From archives: Young girls in Medellin auctioned off for their virginity
From archives: Young girls in Medellin auctioned off for their virginity
Paula Delgado-Kling | December 10, 2013
Today is International Human Rights Day.
Today, I want to again share with you a story from the archives. It’s a story that when I think about, I choke up.
Medellin has one facade: modern revitalized urban center and the birth place of Fernando Botero, the artist who paints and sculpts fat people and fat animals. Then there is the Medellin of the comunas and the gangs, of drugs, hired killers and the legacy of Pablo Escobar.
The drug kingpin was known to hire men to bring him virgins. The deceiving and entrapment of girls continues in Medellin’s underworld. Young girls, most between 10 and 15, are lured with offers of brand-name clothing and meals at luxury restaurants, which include top of the range whisky and cocaine, according to Luis Pardo, Director of the NGO Corporacion Consultoria de Conflicto Urabano (C3).
The girls’ photos then appear in brochures, or on online catalogues where their virginity is auctioned off to the highest bidder – mostly drug barons and foreign sex tourists. Customers are passed a secret PIN number, which grants them access to the auction website where they can bid on the girls.
The biggest clients are sex tourism networks, many of them run by foreigners, who illegally guide tourists through Medellin’s brothels and red-light zones. Colombian women have an international reputation for beauty which has led to “sexual tourism packages.” Foreign tourists are willing to pay as much as US $3000 for a “paisita.” Locals call the girls selected for foreigners “pokemones.” They are usually between 10 and 12 years old and fetch the highest price.
More:
http://talkingaboutcolombia.com/2013/12/10/from-archives-young-girls-in-medellin-auctioned-off-for-their-virginity/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Colombia: The virgin auctions in Pablo Escobar’s home town
Behind Medellin's cosmopolitan façade, the town's street gangs entrap girls as young as 10
then sell them to the highest bidder
James Bargent
Tuesday 08 October 2013
It is a phrase now commonly heard in the hillside slums of Medellin, Colombia: “Take care of your daughter, or she will be sold.” The warning – or threat, depending on who is talking – is literal. The street gangs that rule the slums known as comunas are recruiting 10 to 15-year-old girls and auctioning off their virginities to drug lords and foreign tourists.
The girls are selected for their looks, and then approached by gang leaders or other girls already involved in the gang life, who act as recruiters.
“They start drawing them in with perks from a culture of high consumerism,” says Luis Pardo, Director of NGO Corporacion Consultoria de Conflicto Urabano (C3), which has been investigating the phenomenon over the last year. “They offer them brand-name clothes, trips to luxury restaurants, top of the range whisky and cocaine, and the girls end up as part of this network.”
Once in the sphere of the gang’s influence, the girls fall under their protection. “When it is decided that a girl is to be auctioned off, no man in the neighbourhood can touch her, no one can hassle her and, most of all, no one can take her virginity,” says Pardo.
The girls’ families are caught in the classic bind of organised crime. If they accept the overtures of the gangs, they receive financial help to ease the desperate poverty of life in the comunas. If they refuse, they can either leave their homes and join the ranks of the more than 10,000 people displaced within the city each year, or they can wait for the bullet fired from the back of a passing motorbike, or the knock on the door that will signal the last time they are seen alive.
More:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/colombia-the-virgin-auctions-in-pablo-escobars-home-town-8867289.html