work in Colombia is unregulated, neither criminalized nor legalized. The country is unique, however, in that the Constitutional Court designated sex workers as a vulnerable population with the right to work. The park ban was declared unconstitutional. The previous mayor, Daniel Quintero, tried erecting metal barriers around Parque Lleras and prohibiting sex workers from entering, but feminist groups complained that police were profiling women based on how they dressed. Soon after, the park’s street vendors, who were losing customers, formed a successful coalition with the sex workers in protesting the barriers.
As for sex tourism, “If it weren’t for us, the sex workers, the foreigners wouldn’t come.”
When I visited the park in October 2024, I passed under a yellow archway and through a gauntlet of discotecas, each with a promoter trying to entice me with a drink or to smoke hookah. The park proper is a botanical oasis with a winding path of foliage where women sit on the benches in nightclub attire and look at their phones while they wait for clients. Aurora, a thirty-eight-year-old black woman, told me she started coming here after she was diagnosed with cancer and the government failed to pay her disability benefits. (Some names have been changed to protect interviewees’ identities.) She doesn’t like having sex with strangers, but she can pay her monthly rent if she comes here and gets two clients. “Nothing in life is good or bad,” Aurora reflected. “That’s why it’s called work. Because money isn’t earned easily.” As for sex tourism, “If it weren’t for us, the sex workers, the foreigners wouldn’t come.”
The city of Medellín, once the most violent city in the world, has worked hard to attract tourists. Tourism and human rights specialist Carlos Calle explained that the annual number of visitors has exploded from 150,000 in 2018 to 1.5 million. According to a city official who wished to remain anonymous, there are currently eight thousand foreigners living there on visas available to digital nomads. The city welcomes the influx despite complaints of gentrification. “It’s very good for Medellín that there’s more taxation, which enables more social programs, but the cost of living is increasing a lot,” Calle acknowledged. But the real problem, he said, began when foreigners arrived and found an absence of regulation around sex work, drugs, and nightlife. Word traveled fast, thwarting the city’s efforts to rehabilitate its reputation as Pablo Escobar’s hometown into a more wholesome destination. One official, who asked not to be named, insisted they want the sex tourism to stop. “If what you’re looking for is a destination of drugs, prostitution, sexual exploitation . . . that we don’t want.”
But some groups continue to profit from promoting Medellín as a sexual Disneyland. While out at a rooftop bar in July 2023, my friends pointed out a gringo behind us with an entourage of other white men and Colombian women. “That’s Casey Red Beard,” they said. On his social media pages, Red Beard, whose real name is Casey Brown, advertised “gringo parties” for American tourists to meet Colombian women. A self-proclaimed red-pilled dating coach, he claimed the women at his parties were not “prostitutes”; they were simply regular girls looking to have a good time. Earlier in 2023, a feminist outlet called Manifiesta reported that Red Beard and an accomplice had engaged in sex trafficking. The outlet claimed that Red Beard had procured at least two minors and made them have sex against their will. While he was forced to leave Colombia temporarily, he stated the allegations were lies circulated by “extremist feminists.” His Instagram account reveals he is back in business, though now in Brazil. In several posts, he brags that his “white advantage” helps him attract Latin American women and urges men to get their passports.
Many feminists oppose prostitution on the basis that it upholds patriarchy and advocate for criminalizing purchasers of sex, instead of those who sell it. This is the Nordic Model, as first implemented in Sweden in 1999. The idea is that by targeting the demand, you can reduce the supply. Although no country in Latin America has implemented the Nordic Model, there is a growing movement of abolitionists who view prostitution as the ultimate form of violence against women and aim to do away with it. One is Sara Jaramillo, a twenty-five-year-old activist and the coordinator of Empodérame, a foundation which serves sex-trafficking survivors. When we met, she wore a black cutoff tee and silver vagina-shaped earrings. She asserted that in Medellín, almost all prostitution is controlled by organized crime. She criticized the male demand that generates “the whole tourist system [that] sustains itself from sexual exploitation” in El Poblado. “Why as women do we simply have to accept that men are never going to be able to stop paying for sex?”
Given how many heartbreaking stories I have heard in the industry, I understand views like Jaramillo’s. However, studies find that client criminalization also causes inadvertent harm. A Médecins du Monde study of over five hundred sex workers in France concluded that the new Nordic Model law “had a detrimental effect on sex workers’ safety, health and overall living conditions.” Clients were less willing to provide their personal information for safety screenings, police threatened to deport migrant sex workers who did not report their clients, and sex workers lost income; with fewer clients to choose from, sex workers had to lower their prices or accept clients they would otherwise refuse. Reduced earnings mean sex workers can’t save the money they need to secure housing, start a business, or go to school, making it more difficult to stop selling sex.
As repugnant as certain clients’ views toward women may be, their dollars enable many to survive. Daniela, a nineteen-year-old, told me she came to Parque Lleras after she got pregnant and the father abandoned her. Her baby needed a surgery she couldn’t afford on her waitress salary of $375 per month. Here, she earns $80 an hour, and as much as $700 on a good night. Daniela hates doing sex work. “You feel dirty. You feel like everyone is looking at you,” she said. “I think that prostitution shouldn’t exist. It’s like a psychological fatigue.” But when I asked if the government should criminalize buying sex, she said no. “Because in the moment, it’s a huge support. If this didn’t exist, what would become of those of us who live from this?” The only way to abolish the industry, she said, is by improving the economy. With the money she’s saving, she hopes to open her own clothing shop.
Jaramillo’s organization does provide essential services to support people who want to stop selling sex, including shelter and funds to pursue further education or job training. That’s what the state ought to be doing, Jaramillo insisted, and I found myself agreeing. But activists like Carolina Calle, a street-based sex worker and president of the sex work trade union Asociacíon Sindical de Trabajo Sexual (ASTRASEX), find abolitionists’ approach patronizing. Rather than collaborating with sex workers who seek to improve working conditions, abolitionists vehemently oppose their initiatives to pass a sex workers’ rights law, accusing them of supporting pimps. “Without a law, nothing will be accomplished,” Calle lamented. Currently, sex workers cannot access the employment benefits other kinds of workers are entitled to, like sick pay and pensions. “There’s four sentences from the Constitutional Court, but nothing advances,” she said. “The abolitionists are are accusing us of crimes.” While Jaramillo, meanwhile, allows that a miniscule percentage of women may want to sell sex, she opposes any law that legitimates the industry. “When you work, you create something,” she said. “To do prostitution you don’t need to learn anything, you just need to allow it to be done to you.”
Although some women I’ve interviewed would agree, many others resist victimhood narratives and speak proudly of their skills. When I met Farina, a thin mixed-race nineteen-year-old with carefully contoured makeup, she was eager to be interviewed. She grew up wealthy in a finca—a country house—where her parents kept her isolated because her dad was a kidnapper for the ELN guerrilla group. When some of her friends obtained designer bags from sugar daddies, she saw a path to break free from her sheltered life. “It’s gone super well for me, to be honest. I’m not ashamed of it,” she stated matter-of-factly. Although she recently had to leave an abusive sugar daddy, overall, her clients have treated her well. “I’m my own boss.”
Although the two are often conflated, the crucial difference between sex work and sex trafficking is consent. “To me it seems utopian, absurd, unconstitutional to try to regulate this as a job in Colombia,” Jaramillo said. “It’s full of trafficking rings.” While abolitionist feminists argue that economic need makes consent impossible, the sex-trafficking survivors I have spoken to think differently. In Medellín’s historic center, I met Mariana Díaz, a representative of SINTRASEXCO, which claims to be the first government-recognized sex worker union in Latin America. A bustling mélange of vendors, beggars, and pickpockets peddle their trade beneath concrete pillars covered in tropical plants and the metro overhead. The conditions here are far rougher than those in upscale Poblado; outside the fat statues of Plaza Botero, the street-based sex workers earn as little as $7 per client. Díaz is a spritely fifty-year-old black woman with a youthful energy, exemplified by three small black stars at the corner of her eye and fuchsia eyeshadow. Originally from a small pueblo near the Caribbean coast, her family was killed by guerrillas. At age twenty, sex traffickers brought her to Santa Marta and trapped her in a house. Eventually, with the help of an anti-trafficking organization called Espacios de Mujer, Díaz escaped. After regaining her freedom, she decided to do sex work of her own volition, working in strip clubs and massage parlors across the country. “Sex work has gone very well for me,” she said. She is now studying environmental administration and serves in a consultation group for the Secretaría de las Mujeres of Medellín.
Anti-trafficking efforts often treat the sex industry as unique even though trafficking and abuse happen across many other industries. At first, Díaz was a domestic worker, but the pay was worse, and the men of the house forced themselves on her anyway. “I see it as almost the same thing,” she said. Despite the prevalence of sexual abuse, child labor, and trafficking in domestic work, feminist organizations do not call for criminalizing the people who hire maids; instead, they call for greater labor protections. She wants the same for sex workers.
Díaz emphasized the distinction between someone being sex trafficked and an adult choosing to sell sex. She deplored the number of minors in the industry, some of whom come of their own initiative, while others are pressured by their parents, recruited by criminal groups, or kicked out from their homes for being LGBTQ. Ramona, who begs near Parque Lleras, told me she is sixteen and has a one-year-old baby. She ran away from an abusive home, and sometimes she accepts sexual propositions from tourists. Although the police have tried to remove her from the area, the children’s home they sent her to “was like a prison.” Worried about her daughter, she escaped. Although she does not want to sell sex, she objected to being described as a victim, insisting no one forced her. The increased police presence has reduced the number of minors in El Poblado, though some have relocated to the more dangerous city center, and police corruption remains widespread.
Sometimes, activists interpret decriminalization to mean the elimination of any laws around adult consensual sex work. But Medellín demonstrates that a hands-off approach does not necessarily produce good results. By neglecting the situation in El Poblado, the city allowed criminal organizations to take over the area. “When there’s an absence of institutional presence of the state, other institutions enter,” Carlos Calle explained. The sex workers’ rights movement in the Global North prickles at any mention of regulation; in the Netherlands, Germany, and Nevada, legalization has meant restricting sex workers to licensed premises and requiring them to register with the government, leaving independent and undocumented sex workers criminalized. The Latin American sex workers’ rights movement, however, argues for a different kind of legalization: one based on rights, not control of sex workers’ bodies. In 2023, ASTRASEX proposed a bill establishing specific protections for street workers, brothel workers, escorts, webcam models, content creators, and porn performers. It would require employers to offer sex workers a pension, vacation, and minimum wage, and would establish responsibilities for clients to use condoms and get STI tests. This law may not fix the poverty that leads people to sex work in the first place, but it would better their lives as they work.
Deportation Nation
Guatemala has not attracted sex tourism like Colombia has. It is, however, a transit and destination country for Central and South American migrants. At the Organización Mujeres En Superación (OMES), an organization run by and for sex workers, I spoke with many women whose stories reveal gray areas between choice and coercion in the context of restrictive migration policies. OMES cofounder and national coordinator, Adriana Carrillo, received me at the group’s Guatemala City office, where a banner on the wall read, “We all use our body to work, and just because I use my vagina doesn’t make me less than you.” A dynamic, tawny-skinned woman with short curly hair dyed a fading lavender and shaved on one side, Carrillo sports teal eyeliner and a floral tattoo that spreads across her chest up her neck. She has been a sex worker for twenty-three years, and when she enters a room, her smile, complete with colored braces, makes her the center of attention.
The Latin American sex workers’ rights movement argues for legalization based on rights, not control of sex workers’ bodies.
During my visit, staff from the International Rescue Committee helped migrant women get residence permits. Though most had entered sex work voluntarily, some were tricked into it. Yesenia, a forty-year-old lesbian woman, came to Guatemala at age twenty-two because of the economic crisis in El Salvador. A friend recruited her to work as a waitress in Guatemala, but she soon discovered she was indentured to a brothel and had to pay off the $500 the owner had paid for her journey. After a month, she was allowed to leave freely but decided to remain because she’d seen how much money she could earn. Although she has experienced violence, she hasn’t reported these incidents because “when you’re an immigrant you’re afraid to file a report because they’ll deport you. Or take your kids away.” Yesenia was deported—two or three times per year. “They ask for money or for you to sleep with them so they don’t deport you.” The government assumes all undocumented migrants are victims of trafficking but provides them no assistance. She is grateful for OMES, which helped her move to an establishment with better working conditions and get a scholarship to finish her basic education. “I’ve empowered myself through OMES.” She believes sex work is “a job like any other.”
Another fifty-year-old Salvadorean I’ll refer to as Lidia had a far worse experience. Brought to Guatemala at age fifteen under false pretenses, she was held in a casa cerrada—a clandestine brothel—for six years with about thirty-five other girls. The woman who ran the business would beat them or withhold food if they refused clients. “We were slaves,” she recounts. The owner’s husband was a police officer, and his police friends were frequent patrons. They did nothing to help the girls, and she never received any of the money she made for her bosses. When a client helped her escape, Lidia left sex work for marriage, though she occasionally returns to it in between stints as a cook. Around 2010, with Carrillo’s support, she and other sex workers protested the mayor of Villa Nueva’s plan to expel them from the park. “We’ve fought so they don’t take away our work,” she recounted, smiling. “Nobody obligates me to do what I don’t want to do.”
Carrillo explained that today, because there is so much more public awareness of human trafficking, OMES doesn’t see as many cases as it did a few decades ago. However, anti-trafficking efforts have created new human rights abuses. Since the passage of the UN Palermo Protocol in 2000, the United States has pressured other countries to pass and enforce anti-trafficking laws. The protocol requires an element of force, fraud, or coercion to be present, but many countries fail to make this distinction. Guatemala passed its anti-trafficking law in 2009, and Carrillo bitterly recalled how it gave the police carte blanche to execute raids, make indiscriminate arrests, and deport migrants without work permits. One casa cerrada run by Mariana, a former sex worker whom Carrillo attested treats her workers well, was raided following the bill’s passage. Despite the fact that the workers were there voluntarily, Mariana was imprisoned for trafficking. Now released, she showed me how police had forced the women to stand in the street for hours in their underwear, then published their photos in the papers.
Thanks to OMES’s advocacy, the Guatemalan Secretariat against Sexual Violence, Exploitation, and Trafficking in Persons eventually codified the difference between sex work and sex trafficking. But a clause in Guatemala’s penal code criminalizing whoever promotes, facilitates, or favors prostitution remains problematic. Brothels operate clandestinely, making labor inspections more difficult, and some nightclubs prohibit sex workers from carrying condoms because police could use them as evidence to shut businesses down. The Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare has used this law to deny OMES’s attempts to establish a special labor regime for sex workers. Ironically, a law intended to protect them from abuse by employers prevents sex workers from engaging in collective bargaining or obtaining employment benefits.
Given the blockages OMES faces in advancing a labor rights law, it currently focuses on health care and migration. Bianca, a thirty-eight-year-old health promoter for OMES, migrated from Nicaragua. Asked if she likes sex work, she exclaimed, “Oh yes. I’ve had good experiences. Like any job, sometimes there are difficult things.” Joining OMES has helped her feel more confident. “Before, the clients would come and say, ‘Hey look at the puta [whore].’ And I was afraid to say they’re not putas. But today I say, ‘Excuse me, but they’re not putas, they’re sex workers’ . . . and they say, ‘Oh, sorry ma’am, forgive me.’” Thanks to Bianca’s advocacy, this year OMES opened a safe house for migrant women at the Guatemala-Mexico border called Casa Violeta.
I traveled six hours by car with Carrillo to Tecún Umán, where Casa Violeta offers a safe space for women and LGBTQ migrants, including meals, showers, and psychological support. By the time they get there, most South American migrants will have passed through the Darién Gap, a deadly stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panamá that connects North and South America. In the Darién, migrants face not only difficult terrain but soldiers and criminals who extort and sometimes rape them. Human Rights Watch has reported that the number of Venezuelans passing through the Darién skyrocketed in 2022, when multiple Central American countries began requiring Venezuelan migrants to obtain visas, blocking off a safer method of entry by plane. Although most of the migrants who receive Casa Violeta’s services do not identify as sex workers, many have had to engage in transactional sex along the journey. When they reach Chiapas, Mexico, where organized criminal groups carry out mass kidnappings, some fall victim to trafficking.
Many of the trans and gay migrants who pass through are migrating due to death threats in their home countries. Denisse Pérez, a staffer at Casa Violeta, was one of them when, twenty years ago, she made the journey with the help of a coyote and nearly made it to Houston, Texas. Scared and unsure whom to trust, Pérez was soon arrested and held for two months before being deported. Later, she did sex work in a bar in Mexico, where society is more accepting of trans people than in Guatemala.
Much as anti-trafficking laws often harm sex workers, anti-migration policies create the conditions for trafficking. In their book Revolting Prostitutes, sex workers Molly Smith and Juno Mac argue that countries use sex trafficking as an excuse to tighten their migration policies, yet these restrictions exacerbate the problem. When governments make it more difficult for people to migrate independently, the risk of exploitation rises, as migrants are more likely to rely on an unsanctioned third party to cross borders. Nayroby Peralta, the psychologist at Casa Violeta, agreed. “If they had permission to pass freely, there would be less risk because it would reduce the incidence of cartels.” The existence of borders enables organized crime’s monopoly of migration routes, and the complexity of the application process for asylum makes migrants vulnerable to extortion for “help” with the papers. Attempts to combat organized crime by blocking migrant crossings are fueling the very problem they seek to address.
Beg, Body, or Steal
Back in Medellín, a group of Venezuelan migrants showed me another way that anti-migration policies fuel exploitation. The women beg outside of Parque Lleras, where kind-hearted tourists sometimes buy them baby formula from the pharmacy. One of them, Maria Alvarado, walked for weeks to reach Colombia because her children were starving in Venezuela. Men offered her a roof but only if she slept with them. Here in Parque Lleras, she prefers to sell candy instead. “You don’t know what it’s like to prostitute yourself. Those minutes are horrible, they feel like an eternity.” Yesica, a friend of Maria Alvarado who often sleeps with tourists, explained, “The majority of these cases happen because of labor exploitation. I could get a job in a restaurant, and while they’d pay a Colombian 80,000 pesos a day, they’ll pay me 30,000 [the equivalent of $7] because I don’t have papers. If the government offered good jobs,” she argued, “sex tourism would be greatly reduced.” The women have been driven to selling sex because, as migrants, they lack rights. As the government frets over prostitution, it simultaneously denies these women the work permits they would need to leave the street. Sex workers consistently tell me they want government help getting a job and financial assistance. Until then, they will keep getting by using what they have: their bodies.
It is far easier for a North American man to travel to Latin America for sex than for a Latin American mother to travel to the United States to provide a better life for her child.
Anti-trafficking and the expansion of sex worker and migrant rights go hand in hand. Because of lopsided migration policies between countries of the Global North and Global South, it is far easier for a North American man to travel to Latin America for sex than for a Latin American mother to travel to the United States to provide a better life for her child. As Donald Trump follows through on his promises to “secure the border,” he will surely tout himself as a hero stopping sex traffickers (just as Kamala Harris did during her campaign). The irony is that these restrictions make trafficking and organized crime worse. The existence of sex trafficking is not a myth, but the idea that it occurs through random kidnapping is. As Mac and Smith put it, “The vast, vast majority of people who end up in exploitative situations were seeking to migrate and have become entrapped in a horrifically exploitative system because when people migrate without papers they have few to no rights.” Meanwhile, criminalization creates the conditions that make trafficking more prevalent because it forces these populations to hide from authorities and prevents them from accessing the rights afforded other workers.
Abolitionist feminists get some things right. For many people who sell sex, the experience is traumatizing, and they want a way out. But for most, the alternatives to sex work are worse, all but guaranteeing destitution. While the sex tourist may often be entitled, sexist, and racist, to criminalize him (or her) does not solve the problems that lead people to accept money for sex in the first place. To paraphrase the English Collective of Prostitutes, if we want to abolish prostitution, we must first abolish poverty. The exit programs that abolitionists advocate for can do good. But they would do better if they also supported sex workers fighting to exercise their work with dignity. We must value the desires of both the person who views sex work as their job and the person who wants to leave; they are often the same person.
Some abolitionists may respond that the rampant exploitation of sex workers in Latin America, where sex work is not a crime, shows that decriminalization doesn’t work. But decriminalization is just the first step. The countries that have fully decriminalized sex work—New Zealand and Belgium—also establish protections, like the right to refuse a client; Belgium has just granted expanded labor rights to sex workers, including access to pensions, unemployment, health insurance, family benefits, annual vacation, and maternity leave. The law ASTRASEX proposed in Colombia would do much of the same. To assert that sex work is work is not to assert that sex work is good, any more than saying that mining is work expresses approval of mining. The stronger unions become, the greater workers’ ability to demand better. As the San Francisco chapter of the Wages for Housework campaign put it in 1977:
Prostitution is one way of getting our wages. . . . We are forced to sell our bodies . . . in marriage, in the street, in typing pools or in factories. And as we win wages for all the work we do, we develop the power to refuse prostitution—in any of its forms.