Women who left Venezuela for better lives end up in flesh trade: report

Bogota, Feb 11: The ongoing crisis in Venezuela doesn't just have political and economic impact but also a human one and it is on the women who left the troubled country in the lookout for a better life.

According to a report in CNN, educated and trained women who left their homeland over the past five years after Venezuela found itself in a serious economic crisis hoping that they would get to lead an honourable life found them eventually landing with something they had never thought in their nightmare: prostitution.

And they had no other way but to follow that path for the sake of their families and children.

"They (the women from Venezuela who left the country to go to neighbouring Colombia) speak with pain in their voices and sadness in their eyes. At first reserved, they eventually open up and tell, through tears, how they came to be in a situation that would once have been unimaginable: selling their bodies to make ends meet," the CNN report said.

Trained nurse gets into flesh trade for feeding family

The report told the story of Mariza (name changed), a certified nurse who went to Colombia two years ago leaving behind her mother and three kids in Venezuela.

With her professional training, Mariza had hoped that she would find a job in her own field but it wasn't so easy. After failing to get even a job of a cleaner, the woman took the path she had never thought about in her worst of dreams.

"To have one guy today and another person tomorrow," she was quoted as saying in the report about her fall into prostitution. But as a mother, "you don't think -- you do what you have to."

For Mariza, this experience is terribly disturbing because she spent five years of her life studying and preparing for nursing and then one fine morning, she finds herself in flesh trade. The woman was in tears as she narrated her story, the report added.

Mariza blames both Venezuela's former president Hugo Chavez and the current one, Nicolas Maduro, for the country's plight whereby people are deprived of their basic necessities.

She hence went to Cucuta, a city located near the Vemezuela-Colombia border but the high unemployment rate there meant she had very little chance of getting a job.

Over three million Venezuelans have left the country since 2014 with a million of them moving to Colombia.