The Michigan Boys have been coming to Costa Rica every year for 11 years – for sex. This is an organization of firemen and policeman from Detroit who charter a plane and take over the town of Flamingo on the Pacific Ocean. Flamingo welcomes them (and their dollars) with open arms – and the whores who flocked to town welcomed them with open legs, for $100 to $300 each.
But this year they had a secret visitor: reporter Steve Wilson from ABC, complete with helicopters for the overhead shots and lots of hidden microphones. ABC got a nice, juicy story, just the right kind of thing to air on American TV.
In Costa Rica, it barely got attention in the newspapers. Ticos are used to seeing ugly old Americans come down to meet their hot-blooded Ticas. I see them every time I go downtown to San Jose, I can spot them a mile off: unhappy, miserable souls who are totally taken in by the local sex experts. I’m reminded of a remark made by a European woman in Thailand about the way their men gobbled up the whores: “It’s enough to make you ashamed of the human race.”
You can’t blame the girls, they have children to support. Every woman over 15 down here has kids, usually without a husband. They have to make money while they still can. Prostitution is legal, the cops just check their IDs to make sure they are over 18. If they are not citizens of Costa Rica (as many of them aren’t) they get deported. Costa Rica is protecting one of it’s national assets – at the same time as the Ministry of Tourism makes noises about the undesirability of this kind of business.
I appreciate your concern regarding sexual tourism and exploitation in Costa Rica. Your brief article, however, is prone to exaggeration. Every day of this week, there have been articles in La Nacion (Costa Rica's most popular newspaper), including a cover-page story, on the Michigan Boys and their criminal acts. Your comment of it receiving little attention in Costa Rica, then, seems misplaced.
Also, the statement of every woman over 15 having kids here is a tragic exaggeration. It is genearlizations such as this which lead Americans to believe that other cultures and countries are easily summed up in a sentence or two. Despite your good intentions, your comments are about as misplaced as those of both Bush and Bin Laden when they divide the world into two: good and evil.
Derek Congram
San Jose
Posted by: Derek Congram | May 15, 2004 at 08:53 PM
Your immediate assumption that 'prostitution' is bad is a silly value judgement that thousands of years and countless variations in cultures would argue is, at best, misplaced.
That aside, what do you think Las Vegas is? Or Paris? Or Bangkok, or Rio, or any of hundreds of other places in the world that do not practice American Puritanism?
Costa Rica is a forward thinking country that realizes that humans have a right to use their bodies in most any way we want as long as it does not harm others. Selling your body to Faceless Corporation to sit typing all day is a kind of prostitution too.
When you get rid of your preconceptions about sex as something 'evil', and recognize it is basically a couple of people rubbing on one another, then maybe you can come closer to some kind of sanity on this issue.
For the record, I support normal ages of consent and respect them. Men and women have rights to do what they want, and salacious News whores who want to peddle the "I'm shocked, shocked." stance are much worse.
Someone around here should just grow up.
Posted by: Bob | May 23, 2004 at 04:38 PM
For the women in costa rica that sell themselves. Most can buy houses and send there children to fine schools. If you live in California you must know that San Jose California has 20 men to every women and that Orange county is second in that race.So you live in California you are #1 in sales for your company, you make 5 times the money your nieghbor makes, you drive a Porsche convertible
your 56 years old and in good shape and you have to beg a women to have sex with you. ( Life Is a Bitch and then You Die )= So I travel to San Jose Costa Rica I have 5 girlfriends and I am still $$$$ ahead of the alamony payments that I would be paying in California. Do the math.
I will retire in this paradice. Amenn
Jack
Posted by: JACK | August 27, 2004 at 01:20 PM
most of the prostitutes in costa rica aren't even costa rican they are colombian.
Posted by: c | January 06, 2009 at 09:29 AM
Anyone that does not like Costa Rica, does not like living itself.
CJD
Posted by: CJD | July 02, 2009 at 01:45 AM