Story No. Source: APTV. Socorro Gutierrez, her mother and a social worker leaving hospital. Socorro and her mother getting into the old bus where they live. Teenage prostitution is emerging as a major problem in Nicaragua. More and more underage girls are selling their bodies on the streets of this impoverished Central American nation. Many of the girls are forced into prostitution to help their parents make ends meet -- others to pay for their own drug habits.
In the second of a three-part series on Nicaragua's sex industry, APTV looks at how school age girls are being forced into a harsh adult world. A prostitute waits for clients on one of the main thoroughfares of the Nicaraguan capital Managua. Tough anti-inflationary measures by the government of Violeta Chamorro have produced extreme hardship in an already poor country.
Ever greater numbers of women are being forced to sell their bodies to survive. The ready availability of drugs like cocaine and marijuana have only aggravated the problem. Many of the prostitutes are of school age -- like year-old Socorro Gutierrez. Socorro spoke to APTV on the day she was discharged from hospital where she had undergone three months of treatment to cure her venereal disease.
She invited us back to the rusting Sandinista-era East German-built bus in which she makes her home. Socorro and her mother come from a growing sub-class in Nicaragua where drugs and prostitution go hand in hand.
I sniff glue with my friends, we go out stealing, we smoke drugs in the toilets of a bar called La Coca. And the men from the cars gave me money. It was meant to be for food but I spent it on marijuana, crack and glue.
