By KATE WILLSON
Observer staff
April 2, 2008

Observer slideshow by KATE WILLSON.

Like most prostitutes in the Colombian Department of Cesar, Marlene Ferardo is a poor, single mother. She left her 9-year-old son and infant daughter with her parents 13 years ago and came alone to Valledupar, the capital of Cesar. Since then, her $6 tricks have helped keep food on her family’s table.

“I don’t do this but out of necessity,” says Ferardo, who has kept secret the source of the money she sends home each month. “If I could go back to Cartagena, I would.”

Ferardo tried unsuccessfully to find work in a restaurant when she arrived in Valledupar. She labored part-time as a maid, but couldn’t live on wages that were the equivalent of $54 per month. So she headed for the Boliche neighborhood and stopped at the
Esmeralda Hotel, where she still works today.

On this Easter morning, the weary 38-year-old sits in the doorway of the cinderblock hotel wearing orange stretch pants and a worn black tank top. Her body is round and soft; her eyes are red and watery, as if she’s just stopped crying. She nervously checks her cell phone to see if she’s missed a client’s call.

Valledupar, with a population of about 400,000, is Colombia’s fourth-largest city and the economic heart of the coastal Department of Cesar, in the northeastern part of the country. It sits at the base of the smoky Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta to the north and the Sierra de Perijá, bordering Venezuela, to the southeast. The department — the U.S. equivalent of a state, with its own elected governor and assembly — pours south into the sweltering grasslands of the Middle Magdalena Valley.

Before Álvaro Uribe was elected president in 2002, the streets of this department were stage to countless murders by Colombian paramilitaries who ruled the area. But Uribe managed to push back the leftist guerrillas who’d waged a brutal 40-year civil war, and
he demobilized the right-wing paramilitaries who had waged an equally vicious counter-attack. As a result, the extreme and unrelenting violence has abated.

But common crime has replaced organized crime. Many streets are now overrun by violent and determined thieves. In fact, Marlene Ferardo feels so vulnerable she won’t work at night.

Blame it, perhaps, on the jobless rate, which has not improved during Uribe’s presidency: nearly 20 percent of the department’s men, and a quarter of its women, are currently unemployed.

The lucky ones find jobs in small shops that peddle cheap synthetic clothing or in restaurants that sell thin, tough steaks and fried plantains. These workers make the state-mandated minimum wage — about $250 a month.

Others man wooden pushcarts heaped with bananas, mangoes and papayas. They also sell small cups of sweet coffee, potato chips, gum and cell-phone minutes.

Valledupar street vendor Isidro Pere, who supports his wife and two children selling black-market CDs, says he makes about $100 a month. Five other men compete for customers on the same corner.

Mujeres de servicio — prostitutes — typically make about $300 per month, although those most in demand can earn more than three times that amount. After paying room and board, they’re able to send most of their earnings to their parents, who
take responsibility for raising their grandchildren.

At the Cachetes, a brothel in a slightly safer part of Valledupar, the owner provides each woman with her own bedroom and two meals a day — meat, beans, rice, and, inevitably, a variety of the same soup.

They work six-hour shifts, starting at 7 p.m., in an open-air courtyard below their bedrooms. On a recent Sunday night, clients and the brothel’s male staff sat in the heavy, humid heat watching a televised soccer match. Salsa, reggaeton and Vallenato — a popular brand of Colombian folk music that originated in this region — blared from the speakers.

Every one of the 25 prostitutes at the Cachetes is a single mother. They all came here from elsewhere, so their families wouldn’t know they trade men 30 minutes for $20. And, to a woman, they send home money to care for their parents and children, whom
they see only occasionally.

Pauola, for example, last saw her children two months ago. They’re ages 2 and 5, and live with her parents in Magdalena. She has worked as a prostitute for nearly a year, but looks more like a teenager enjoying a high-school dance.

On this Sunday night, she’s dressed in jean capris and a yellow V-neck T-shirt. Her long black hair is pulled up in a clamp, and her face is only lightly made up. She ignores the men, and instead laughs and grins at a table with friends. She dances song after song
with the other young women, shaking her shoulders to the rhythm and spreading her arms wide as she belts out “Ni Que Tuvieras Tanta Suerte” at the top of her lungs.

Upstairs in her room, Pauola’s bed is neatly made, with a clean — albeit worn — set of Cinderella sheets. She never brings men here, she says. This is her space.

As the night wears on, most of the women pair off with men, leading them to one of a dozen rooms lining the lower level of the courtyard. In the background, the completed soccer match has given way to a pornographic video of a man and two women on a
yacht.

The clients have good jobs. Many work for oil companies or in one of the nearby coal mines, where they earn upwards of $500 per month. Most of their families live in other parts of the country; the men typically return home for a few days each month.

Prostitutes who find too much competition in Valledupar head south to the lowlands, settling in small towns built around a railroad that carries coal from La Loma to a port in Santa Marta, on the Caribbean Sea.

Riselis Garcia supports her parents and three daughters on the $325 she makes at a bordello in La Loma, a trash-strewn, one-story town covered with the fine dust kicked up daily by buses carrying workers to Drummond Coal’s expansive mine a few miles away.

During Colombia’s long Easter vacation, Garcia sits in the courtyard with a young, sinewy client. Two dozen Costenita beer bottles clutter the plastic table before them.

So many men ask why, at 31, she’s still selling herself. Her answer echoes that of so many peers: “I’m here for my children, out of necessity,” she says.

“Not for pleasure,” she adds. “No one does this for pleasure.”

She laughs as she talks, embarrassed to be discussing her work in front of a client. But, he knows her and why she’s here.

She still vividly remembers her first time.

“It was an older man, a land owner from here,” she explains. “The [bordello owner] brought him to me. He was kind. He paid me well.”

She earned $40 that morning.

Most of her customers, she says, are miners, and they’re rough. But she’s learned the rules from the more seasoned women: always use a condom, don’t accept drunks and don’t remove your shirt. Men are only paying for the waist down, after all.

Across the patio, an 18-year-old woman — at the job for only a month — sits with a group of equally young men. She remains quiet, her eyes focused on the table beside her as the men joke among themselves.

Her parents live in Valledupar and care for her 14-month-old daughter; they think she found work in a restaurant, she says. She’s seen them just once since starting here. When she speaks of her daughter, her embarrassed smile vanishes.

“I left her with my mom,” the young woman says. “No one can care for her like my mom.”

A few feet away, a miner slouches in a plastic deck chair, leering at her. A sneer spreads beneath a mustache on his pock-marked face.

“Look how beautiful she is,” he says in speech slightly slurred by too much beer. “She’s a special woman.”