But then we are stopped by heavily armed police and have to get out of the car. That the windows are wide open in the absence of air conditioning and that a gun can not be stopped by a locked door, we choose to ignore. This time we go in a northeasterly direction. Just a short distance along the twenty kilometer long city beach. Night falls quickly and the ocean waves crash against the shore with anger.
It was the Dutch who founded Fortaleza. It was and the stretch of beaches and palm trees was then called Fort Schoonenborch. Not a story anybody recalls any longer. If the Dutch are mentioned nowadays, it is related to football or sex tourism. Sometimes a bar owner or tour operator makes the headlines because he is arrested after boasting about his sexual escapades with underage girls. Not that it often leads to convictions, because that is also Brazil.
Poor prostitutes, let alone children, never stand a chance against men paying for sex. However, foreign men are not the only nor biggest the threat.
They are the dealers in the slums that supply girls with drugs. They are the ones who, for a few Brazilian Reals, will have sex with crack addicted girls. They are the owners of expensive hotels in the city who can order minors for their sexual pleasures without ever being convicted. And they are the ones who take away financial worries from mothers in exchange for their eight-year-old daughters. Going into prostitution is the only way for many women to feed their children and to survive in an environment where fatherhood ends after making babies.
We have visited many favelas over the last few days. But the port district Serviluz, named after the lighthouse, we have not visited yet.
