Brazil Sex Trade

Brazil's sex trade: How the country's one million
prostitutes are preparing for the World Cup
The headlines say that the sex workers of Brazil are
preparing for the World Cup with English lessons and
credit-card facilities. But what is life really like in the
country’s licensed brothels? Ewan MacKenna reports from the
‘zonas’ of Belo Horizonte, where England will play their final
group match
More than 300 prostitutes have already signed up for the free
English classes
By EWAN MACKENNA
Friday 6 2014
According to the locals, it's the bar capital of the world, with
more than 12,000 catering for the five million citizens of
Brazil's third city. Others will recall Belo Horizonte as the
scene of England's most humiliating football defeat, when a
hearse driver and teacher from the US stunned the national
team at the 1950 World Cup. But if the 5,000 or so English
ticket holders expected here for England's final group game
against Costa Rica in a few weeks' time look a little more
closely, they may remember it for something else. As is the
case across Brazil, peer behind the mask and another reality
stares back at you.
In downtown Belo Horizonte are 23 brothels, known locally
as zonas. They are hidden up narrow staircases between
shops in the grim city centre, a place so grey, in parts, that
you could be in the old Soviet Union except for the scorching
sun above. Nearby, in an empty office on the top floor of a
shopping centre, a handful of the 2,000 or so prostitutes who
work the city are getting English classes from a volunteer in
order to cash in on the six matches the city's Mineirão
stadium will host (including one semi-final). All the while,
tucked away at the back of an indoor car-park, is Aprosmig –
a union for those within the industry in the state of Minas
Gerais (the name is a contraction of the "Minas Gerais
association of prostitutes"). "For sure [the city's prostitutes]
will get more money with the World Cup," says the
fiftysomething woman working the desk. "In the nightclubs
they'll be earning a lot. It's normal for foreign guys to look
for them, they always do, and now there'll be more foreign
guys. They'll do very well."
Inside, pasted to a grubby wall are erotic photographs and
charts of the body, notes about diseases, numbers for doctors
and timetables for psychology sessions. As the woman potters
about, she tells her story, a familiar narrative. Having
become pregnant and seen the factory she worked in shut
down, she took a job as a cleaner. But the family she worked
for put pressure on, insisting they should adopt her child,
and she felt she couldn't keep both job and baby, but neither
could she go hungry. There was one avenue to walk down. "I
prostituted when my child was sleeping," she sighs. "But it
was weird, lying there in a room as guys looked in your door
before deciding. I just remembered I had to bring food to my
house and I had to pay bills so there was no choice. But I
spent my life working in that room. I missed out on so
much."