Sex Tourism Report
International Labour Organization/The Georgia Straight, Vancouver
Ivette Badilla was a ‘naïve little girl’ who enjoyed a lively game of ball with her friends after climbing into cars with strangers and exchanging oral sex for money. The second youngest of a poor family living in San Jose’s most squalid and dangerous neighborhood, ‘father’ was a succession of strange men who may, or may not, have abused her. By the age of nine she was selling flowers on the streets. By ten she was selling sex for a few colones to strangers who found in the neglected little street kid the kind of cheap thrills easily available in many developing country tourist destinations. Most of her ‘clients’ were men from her own country while others, what local authorities describe as a “growing minority,” were tourists attracted by Ivette’s young age and the low-cost anonymity that is part and parcel of the developing world travel experience. It is unlikely that any of the men who bought sex from her ever paused to consider that what they were doing was not only illegal, but an outright violation of the little girl’s fundamental human rights.
Today, Ivette’s country is being promoted as being an exemplar of La Pura Vida—the pure life. But behind the slick travel promotions featuring sandy white beaches, untouched rainforest and a country blessedly free of the Latin American post dirty-war hangover of thuggery and endemic banditry lurks another, darker, reality. Costa Rica is increasingly the favored travel destination of tourists intent on sampling more illicit pleasures. Namely: the sexual exploitation of children made too easily available through a potent combination of poverty, rampant incest, official neglect, exploding tourism and the increasingly sophisticated networks of organized crime.
One year after an embarrassing expose on ABC’s 20-20, and more than 10 years after its ratification of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, the tiny country is only just beginning to grapple with what many human rights groups and critics charge has been an been an attitude of “extreme tolerance” to the commercial sexual abuse of children on a mass scale. And although a lack of hard data constitutes a serious impediment to law enforcement, recent changes to Canada’s own criminal code reflect the growing contention that sex tourism constitutes a serious violation of the human rights of children around the world.
According to reports undertaken by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and Casa Alianza, a non-governmental children's advocacy organization, commercial sexual exploitation is rapidly edging out drug trafficking as the primary source of income for organized crime in Central America. Although hard data is difficult to pin, and the numbers of women and children impossible to gauge, ILO experts, and in particular the International Program to Eradicate Child Labour (IPEC) maintain the problem is rapidly growing worse. However, in contrast to the government’s claim that an unknown number of children are involved in the flesh trade, a U.S. State Department report on human rights in Costa Rica released in February 2000 said more than 3,000 children are involved in prostitution in San Jose alone. “Tourist agents are now actively promoting Costa Rica as a sex destination and where there is demand there will be supply,” avers Bente Sorenson, Latin American co-ordinator for United Nation’s International Programme for the Eradication of Child Labour (IPEC). “We have mounting evidence that a number of drug cartels operating out of Colombia are now trafficking in children.”
And far from being benign onlooker to this orgy of child exploitation, it is to a Canadian no less to whom Costa Rican authorities and child welfare activists append the dubious moniker of “Latin America’s sexual exploitation Czar.” In a windowless basement office at the Ministry of Justice in San Jose federal prosecutor Martiza Ortiz gloomily drums her fingers on a ratty-looking desk. Partly in response to a growing tide of international condemnation, the government of Costa Rica has recently launched a very public campaign to crack down on sex tourism and child prostitution. Among their more recent moves was the appointment of Ortiz as head of the Seccion de Prevencion de la Violencia y el Delito at the Ministerio of Justice in 1998. Behind her sits one computer—an old one, indeed the only computer designated for the entire department. Armed with only this relic of a previous century, she and her four assistants have been awarded the impossible task of, among many others, identifying, investigating, charging and prosecuting sex tourism purveyors doubling as child cyber-pimps. In front of her lies a list of at least 30 websites specifically dealing with sex tourism in Costa Rica. In one of them, dubbed SoloMan, would-be travelers can book their entire vacation complete with “hostess” online. Advertising complete anonymity, the travel agency also makes “special accommodations” for clients with “special” needs. Code, Ortiz maintains, for the procurement of children for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation.
Among those targeted for investigation is a Canadian—formerly hailing from Toronto—who has thus far escaped arrest even though his company ‘Friends of the Rainforest’ was accused of smuggling in 14 Phillippine girls under the guise of ‘ecology’ students, confiscating their passports and forcing them to engage in sex for hire. According to prosecutors with the Costa Rican Ministry of Justice, Enrico Cacciatore (whose last name—somewhat ironically—means ‘hunter’ in Italian) operates as many as 14 different websites offering both sun and sex neatly packaged for maximum convenience and discretion. Prostitution for adults is legal in Costa Rica but not for children under the age of 18. According to authorities, arranged marriages for the Philippine children to Costa Rican men so the new wives will be given a cedula, or national identification, normally given to people when they turn 18 years of age. According to a quirk in the civil code, armed with such ID, under age children can then prostitute themselves. (The subject of a National Post expose last year, Cacciatore declined an interview citing “bad experiences with journalists”).
One of the difficulties for investigators in tracking such sites is that they appear and disappear as rapidly as the tropical sun during the seasonal ‘wet.’ “It takes an entire day to download and print only one file,” says Ortiz gesturing at a small stack of freshly printed tourism/porn websites. “We have the laws but we have no resources to enforce them While those running these networks have unlimited resources and aren't hampered by any rules.”
It is a sentiment that is echoed by law enforcement authorities and child welfare activists though out Costa Rica and Canada and one that, despite a flurry of new legislation and high profile public awareness campaigns, is unlikely to change anytime soon. Nevertheless, as well as initiating police sensitivity training, the Costa Rican government has launched a public awareness campaign the includes handing out leaflets at the airport warning would-be sex tourists of the penalties imposed for sexual relations with minors. These brochures outline changes in legislation that now makes it illegal to have sexual relations with a child—a recent law that was enacted in 1998 soon after Costa Rica signed the International Labour Organization's convention 182 outlawing the worst forms of child labour. Previously—under former laws dealing with the corruption of minors—an offender could only be charged if the child in question had no prior history of sexual interference. In other words, a child that had been previously sexually abused could not legally be raped.
Bruce Harris, Latin American Regional Director for Cassia Alianza—sister organization to Vancouver’s Covenant House—is among those who maintain that the government is not doing nearly enough. “As for as we are concerned new legislation will only be effective if it is backed up by resources and political will. And that isn’t happening.”
A case in point is a 1998 law passed by the Costa Rican Congress which decreed that seven per cent of the total tax income be earmarked for PANI (Patronato Nacional de la Infancia), the government's child welfare agency. Funds were to be fed into programs designed to assist the country's poorest children—many of whom had been forced into prostitution by a combination of adverse circumstances such as incest, poverty and drug addiction. As of this writing the government has yet to transfer any of the promised funds to PANI which has stated that, owing to insufficient funds, it is unable to provide services to many at risk children, including victims of sexual exploitation. Casa Alianza sued and in May 2001, the Constitutional Court of Costa Rica and ordered the government to transfer the estimated US$ 42 million owed to poor children as required by law. Despite the upper court ruling the government however, has yet to make the transfer. “This is an example of the government giving with one hand and taking with the other,” says Harris. “Initiatives are all very well, but where is the money and where are the resources?“
“The problem is that the process has been arrested,” says Virginia Murillo, director for Defensa de la Ninez, a San Jose-based non-governmental organization. “The laws are good but the sanctions are weak. For example, if a tourist is charged with exploitation he needs only to post a $1,000 bond and then skip the country.” “They won’t stay in jail. There is no deterrent.”
Bente Sorenson, the bird-like and smiling IPEC co-ordinator for Latin America, concurs but says it is too soon to give up on legislative reforms that, at the very least, provide a template from which law enforcement authorities can work from. “In terms of Latin America, Costa Rica is at the forefront in the fight against the sexual exploitation of children,” avers Sorenson from her modest office located in what passes for San Jose's business district.
Some recent ‘successes’ include the arrest and conviction of 45-year-old Egyptian born Canadian citizen Fahny Hanny who was sentenced to 22 years for corrupting minors and supplying them with drugs. Apparently Hanny had invited foreigners to his Escazu house to sexually abuse poor girls. After plying the girls with drugs and alcohol Hanny would produce child pornography that was then distributed via the Internet from Costa Rica.
According to Sorenson, of the 200 child sex workers interviewed by IPEC, fully 50 percent maintained that nationals were their predominant clients while the other 50 percent had experienced sexual contact with foreigners of which 25 percent constituted tourists in Costa Rica for only a week or two.
Despite its reputation for lax enforcement of child protection laws, many wonder how it came to be that Costa Rica—a purportedly wholesome symbol of democratic values all too rare in Central America—should become a haven for Western sex tourists. Part of the answer lies in a 1999 UNICEF report titled Sexual Exploitation in Costa Rica: Analysis of the critical path to prostitution for boys, girls and adolescents. In it, UNICEF investigators detail the combination of social and economic factors that provide the conditions under which sex tourism flourishes. Based on interviews with 200 child sex trade workers, researchers determine that a high incidence of incest (80 per cent before their 12th birthday and a whopping estimated 35 percent among the general population) coupled with ‘patriarchy,’ poverty, illiteracy and the prevalence of single-parent homes provides a ‘pool’ of at risk children perfectly primed for exploitation.
Like many other Latin American countries, fully 41 percent of Costa Rican children are born into single-parent homes—usually headed by the mother. “Single parent homes means that there is usually a succession of ‘stepfathers’ for whom a child is just part of the marital-sexual package,” says Harris. “We've had cases of family members pimping their own children!” According to the Ministry of Tourism, Costa Rica received more than one million tourists last year that, for a country with a population of barely 4 million, makes it a principal form of revenue. The Director of the Judicial police, known as the OIJ, estimates that at least one half of one percent of these tourists are pedophiles who come looking for sex with children.
Like all of the NGOs and government bodies involved in law enforcement and child protection, the UNICEF also points to an increase in sex tourism but includes no numbers. “Sex tourism has increased among residents from countries where there are strong criminal sanctions against the sexual exploitation of children. These persons are attracted by the low cost and young age of these boys and girls, as well as by the impunity towards prostitution in Latin America and other Third World Countries.”
David Forester, an acknowledged sex tourist who has “absolutely never” had sex with a child agrees. According to the former plantation-owner and American expatriate, it was common practice for the local men to discuss amongst themselves which girls were targeted for sex. “They had about ten different terms to describe at what stage the girls were considered easy pickings,” he says. “They talked about which girls were ‘ripening’ and ready to be ‘plucked.’ Most of them were under 12 and many were close relatives. It was sickening.”
Says Sorenson: "the extent of the problem in this country has a lot to do with the culture in general. It is a patriarchal culture where women, children and weaker members of the family exist only to do the bidding of the father.” “There is a degree of cultural complicity in the practice of incest. It is a big secret within families. Added to this custom are the usual development issues of a third world country—widespread poverty, abandonment, dysfunctional families, rapid urbanization and exploding tourist trade and well, the pot only gets hotter.”
Nowhere is this more evident than in the port towns and resorts ringing Costa Rica's shoreline. In Jaco Beach, a grubby enclave of low-rent hotels and nondescript bars, well-fed ex-pats and tourists luxuriate in the fleeting illusion of wealth that is part and parcel of the developing world holiday experience. At the Entrada Discotheque, surfers, vacationing businessmen, Florida teenagers and the usual traveler's detritus of post-modern hippies and local ‘tour guides’ uneasily mingle in an atmosphere of congealed lust overlaid with mutual suspicion.
Enter Lucia, whose round face, barely discernable breast buds and scrawny hips form an anachronistic counterpoint to high heels, torn fishnet stockings and a dress so tight it advertises, rather than conceals, the young age of the body hidden beneath. Lucia is typical. Born to a single mother, her first taste of paternal interest came in the form of a stepfather who believed he was marrying not one, but two sexual partners. To whit, at the age of six, Maria was no longer a carefree child but just another damaged and violated little girl sacrificed on the alter of male sexual expediency. Asked when she began ‘working it’ (code for selling her body) Maria mumbles a barely audible “ten.”
What constitutes only 25 per cent of the child sex worker ‘clientele’ in San Jose skyrockets to the majority of sexual contacts in the port and resort towns of Puntas Arenas and Guancaste. Among child advocates the term is itself a misnomer. “The word ‘client,’ implies an equal exchange of goods for money,” says child advocate Thais Aguilar Zuniga, co-ordinator for Latin America's feminist news service Servicio de Noticias de la Mujer. “There is no equal exchange involving children. Most of them have been abused since day one and continue to be abused by these men. Today we call them for what they are—abusers.”
According to experts, widespread sexual tourism involving minors is also symptomatic of a consumer culture founded on the principals of instant gratification and the sense of entitlement that comes with any commercial transaction. The mere act of paying for something absolves the consumer of any responsibility to the purchased commodity—even if that commodity happens to be a child.
On the face of it, Costa Rica is a nation so thoroughly co-opted by its neighbour to the north that has effectively become a no man's land of transnational companies, office towers, auto dealers and anonymous strip malls filled with fast food joints whose only sop to ethnicity is that culinary paean to Latino-lite—the ubiquitous Taco Bell. In this tropical paradise whose only culture is the imported homogeneity of American capitalism, the sex tourist blends in seamlessly, anonymously and in relative safety.
“It is a culture of impunity and anonymity,” charges Harris. “Authorities look the other way while children are being abused, tortured, violated and even killed. Once they're in they have no choice. It is slavery pure and simple.”
Maria, for one, would certainly agree. Barely 14 years old and deeply in debt, she is, by any definition, a slave. Tricked with an offer to waitress in Costa Rica by a family acquaintance, Maria reluctantly left the desperation of her devastated post-Hurricane Mitch family shack in Tegucigalpa and headed out. She did not know she would be trafficked out of Honduras nor did she realize that she would be charged several hundred dollars for land transportation to San Jose. Once there, her new employers beat her into the understanding that she must pay-off her debt through sex. Do any of her customers know or care? “No way” says Harris. “Their sexual pleasure is more important than the security and safety of another human being.”
Law enforcement authorities in Canada concur—and are worried. A growing body of evidence suggests that the sexual exploitation of children by Canadian tourists is only one expression of an escalating behavioral pattern that eventually leads the predator back home. “If he is going to do it in another country then he will eventually do it at home as well,” says Vancouver police vice detective Oscar Ramos. Not every John is a child abuser or serial killer, but what we do know is that every serial killer or child abuser has at one time or another been a John. Theirs is an escalating pattern. Both serial killers and pedophiles typically ‘practice’ on prostitutes.”
Ramos and his partner Raymond Payette are sitting at a conference room at the Vancouver Police Station. Although unassumingly dressed in down vests and baseball caps, both men are considered pioneers in the field of child trafficking, prostitution and sex crimes. DISC—an acronym for Detect and Identify, Sex-trade Consumers—is an innovative strategy developed by both men three years ago utilizing an ingenious multi-pronged method of tracking sexual predators both in Canada and abroad. So successful is the program, that law enforcement agencies in both the United Kingdom and the US are seriously considering adopting the strategy. To date, more than 35 police agencies now rely on DISC to share information and track the activities of John, pimps and would-be predators. Their method, which utilizes information gleaned (via human intelligence, police reports and the internet) from five categories of people: Johns, pimps, sexually-exploited minors, sex trade workers and ‘special interest’ (i.e. Suspected pedophiles or sexual predators) runs into a stumbling block when dealing with offences occurring on foreign soil.
Under Bill C-27, the so-called child sex tourism law that was passed on May 26, 1997, Canadian citizens can be charged and convicted in Canada for sexual offences committed abroad. The law was crafted to apply to an exhaustive list of sex offenses—among them child prostitution, molestation, incest and child pornography—committed outside of Canada by citizens or legal residents. Moreover, the nationality of the victim has no bearing on the law’s application. Well and good, but the legislation contains one caveat that has thus far, prevented it from being successfully applied even once. According to the legislation, law enforcement authorities in the country where the offence occurred must invite Canadian authorities to undertake an investigation. Needless to say, many countries where sex tourism is rampant are less than eager to crack down on such a lucrative business. Moreover, what is illegal in Canada is not necessarily in other jurisdictions. Child welfare advocates—including Harris—point out that the provision in C-27 requiring another country’s intervention is unique to Canadian law.
“If 25 per cent of these people are tourists, and a proportion of them are Canadian then we should be able to apprehend them in Canada,” says Ramos. “It is all about progression—and its also about power and not sex—if there are doing these things in other countries they will do the same in Canada.”
Although Parliament is now considering revisions to C-27, such changes can’t come soon enough for the millions of children worldwide who are trapped into an abject existence of danger, drudgery and disease. For the thousands of children like Ivette Badilla however, any change in the implementation of much needed reforms will be too little too late. Her fate, and the fate of those just like her, can have only one end.
One a blustery winter night in January of last year Badilla's short sad life came to an abrupt close. Two months later her dismembered body parts were discovered scattered in and around San Jose. Just a few weeks later, her 16-year-old friend Jackeline—also a child prostitute—met a similar fate. Their killer has never been apprehended.