by James Bargent, June 27, 2016.

Behind Medellin’s cosmopolitan façade, the town’s street gangs entrap girls as young as 10 then sell them to the highest bidder.

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 Urbano (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.

Reporting
the advances is rarely an option as it is the gangs and not the state
that are the true authorities in the comunas. The gangs not only control
criminal activities, they also regulate day-to-day life, even resolving
disputes between neighbours and charging their own taxes in the form of
the daily or weekly “vaccination” – local slang for extortion fees.
The
gangs operate as the foot soldiers of Medellin organised crime,
controlling territories on behalf of one of two warring mafia networks;
the remnants of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s criminal empire, now called
the Oficina de Envigado; and the narco-paramilitary army known as the
Urabeños. These associations ensure the gangs’ reach stretches far
beyond the neighbourhoods they control and even extends deep into the
state security institutions, where corruption is rampant. The gangs’
connections not only facilitate the movement of the girls through
criminal networks, they also all but guarantee the silence of the
victims.

“People are scared to report it, even talk about it
because of the fear of these armed actors,” says one youth worker in the
city’s violence-torn Comuna 13 district, who has seen girls under his
care disappear into gang life, and who did not want to be identified for
fear of reprisals. “Silence has become an accomplice.”

Victims contacted by The Independent said that since the
revelations in the C3 report, gangs had issued them warnings that they
would be killed if they talked about their experiences.
With the
families powerless to intervene, the girls are prepared for auction.
Some are offered up for the orgies thrown by the drug lords and mafia
kingpins that control the Colombian underworld, continuing a tradition
begun by Pablo Escobar, whose demand for teenage virgins was notorious.
Once sold off, few return.

“This is a girl’s first [sexual]
experience,” said Pardo. “They pass from the hands of one capo to other
capos and by the end they have become prostitutes.” Many are sold to
foreign tourists. The security improvements of the last decade, which
have helped change Medellin’s international reputation from that of a
war zone ridden with drugs and extreme violence to a thriving
cosmopolitan city, have opened it up to tourism. However, with the
city’s reputation for beautiful women and Colombia’s lax laws on
prostitution – which is legal if the women are 18 or over and no
intermediaries are involved – the dark underbelly of the influx of
foreign visitors has been a boom in sex tourism.

As the city’s
murder rate dropped, sex tourism networks quickly sprang up, many of
them run by foreigners, who illegally guide tourists through the city’s
brothels and red-light zones. The city sex trade itself is overseen by
the larger street gangs or specialist sex-trade rings.

According to C3’s investigations, trusted clients are contacted
through these networks and are offered brochures of the children on the
auction blocks – either physical booklets containing a small selection,
or online catalogues of up to 60 girls.

Customers are passed a
secret PIN number, which grants them access to the auction website.
Clients can then bid on the girls, with C3 registering prices as high as
five million pesos (about £1,600) for the right to take the child’s
virginity. When the auction is completed, the sites are taken down, and
the brochures destroyed.
After the experience, the girls very
rarely return to family life, and instead get drawn ever deeper into the
Medellin underworld.

“What happens is the girls begin to have a
different life because they have access to money and with this money
they have access to drugs,” says the youth worker. “They end up far from
home, involved with gang members – their way of life is changed from a
very young age.”

The gang’s recruitment and abuse of young girls
is not just a security issue, it is also cultural, according to Clara
Ines, the director of Medellin women’s rights NGO Vamos Mujer. “In the
context of the war, and in the context of the ‘narcotisation’ of the
culture, women have gone from being thought of as sexual objects to
becoming merchandise,” she says. “Women have become the spoils of war.”

The
Medellin authorities say they are aware of the practice but their
efforts to tackle it are limited by the silence that surrounds the
issue. They also say they are hamstrung by the fact that many of the
children being groomed for the sex trade enter into gang life
voluntarily.

“From a very early age they look at it as something
natural, something normal,” says Jesus Sanchez, the Medellin human
rights ombudsman. “There are cases where the parents call attention to
it, they ask the state to intervene, but the child says they don’t want
to be part of a protection program, they want to stay in the environment
and belong to the group.”

However, many of those working with the victims say the response of the authorities has been weak.
“This phenomenon exists and it is getting worse every day, but there is no state or police action,” says Pardo.
Pardo
believes the situation is a clear example of the growing gulf between
the facade Medellin now presents to the world, and the reality of
poverty and violence still rampant in the comunas, where child
prostitution and virgin auctions are just another daily horror to
endure.

“This has become part of the landscape, part of the cruel
reality of the other Medellin – the one that is not visible, the one
that does not appear in the media, that does not involve grand
construction projects and fancy restaurants,” says Pardo. “In the
comunas it is lack of opportunity and poverty that reigns.”

SOURCE: Independent