Sex worker Patricia, a year-old mother of three, says she was beaten, raped and sodomized by a drunken client once -- but she is still working. But the women, without identity papers, ended up working as prostitutes in sordid bars in Colombia, saving all they can to provide for their families back home, still in the throes of economic crisis.
Mother-of-three Patricia, 30, was beaten, raped and sodomized by a drunken client -- but she keeps on working in a brothel in Calamar, in the center of the country. Alegria is a teacher of history and geography but in a Venezuela gripped by chronic hyperinflation, she was earning just , bolivars a month: less than a dollar.
Her salary was not enough "even for a packet of pasta," the year-old mother of a four-year-old boy told AFP. She initially worked for three months as a waitress in the east, a job which offered room and board, but Alegria was never paid, getting by on tips. Six people, including her son, were relying on her.
Eventually, even those were confiscated, so Alegria made her way south to Calamar, which is located in an area scarred by decades of armed conflict. With nine other women, Alegria -- a pseudonym she gave AFP for this story that means 'happiness' -- prostitutes herself every night in a bar in the town of 3, people.
We're doing it because of the crisis," says Joli, her voice cracking. This year-old lost her job as a newspaper carrier in because "there was no more paper to print them. After four years of recession and years of financial mismanagement, Venezuela's crisis has seen poverty soar as basic necessities such as food and medicine became scarce.
