Pandemic pushes thousands into sex work in Mexico

By Rebecca Blackwell | Associated Press

MEXICO CITY – Adversity caused by the coronavirus pandemic forced former sex workers in Mexico back into business years after their departure, making it more dangerous and reducing some to sex in cars or on sidewalks due to a lack of available hotels.

Claudia, who like most sex workers surveyed, asked to identify only by her first name, stopped working in the streets a decade ago after marrying one of her former clients. But when her husband lost his job early in the pandemic, the couple fell four months behind on rent for their apartment.

The only solution Claudia saw was to go back to the streets.

“It was an income to eat, to pay the rent we owe,” said Claudia, who now only rents back one month. “It’s hard to come back and see so many of my co-workers from the old days, my era, go back to doing the same … to see all the problems there.”

Laura, a 62-year-old transgender woman who started working in the streets of Mexico City 40 years ago, is fighting a daily battle to stay homeless. If she gets a client that day, she can afford a cheap hotel room for the night. If she does not, she sleeps on the street.

Laura said many of her clients have lost their jobs and can no longer pay her. At one point, she had to pawn her phone, her only contact with some of her ordinary people.

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

Things are even harder for older sex workers like Laura, as thousands of new sex workers took to the streets when the pandemic had to close restaurants and shops.

Elvira Madrid, who leads the activist group Street Brigade in Support of Women, said her group found 15,200 sex workers in Mexico City’s streets in August, about twice the number before the pandemic.

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

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

“Many others – the other 40% – were waitresses who had never worked in the sex trade before,” she said. “You know, when they closed the restaurants, people had to eat and give their children what they needed. And then the single moms – most of them worked in shops, clothing stores, bars, cosmetics. ‘

“They cried because they said, ‘I do not want to do this, but I have to feed my children,'” Madrid said. ‘But there were still 20% who surprised us more. They were housewives, women with grocery bags who did it for 50 pesos, or whatever they needed to buy food. They did not protect themselves (use condoms) because they did not consider themselves sex workers. ”

Madrid said it knows of 50 sex workers in Mexico City who died of COVID-19. She and her longtime partner, co-organizer Jaime Montejo, caught it themselves, and he died of it last May. The sex workers who gather outside one subway station believe Montejo caught the coronavirus while helping them. On the autumn day of Mexico’s Day of the Dead, they erected an altar for him in the square where many of them work.

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

Conditions that have always been difficult for the women who trade in Mexico City – violence by clients and gangs who prey on prostitutes and shake off the corrupt police – got even worse during the pandemic.

Partial lock-in rules forced many hotels to close, and others raised the prices charged by sex workers. So some just earned $ 3 or $ 4 per customer.

Madrid said some people, after closing hotels or raising prices, started renting rooms or shop windows to sex workers, who found that the landlords took it up with customers and demanded payment in exchange for not posting the videos on the internet. .