Plaza Botero

I saw prostitutes when I walked towards plaza Botero.

It was a rainy and warm day, the traffic was chaotic, market vendors calling out for pedestrians to come inside. The rain cutting through the city smog, rain seeping through the tight corridors between vendor tents in the middle of the street and the store buildings. Streets lined with the same products in every tent: Nike and adidas and new balance and gucci counterfeit shoes wrapped in plastic, row after row. The tents created ever more narrow alley ways between the already narrow streets, creating grids upon grids, fractals of market organization, of commodity, of replicated symbols of power, reducing the grotesque greed of the first world to $15 dollars a pair, like a child’s drawing that copies and yet crudely captures more than what refined eyes can see. 

Young women of all shapes and sizes and genders stand around at the entrance of bars and corners of streets, chatting and joking. At first I thought someone was having a party they were all dressed up like they were going clubbing. Were they waiting for the bus? They seemed happier than everyone else. Like they were having fun. 

But their exposed skin and bodies of all shapes made me remember where I am, and I realized they were the Medellín city sex workers.

They seemed so strong, so confident, so defiant, so unaffected by the other local men teasing and calling them. 

They waited in the rain, scanning the streets for the foreigners that were few and far between in the rainy off-season.

More concerned about the money that would or would not come, about marketing and soliciting.

Was marketing a science? I wondered about their world. There was a sharpness in their coquetry, the sharpness of survival. They were sharper than I could ever hope to be, not with all my courage and genius and words.

But that’s the philosophy that’s been forced upon the entire world. Simple and underestimated and devastating: 

Everything can be bought and sold, everything.