April 6, 2012 - LA JONQUERA, Spain — She had expected a job in a hotel. But
when Valentina arrived here two months ago from Romania, the man who helped her
get here — a man she had considered her boyfriend — made it clear that the job
was on the side of the road.
He threatened to beat her and to kill her children if
she did not comply. And so she stood near a roundabout recently, her hair in a
greasy ponytail, charging $40 for intercourse, $27 for oral sex.
“For me, life is finished,” she said later that evening,
tears running down her face. “I will never forget that I have done this.”
La Jonquera used to be a quiet border town where
truckers rested and the French came looking for a deal on hand-painted pottery
and leather goods. But these days, prostitution is big business here, as it is
elsewhere in Spain, where it is essentially legal.
While the rest of Spain’s economy may be struggling,
experts say that prostitution — almost all of it involving the ruthless
trafficking of foreign women — is booming, exploding into public view in small
towns and big cities. The police recently rescued a 19-year-old Romanian woman
from traffickers who had tattooed on her wrist a bar code and the amount she
still owed them: more than $2,500.
In the past, most customers were middle-aged men. But
the boom here, experts say, is powered in large part by the desires of young
men — many of them traveling in packs for the weekend — taking advantage of
Europe’s cheap and nearly seamless travel.
“The young used to go to discos,” said Francina Vila i
Valls, Barcelona’s councilor for women and civil rights. “But now they go to
brothels. It’s just another form of entertainment to them.”
There is little reliable data on the subject. The State
Department’s 2010 report on trafficking said that 200,000 to 400,000 women
worked in prostitution in Spain. The report said that 90 percent were
trafficked.
But police officials and advocates say that whatever
the number of victims, it is growing. Thousands of women are forced to work —
often for even lower pay now, because of the economic downturn — everywhere
from fancy clubs and private apartments to industrial complexes and lonely
country roads.
Europe woke up to the problem of trafficked women in
the 1990s, as young women from the former Soviet Union began to arrive in large
numbers, and it has spent much of the last decade developing legal frameworks
to address the issue. But, some advocates say, this decade will test Europe’s
commitment to enforcing its new laws.
“The structures, by and large, are in place,” said Luis
CdeBaca, the ambassador who leads the State Department’s Office to Monitor and
Combat Trafficking in Persons. “Now it’s time to take them out for a drive.”
Fueling the boom in the sex industry in Spain are many
factors, experts say, including porous borders in many parts of the world and
lax laws. Until 2010, Spain did not even have a law that distinguished
trafficking from illegal immigration. And advocates say
arrests of traffickers and services for trafficked women remain few. The State
Department’s report on trafficking said that according to preliminary information,
the Spanish government prosecuted 202 trafficking suspects and convicted 80 in
2010.
More important, some advocates say, is the growing
demand for sex services from younger tourists. Of course, there is a local
market. One study cited by a 2009 United Nations report said that 39 percent of
Spanish men admitted having visited a prostitute at least once. It is widely
accepted here for business meetings to end in dinner and a visit to a brothel.
But more recently, experts say, Spain has also become a
go-to destination for sex services.
In La Jonquera, tucked behind an all-night gas station,
is the newly opened Club Paradise, which, with 101 rooms, is one of the largest
brothels in Europe. It caters in large part to young men from France, where many
aspects of prostitution are illegal, and perhaps more to the point, buying sex
is more expensive.
On a recent evening, one young man from Paris stood in
the parking lot of Club Paradise, bragging about his sexual exploits while his
friends looked on. The women, he said, did not talk about whether they were
being forced to have sex.
“Maybe,” he said. “But I think they are having a good
time.”
If any of them actually are, they would seem to be the exceptions.
Thirty years ago, virtually all the prostitutes in Spain were Spanish. Now,
almost none are. Advocates and police officials say that most of the women are
controlled by illegal networks — they are modern-day slaves.
The networks vary enormously, and shift constantly.
Some are “mom and pop” operations out of Eastern Europe, like the one that
controls Valentina. Others have far greater reach, like the Nigerian
organizations that first began to surface in Spain in the last decade. Deputy
Inspector Xavier Cortés Camacho, the head of the regional antitrafficking unit
in Barcelona, said the Nigerian groups moved women through northern Africa to
Spain, and then controlled them by threatening to rape or kill their family
members back home.
But Mr. Cortés said that people of maybe a dozen
nationalities were involved in the trafficking. Until recently, for instance,
the police in Barcelona did not even realize that Chinese mafias ran
prostitution rings in the city. Then they began noticing more and more advertisements
for Chinese, Japanese and Korean women — all of them, it turned out, Chinese —
working in a network of about 30 brothels.
The working conditions were brutal, Mr. Cortés said. On
wiretaps, he said, “we listened to them complain that they needed to rest, they
were in pain. But they had to keep working. One woman committed suicide after
finding out she was H.I.V.-positive.”
Some of the women are sold into the business by their
families, Mr. Cortés said. The police came across one case in which Colombian
traffickers were paying one family $650 a month for their daughter. She managed
to escape, he said. But when she contacted her family, they told her to go back
or they would send her sister as a replacement.
Of the 1,605 women identified in 2010 as victims of
traffickers, the biggest number — about 30 percent — came from the Balkans.
Many tell a story much like that of Valentina, who
hoped to earn enough money in Spain to build a house and live in peace with her
children.
So far, she said, she has earned a bit more than
$2,000. But she has not been allowed to keep any of it. “They say I eat too
much,” she said. “They are angry if I buy something to drink.”
In the meantime, her cellphone kept ringing, and the
threats from her former boyfriend kept coming, she said.
The visibility of prostitution has become an issue
here. A battle has raged over whether to allow advertisements for prostitution
in newspapers, but they remain legal and appear even in the most reputable
papers.
After one Barcelona newspaper ran a series last year on
sex acts conducted in plain view near a main tourist attraction, the boulevard
Las Ramblas, the city council said it would ban street prostitution and expand
services for the women.
In La Jonquera, Mayor Sonia Martínez Juli says the
town, population 3,000, has few resources to help the women.
“We feel completely abandoned with this problem,” she
said.
Some politicians would like to see prostitution
outlawed in Spain, though that does not seem imminent. Many women’s groups say
that this would only force prostitution underground, making it even harder to
help trafficked women.
For now, prostitution is legal, though not regulated,
in Spain. But pimping is illegal, so most brothels like Club Paradise operate
more like hotels. It charges the women who work there about $90 a night for
room and board.
José Moreno, one of the owners, said the women who
worked there did so freely.
“Sometimes there is a problem with a boyfriend,” Mr.
Moreno said recently, as scantily clad young women began to gather at one of
the bars inside his club, readying for a night’s work. “But that is usually
cleared up quickly.”
Some weeks after the interview, however, Mr. Moreno was
convicted on charges relating to smuggling Brazilian women into Spain to work
as prostitutes. He was sentenced to three years in prison and is appealing the
decision. The authorities say the women can seek help, but many are reluctant.
On a recent evening, Valentina, speaking a mix of Spanish and Romanian, said
she was unsure where to turn. She said she had already been to the local
police, but had been told she had to go to the regional police in Figueres,
about 15 miles away.
A few days later, she stopped answering her cellphone and could not be found at her usual spot along the road. Inspector Cortés said that she had indeed gone to the police in Figueres. But at the last minute, she refused to go to a shelter and left on her own.