Pandemic, famine is forcing thousands to work in Mexico

Mexico City (AP) – The hardships caused by the coronavirus pandemic have forced former Mexican sex workers 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 of the sex workers interviewed, asked to be identified only by her first name, stopped working on the street a decade ago, after marrying one of her former clients. But when her husband lost his job at the beginning of the pandemic, the couple was four months behind the rent for their apartment.

The only solution Claudia saw was to return to work on the streets.

“It was an income to eat, to pay the rent we owe,” said Claudia, who now owes only a month’s rent back. “It’s hard to go back and see so many of my colleagues from the old days, my age, going back to do the same thing … to see all the problems there.”

Laura, a 62-year-old transgender woman who started working on the streets of Mexico City 40 years ago, is waging a daily battle to stay hosted. If you receive a client that day, you can afford a cheap hotel room for the night. If not, he sleeps on the street.

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

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

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

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

“It simply came to our notice then. On every street corner – it was surprising, “she said.

Madrid estimates that 40% of those on the streets are now women who have left the profession, but have been forced to return by the pandemic, another 40% are new to the profession and 20% are part-time or occasional sex workers.

“Many of the others – the other 40% – had been waitresses who had never worked in the sex trade before,” she said. “You know, when they close restaurants, 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 children,'” Madrid said. “But there were another 20% who surprised us more. They were housewives, women with grocery bags who made it for 50 pesos or whatever they needed to buy food. They did not protect themselves (use condoms) because they were not considered sex workers. ”

Madrid said it knows of 50 sex workers in Mexico City who died of COVID-19. She and her longtime companion, fellow organizer Jaime Montejo, caught him by themselves, and he died in May. Sex workers who gather outside a subway station believe Montejo caught the coronavirus while helping them, and the Feast of the Dead in Mexico last fall erected an altar in the square, where many of them work.

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

Conditions that have always been harsh for women businesses in Mexico City – violence from customers and gangs looting prostitutes and shakedowns by corrupt police – have worsened during the pandemic.

Partial lockout rules have forced many hotels to close, and others have raised the prices they charge for sex workers. This left some earning the equivalent of only $ 3 or $ 4 from each customer.

Madrid said that after hotels closed or prices rose, some people began renting rooms or shop windows for sex workers, who found that the owners registered them with customers and demanded payment in exchange for not posting the videos on the Internet.

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

“Everyone can find sex anywhere, in cars, on sidewalks,” she said. “They have started looking for a safer place to work because the hotels have closed.”

Most hotels have reopened, but many have increased their prices.

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