Sex Workers and Human Rights: Prostitution in Guatemala City

March 11, 2005 (Terre Libere) -- In Guatemala 'The Stars of the Tracks', a futboll team formed by sex workers to advocate for their rights, demand recognition of prostitution as a legitimate work decision for an adult person and to stop all kinds of violence against them.

City's Central Parque, it is only a 15-minutes walk east to the area known as ‘La Línea’ (The Tracks). There, on a three-block stretch of dirt road with railroad tracks running down the middle, prostitutes stand in dilapitated doorways, and men furtively stroll by on foot, motorcycle, and in the occasional car. The women rent small rooms on the Tracks for Q40 for day, and charge their clients as little as Q20 for ten minutes. The 160 or so women who work here are just a few of the estimated 12-17.000 prostitutes currently working in closed houses, in bars and clubs, or on the streets in Guatemala.

What distinguishes ‘La Línea’ is eleven women there who have formed a futboll team – ‘Las Estrellas de la Línea’, The Stars of the Tracks - as a forum to advocate for their rights.

Of the 11 Stars, five are from Guatemala (Maribel, Vilma, Lupe, Erika and Susy), four from El Salvador (Valeria, Mercy, Andrea and Carol), and two from Nicaragua (Kim and Beatriz). All are mothers, with a total of 39 children between them. Sex work for these women is a lesser of two evils; an economic option better than most available to them. On the one hand, they express a desire for greater education and alternative job opportunities. On the other, like hundreds of thousands of sex workers globally, they are demanding respect for their work and recognition of their civil, labor, and human rights. Taking inspiration from working together on a documentary about life on the Tracks (which is due out this February), the women formed a futbol team believing that is might get more attention than protests in front of government buildings. They were right.

When the Stars formed in September, they were promptly ejected from the first tournment in which they played, which took place in a high-class neighborhood in the capital. Their opposing team, young women from the elite Colegio Americano, did not know beforehand whom they were going to play. The ‘colegio’ girls complained to the tournament's administrators that they feared catching contagious diseases from the team of prostitutes. The administrators, claiming that the Stars and their followers used profanity in their cheers, kicked them out of the tournament and kept the Q1,000 fee the women had payed to enter the event.

This seemingly-inauspicious beginning attracted national and international press attention. The BBC ran articles in English and Spanish, and Reuters syndicated a small piece out to a number of print and on-line sources. A longer story was published by the Miami Herald and the Houston Chronicle. Here in Guatemala, Prensa Libre ran a straight story on the team on September 26th, only to follow in the next day with a scathing opinion-editorial. The author, Dina Fernández, countered the prevailing support for the Stars by claiming that prostitutes have no right to play on a public field where children are in attendance. Denying that the Stars' rights had been violated by being tossed out of the tournament, Fernandez stated that while "there are some rights inherent to the person, independent of a one's... profession... the case of the prostitutes is more specific. Their job is on the margins of the law".

The act of selling sex is not in itself illegal in Guatemala, as it is not mentioned at all in the Penal Code. But "promoting, facilitating, or fostering prostitution", or living off the profits from people in prostitution, is illegal. In other words, the focus is on a third party. This could include anyone from the owner of a brothel, to a cab driver who directs clients, to a spouse or partner of a prostitute who partially lives off her earnings. Such laws that criminalize the third party severely restrict sex workers' ability to seek legal redress than their rights are violated. Moreover, they can be used to suppress sex worker organization-eg, by saying that a sex worker union is ‘fostering’ prostitution. The focus on a third party in prostitution also figures strongly in the national and international debates over ‘trafficking in persons’. The idea here is that people - mostly women and children - are either forced physically, or lured by false promises of better jobs and pay, to another part of thir own country or into a neighboring country, where they are then subjected to slavery-like conditions. While such conditions can exist in any number of industries, the sex industry gets by far the most attention within the anti-trafficking milieu.

No one denies that there area cases of women and children who are forced or deceived into prostitution or pornography. Indeed, these are issues that demand - an get - attention. But some use the trafficking framework as a means of condemning prostitution as a whole, with an eye toward its complete abolition. Under this vision, all sex workers are slaves in need of rescuing, leaving no room for the existence of an independent sex worker or her rights. A major example of this ideology is George Bush's Decembere 2002 Presidential Directive that changed the policy of the United States' international aid agency, USAID. The directive set forth (in addition to cutting funding for any projects perceived as supporting abortion, and tying HIV-prevention funding to abstinence-based programs) that no funding for anti-trafficking projects would go to "organizations advocating prostitution as an employment choice or which advocate or support the legalization of prostitution". The Bush Adminsitration claims that legalized prostitution only acts as a cover for the dirty work of organized crime. They often use the terms ‘prostitution’ and ‘trafficking’ interchangeably, so that the dividing line between coerce and consent melts away.

In December 2000, the United Nations passed the “Protocol to Suppress, Prevent and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children”. To date, it has been signed by 117 countries, including Guatemala and the United States. But due to the efforts of various human, labor, and sex worker rights advocates, the Protocol includes coerce into by consenting adults, and to afford sex workers, like any other workers, the labor and human rights protection they need. On the other hand, the Protocol itself contains very few protections for actual victims of trafficking, and none at all for the large number of sex workers who are not defrauded or coerced into their jobs.

The current climate in Guatemala does not bode well for the positive possibilities held out by the U.N. Protocol. The Guatemalan government not only shows no intention of recognizing sex workers' rights, or protecting them form abuse, but is itself a major perpetrator of abuse. Following an international trend, the Public Ministry and National Civil Police have stepped up brothel raids in the last year. When not skunked by crooked cops who tip off brothel owners in advance, these raids typically trumpet the "rescue" of women and minors from sexual servitude. That may sometimes be the case, but other factors indicate that such police actions are just as likely result in brutal treatment and dislocation for women who need rescuing from a much larger cyrcle of violence.

Guatemala is in the midst of an incredible wave of violence against women, and sex workers are receiving a disproportionate share of it. This past summer, the Institute of Comperative Studies in Penal Sciences of Guatemala (ICCPG) released a report stating that "women are attacked and raped not only by delinquents of the street, but also by police agents who use sexual violence as the principle form of torture". Lucía Moran of ICCPG said that "sex workers... are the most vulnerable to suffer this kind of abuse on the part of police". Mercy and Valeria, two of the Stars of the Tracks from El Salvador, say that undocumented immigrants in the sex industry are especially vulnerable to the police, who will often demand sex in exchange for not having the women jailed or deported. The Stars also report the murder of two women on the Tracks between October and November last year. Given that a full 40% of cases of murdered women do not get investigated at all in the country (see ‘Prensa Libre’, 19/11/04) it is hardly likely that those cases involving sex workers get attention.

It is in this atmosphere of violence and discrimination that the Stars of the Tracks wage their battle for prostituters' rights. Mercy who, at age 33, has been working on the Tracks for 15 years, expressed interest in the idea of unionisation, but is not aware of any union that will accept them. Her idea is not novel or idealistic. Major organizations of sex workers exist all over the world and under the most difficult conditions. The Network of Sex Workers of Latin America and the Caribbean alone has affiliates in 11 countries, including Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Some of them, in particular AMMAR, a sex worker union in Argentina, are extremely wellorganized, strong and active movements. The Guatemalan affiliate, Mujeres en Superación (Women Overcoming) operates as a small anti-stigmatization lobby out of La Sala, a drop-in center and outreach program for sex workers in Guatemala City. La Sala began seven years ago with funds from an organization in Holland. But today they are so financially strapped that they sometimes even have to charge for condoms. Yanira Tovar, a social worker at La Sala and president of Mujeres en Superación, says that Guatemalan-based funding sources, either public or private, for a group helping sex workers, are non-existent.

And so, when they are not working or attending to their families, the Stars play futboll. To date they have played in a number of games, against colegios; teams of prostitutes from San Salvador, Petén, and Amatitlan; and even a team of policewomen. On the day in December when I met with some of them, they were getting ready to play ‘Colegio Don Bosco’ the following night. Reminescent of what some have called the first great feminist tratise, Mary Wollstonecraft's ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, the Stars at each of their games distribute a list of ten demands intitled "Vindication of the Prostitutes of La Línea". It begins by saying: "The prostitutes of ‘La Línea’ are women before prostitutes. We vendicate our right to be treated with the respect and dignity that any human being merits". They seek protection to the right of custody of their children; protection from violence; to end the police harassment of immigrants; prosecution of forced prostitution; and public campaigns on the importance of the use of contraceptives, among other demands.

They also express as desire to get out of the sex business. They demand job training and assistance leading to "professional possibilities with dignified labor conditions and slaries congruent with our needs". Such are the desires of a vast majority of workers in the third world, and many in the first world as well. But the particurarly threatening conditions under which sex workers live and work are not a necessary part of the sex industry. They result from a moral mentality and a political will thad denies the Stars and others like them their autonomy and self-awareness as women and as human beings. The Stars know this. In defiance of those who world deny agency to any and all sex workers, they demand "Recognition of prostitution as a legitimate work decision for an adult person. Prostitution," they write, "is a job like any other". If the women of La Línea are slaves, we must ask ourselves who exactly is enslaving them. Once we answer that, we can consider how they might be emancipated, and who will do the emancipating.

From: Kim Kantz, 'Entre Mundos', Jan/Feb 2005 http://www.terrelibere.it/terrediconfine/index.php?x=completa&riga=0608