Kamagayan, Cebu - Part 2

Today is Part II of Kamagayan - the notorious red light distict here in Cebu.
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Kamagayan is busy from eight thirty in the evening up to four thirty at dawn. Ironically, it is at dawn that the manangs of Cebu walk in a procession praying the rosary in Junquera street.

Traffic is heavy on certain days, especially paydays on the fifteenth and last day of the month, and when there is a convention in Cebu. Even charismatic conventions, interdenominational and all kinds of religion is no exemption

Most of the clients are construction workers in the lower bracket, teenage students, unfaithful husbands, businessmen, and foreigners in the upper bracket of the economic ladder. Most are male clients, but there can also be female customers.

The heaviest traffic is when American troops go on rest and recreation in Cebu. Then casas all over the country also congregate here. And they can buy whole casas from Luzon, or Visayas, or Mindanao and transport them over here

The Cinderella dream of each prostitute, like Pretty Woman, is to be rescued from this dungeon in a tower, by a knight in shining armor, preferably rich and handsome as Richard Gere. Some foreigners get them as live-in partners and promise them marriage To have a live-in prostitute is cheaper than to get a girl every night. For the customer pays only for food and gifts for the girl. But when the girl gets pregnant, she is sent out of the customer’s house, and even beaten up sometimes.

A fourteen or seventeen-year-old girl had already died, beaten up and stabbed by her customer in the casa. The tragedy lies not just on the meaninglessness of her death. But the fact that nobody knows her real name and where she comes from. Her relatives do not know what really happened to her and so she is buried incognito.

As I write this, I put to risk the lives of the girls, the social workers and even myself and my fearless editors. Because the knee jerk reaction of government after such a hard-hitting expose as this is to raid the red light district and imprison the girls and the pimps for vagrancy. The under the table fine is one hundred pesos. The real fine is one thousand pesos per girl. Never have they caught any owner or a prostitution lord. Never have they caught a client in the act.

The girls may be abused by their casa owners and even the police.

The girls will have no business for a few weeks and no food to eat.

Kamagayan, the red light district will be quiet.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo suggests the transfer of the Department of Tourism to Cebu. There are many direct flights to and from Cebu and other foreign countries. A proportion of any flight manifest from Manila consists of male foreigners and Filipino girls flying together on a three day vacation, but they are not related to each other. Nobody does a Julia Robert’s act here, pretending to be a niece of the companion.

In bus stations of well known sources of recruitment, a male/female recruiter usually travels with five minors, none of them his or her relatives. The children are also not related to each other. How do you stop them? Can you make a citizen’s arrest for intention to commit the crime of trafficking? What if they answer that they are just going on a field trip?

What is the country trying to sell?

Tourism or a pound of flesh?