Oldest Prostitution District in the Philippines

By Josephine Acosta Pasricha

I have to be a sexagenarian in order to be embedded in the oldest prostitution district in the country.

In my whole life of almost sixty years, twenty-five years of which were spent as a journalist, I have never really gone inside a red light district.

Of course, I have seen the famous red light district of Amsterdam, where the women are on display in glass display windows. But it is only from a safe distance. I have just been driven around the blocks in a car by a Dutch cousin-in-law and his wife.

I have seen the women for sale in the streets of Bangkok. But it is also from afar.

I have walked up and down Ermita in Manila, Pasay, even Makati, and seen the women of the night sitting or standing by the doorways of karaoke bars, massage parlors, cheap motels and hotels and other entertainment establishments. Again, from a distance.

In Kamagayan, Cebu, however, I have really gone inside the red light district with  field social workers. I have met and talked with the prostitutes and the pimps. I have seen the street watchers, some of whom are minors and the mama sans, some of whom are also sexagenarians. The only people I have not seen are the real owners and their politician protectors.                                                                    

The story of most prostitutes are the same, they are young, well-protected daughters of decent fathers, mostly poor farmers and fishermen in the smaller and farthest towns of our country. They have reached only grade or high school level. Very few are in college.  Most have run away from home, because of dire poverty, which by United Nations definition of poverty is a family, usually of five members, that earns only one dollar a day or even less. They are lured by promises of a recruiter to be given decent work as waitress or sales lady in the city. The family is usually promised a monthly salary of three thousand pesos and the first month's salary is given in advance to the family.

But you can establish a profile of the Filipino prostitute. When asked how old they are, they always say they are 18 to about 24. You look at their faces and bodies and many of them are minors. In fact, their ages really range from 14 up to 65. Sexagenarians are also in demand, although not as much as children in pre-puberty, whose sexual fluids are supposedly the fountain of youth.

They never tell you their real ages. Just as they never tell you where they come from and what are their real names. The names of the same persons even change every night. 

At the very outset, here are women living a life of lies, lying to and fighting with others and lying even to themselves. You look into their eyes, and you see hurt and the woundedness of Filipino women without a positive self image, without a sense of self worth and without self respect.  There is an identity crisis in each and every girl.

For who can accept such a sordid life in such a sordid profession?

Cebu is the oldest city in the country, the exact place where Portuguese navigator in the service of the Spanish crown, Ferdinand Magellan discovered the Philippines for the West. Mactan is where Lapulapu killed Magellan when he got involved in the rivalry between two native chieftains on April 27, 1521. Cebu is where the cross of Christianity was first planted and the Statue of the Santo Nino was given to the wife of Rajah Humabon, Hara Amihan, who was baptized and named Queen Juana.

And yet Baranggay Kamagayan in Cebu, is the oldest red light district in the Philippines.

Archival records speak of Kamagayan district as early as 1906. Periodical records report it as a prostitution district as early as 1920. And it is plausible, because most prostitution districts in the world, from ancient Greece up to today, are located at the piers or at the end of the train line. And Kamagayan used to be the end of the train stations.

Baranggay Kamagayan, which has a baranggay center and even a health center that displays prominently information on HIV AIDS and STD diseases, is composed of three blocks, bordered by the streets of Junquera, P. del Rosario, Jakosalem and Sanciangco.  Junquera has been known as the street of prostitution as early as 1920.

Junquera is a one way street, but at night, taxis and cars can go against the traffic into the baranggay.

Demographically speaking there are about 42 casas or brothels, or prostitution dens here, with about 42 mamasans or den mothers. As of today, they have gone down to 35. They are called Ate by the girls, older women oftentimes dressed in dusters and playing cards through the night, or simply sitting around with fans in their hands.

There are about 60 to 80 pimps in one night, those who negotiate with the men for the girls. There are certain rules to follow in the negotiation.  When a foreigner arrives in Cebu, the taxi driver may ask if the foreigner needs a girl for a night. If the guest agrees, he is brought into Kamagayan, really a slum or squatter area in the same taxi. The pimps cover the four streets, together with street watchers. The first pimp that the guest or taxi driver talks to owns the negotiation. So the pimps do not fight over the same commercial transactions.

The girls sit on plastic monobloc benches strewn all over the baranggay, in street corners, in front of houses or casas, and in the small unpaved plaza. I also sat on one of those plastic monobloc chairs, which is really a child’s chair!

When the taxi enters the small plaza clearing, the girls line up. There can be ten to twenty, or fifty to seventy girls in the choral line up. On heavy days, there can be two hundred fifty girls in many different line up. The cheaper girls are in the entry points of the baranggay. The more beautiful ones, the more expensive ones are inside the depths of the baranggay.

The headlights of the taxi flood over the girls in the line-up. Then the customer, inside the taxi, chooses his girl. The girl may go with the customer to his pension house, motel, five star hotel, beach resort, or rent any of the casa rooms or cubicles in the baranggay.

In a place called City Center, which is actually a market during the day, but turned into a prostitution house for the night, there are cubicles for rent for only twenty to thirty pesos short time. The cubicles are as small as a confessional box, with only a single mattress on the muddy floor, and the walls are made of thin unpainted plywood. You can hear whatever is happening inside.

The cubicle is the most nauseating sight that an advocate for women’s rights and against child abuses could ever see. Even I have never felt the same revulsion, when I saw the ancient excavated prostitution houses in Pompeii, Italy, with pornographic paintings on the walls, and chairs and beds based on stone.

How is RA 9262, the Law Against Violence of Women and Child Abuse, or R.A. 9208, the Law Against Trafficking of Women and Children applying in this case? The Philippines has 500,000 prostitutes in the whole country according to conservative estimate. 

Nobody knows about R.A. 9208 among the girls. They imagine it as 69. They think that they are the most beautiful girls, from head to toes, and they even have the most beautiful female organ, said straight in the local dialect.

On ordinary days, there are 100, 300 to 500 prostitutes here in Cebu. One girl can cost from three hundred to five hundred pesos. But their cost can go down to a measly fifty pesos to one hundred pesos. The first class prostitutes, who in fact do not sit here or join the line, cost about fifteen thousand to seventy thousand pesos.

The official share of this payment from fifty pesos to five hundred pesos is twenty-five percent for the girl, twenty five percent for the pimp, and fifty percent for the mamasan.

The girls do not get their payment in cash, though. It is listed on paper, and used as debt payment for the food, lodging, clothing, make-up, medicine or even drugs that the girls are given. It is worse than five-six. If the girl has no customer, she is not given food. There are many days, when the girls complain that they have not eaten the whole day.

The girls are also forbidden to talk to strangers, even to the customers, and especially to social workers. They are fined when they are caught talking to strangers. The fine is charged against their earning.

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?