Thousands of Venezuelan Women Remain Trapped in Colombia’s Sex Trade Following Maduro’s Capture

MEDELLÍN, Colombia — Lorena arrives at the coffee shop in a light blue top and jeans, appearing like any other young woman in her late twenties. Yet her life has been anything but ordinary. At 29, the Venezuela-born mother of two has spent the better part of a decade selling her body to foreign tourists in Parque Lleras, the upscale nightlife district of Medellin, Colombia, where Americans and Europeans gather in pursuit of pleasures both legal and otherwise.“I basically never have a period,” she tells The New York Sun, explaining how she uses drugs from local pharmacies and cotton tampons inserted deep enough that clients won’t notice. “I rarely take a break.”More than a month after United States forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a January 3 raid on Caracas, Lorena represents the human cost of a migration crisis displacing nearly eight million Venezuelans since 2014. While American officials urge Venezuelans to return home, interviews across Colombia reveal thousands of women and girls trapped in sexual exploitation. Economic desperation persists, and Mr. Maduro’s infrastructure of human suffering shows no signs of dismantling.“Since 2022, we have observed an upward trend in mass tourism involving sexual exploitation — both of adult women and children,” the regional director for the government body Migración Colombia at Medellín, Paola Salazar, tells the Sun. In 2025, Medellín’s José María Córdova Airport experienced 11 percent growth. Immigration officials say the airport accounts for nearly 70 percent of all inadmissible arrivals to the suspected sex tourism industry.“The vast majority are of United States and European nationality,” Salazar says. Officials conduct interviews at immigration filters, and when travelers give “incoherent, contradictory answers” or admit they’re seeking “bodies of women, children, or adolescents,” they can be denied entry, or deemed inadmissible.Colombia has increasingly relied on Angel Watch, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security system that alerts partner nations when American sex offenders travel abroad. The program played a key role in denying entry to 42 foreign nationals in 2024, according to migration officials. Those denied entry face lifetime bans. The agency did not respond to The Sun’s request for comment on specific 2025 inadmissible numbers.Between January 1 and February 5, 2026, Colombia registered an average of 54,350 Venezuelan entries and 54,629 exits per day — figures that remained stable even after Maduro’s capture.Lorena’s path to Parque Lleras began at Caracas, where her father’s repeated attempts at sexual abuse drove her from home. When her mother died from flu complications in 2016, she fled to Colombia, pregnant and desperate. She had an abortion at Medellín. Six years later, she had a daughter; two years after that, a son. Both fathers, Colombian men, have assumed no role or financial responsibility.During both pregnancies, Lorena continued working, hiding her belly from clients for as long as possible. During both pregnancies, she worked until her seventh month, she says, careful to conceal her condition so she wouldn’t lose income.“If it weren’t for my kids, I just wouldn’t do this,” she says. Lorena charges between 400,000 and 500,000 Colombian pesos per hour, roughly $100 to $125. On a good weekend, she has 10 clients. Most are English-speaking men between 45 and 60, she says, appearing to be businessmen.The work is dangerous. Lorena herself once fled naked from a hotel room when a drugged American client from Miami refused to use protection and became violent. Police arrested him, yet she doesn’t know what happened afterward. She stayed away from work for 20 days, terrified.Drugging clients to rob them is very common in Parque Lleras, Lorena explains, but she refuses to participate. One of her friends, a 17-year-old drug addict from Venezuela whose family rejected her, tried to drug a client. He realized what was happening, didn’t drink what she offered, and took revenge into his own hands. Two months after disappearing, police found the teenager’s body. The client had killed her and cut her to pieces, Lorena says. She believes the man was from California, but he left the country and was never caught.The youngest sex workers in Parque Lleras are 15 years old, Lorena surmises. The oldest are in their late 40s or 50s.The phenomenon is widespread and highly visible in Medellín’s densely populated areas. Young women congregate from the early hours of the morning until late at night, heavily made up and in very little clothing, many appearing painfully young and fragile. Sex work is legal in Colombia, but only for those over the age of 18. Policing the growing industry, however, is very difficult.The Trafficking InfrastructureVenezuelan lawyer César González, who works for the NGO Plan País, which has been operating in Colombia since 2023, describes a trafficking ecosystem that targets specific populations. Young women aged 15 to 25 are recruited for forced prostitution with promises of modeling careers. Young men are promised construction jobs with contracts. Women over 35 are offered household work. The most insidious scheme involves promising minors education.“Traffickers change the paperwork so suddenly they have another ‘father,’ and they’re legally tied to a family that isn’t their real family,” Mr. González tells the Sun. “They can’t run away and are used for forced work instead of going to school.”In Bogotá, 75 percent of known trafficking victims between 2016 and 2018 were Venezuelan, according to tracking data. The spike in migration corresponded with a 23 percent increase in identified trafficking victims from 2015 to 2019.The Documentation TrapWhile many others don’t turn to the sex trade, their lives are still deeply challenging. María, 33, stands behind a clothing stall at Medellín’s Plaza Botero. She has been in Colombia for five years, working 14-hour days, seven days a week as a street vendor. “If you just rest for one day, then it wouldn’t be enough,” she tells The Sun.Her children, ages three and 12, wait alone at home from 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. while she completes her shift. Before leaving Venezuela, she worked as a teacher’s assistant. Colombia’s Temporary Protection Statute, announced in February 2021, granted 10-year protection to Venezuelan migrants. Yet when the registration window closed in November 2023, it left hundreds of thousands of people without legal status or the means to get it. Those mechanisms require passports and identity cards, which are nearly impossible to obtain from Venezuela’s dysfunctional government.Ms. Salazar explains that safe-conduct documents issued to refugee applicants are often not accepted by employers or banks, leaving people in legal limbo for two to three years. An estimated 500,000 Venezuelans currently live in Colombia with irregular status.Despite Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s assertions that Venezuelans can “go home to a country that they love,” interviews provide little indication that displaced Venezuelans are preparing to return from Colombia.A spokesman for the opposition party Primera Justicia, Luis Bustos, who has lived in Colombia since 2017, says that the first days after Mr. Maduro’s arrest were marked by confusion and fear. “Maybe the first 10 days, it was like a taboo topic,” he tells the Sun. “No one would talk about it in public places.”Even now, nearly two months later, Venezuelans inside the country do not openly express joy about Mr. Maduro’s removal. “There’s a kind of secret joy, but you can’t shout it openly,” Mr. Bustos says. “Those who are being seen celebrating on the streets would be arrested.”Nothing has fundamentally changed economically, Venezuelan migrants note. The official currency is barely used. Food scarcity persists. Public services remain collapsed. “The situation is pretty much the same,” Mr. Bustos says. Meanwhile, the Colombian country coordinator for Maria Corina Machado’s Vente Venezuela opposition party, Mauricio Baquero, notes that most of the more than 1,000 political prisoners arrested before Mr. Maduro’s capture remain behind bars. “Currently, they have only released around 200,” he tells The Sun. “They try to make it seem like they’re releasing many people, but the truth is it’s not like that.”Just days ago, opposition leaders who attempted to demonstrate for their release were arrested within minutes by the acting government of Delcy Rodríguez.The Trump administration has indicated no immediate elections will be held in Venezuela. Mr. Baquero estimates elections could occur between 18 and 24 months from now. Realistically, he estimates, Venezuela needs at least five years to stabilize. “That’s a time we have to give ourselves for transition,” he says.Even those who once dreamed of returning are reconsidering their plans. Venezuelan community organizer in Bogotá, Alejandro Méndez Hernández, outlines the shift in thinking. “If you had asked me the day after they arrested Nicolás Maduro, I would have said, ‘Yeah, people will go back,’” Mr. Méndez tells The Sun. “But now, when you can see that maybe the decisions might be different, but it’s still the same people who have been in the government — that makes people think, ‘Is it smart to go back right now?’”Mr. Méndez came to Colombia in 2015, started a business with his wife, and now has three children attending Colombian schools. “After 10 years, I have settled down here,” he explains. For Venezuelans already settled in Colombia, the calculus of return has fundamentally changed. Armed collectives — civilian groups that historically acted as shock forces for the Chavista government — continue operating despite Mr. Maduro’s removal. “The collectives haven’t disappeared,” Mr. Baquero explains. “There are still important movements.”These groups establish improvised control points and conduct arbitrary detentions. The most powerful figure is the interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, with a $25 million United States bounty on his head. “While Diosdado is in power, there won’t be profound change,” Mr. Baquero says. “He has to be neutralized.”Inside Caracas, a 30-year-old teacher who asked only to be identified as Miguel tells the Sun that the situation is “calm,” yet surveillance on the streets seems to be increasing. “Eventually, there will be some sort of riot,” Miguel continues. “Venezuelans want real change.”Mr. González further highlights three trafficking operations: the Clan del Golfo cartel controlling the Darién Gap; the ELN rebels trafficking people to Europe; and smaller groups along the Colombia-Venezuela border.Venezuela’s most powerful criminal gang, El Tren de Aragua, has established particularly sophisticated operations. Gang members gain victims’ trust by housing them in daily-rate accommodations, providing food, and allowing them to incur debts. When victims cannot pay, the gang exploits them in sex trafficking. The gang allegedly marks women and girls behind their ears to prove ownership.Back in the coffee shop at Medellín, Lorena’s dreams are far simpler than escaping criminal networks. She wants for her children “to go to school, to study,” so hopefully they won’t have to go through what she’s going through.Her dream job, she says, is working as a cashier at a supermarket — an ordinary life where she doesn’t have to hide.For now, millions of displaced Venezuelans wait for a meaningful transition, economic recovery, and the collapse of criminal networks. They wait to see if removing one leader will dismantle 26 years of Chavismo.And women like Lorena, working Medellín’s tourist districts multiple nights a week, wait for something more fundamental: the ability to live without selling themselves to survive.“Everyone can leave if they want to,” Lorena says of women in her situation. “It’s not like there’s a rule. But there is economic depression that makes them stay.”The desperation pipeline that Maduro’s regime created over more than two decades in power delivers vulnerable people into exploitation even as he sits in a New York jail cell awaiting trial on narco-terrorism charges.“The head of the cartel has been removed. But the infrastructure? That will take years to dismantle,” Mr. Baquero says.

Thousands of Venezuelan Women Remain Trapped in Colombia’s Sex Trade Following Maduro’s Capture

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