Venezuelan exiles turn to prostitution to feed families

Back in Venezuela, they were teachers, police officers and newspaper carriers, but were forced to flee their homeland in search of work and money to survive.

But the women, without identity papers, ended up working as prostitutes in sordid bars in Colombia, saving all they can to provide for their families back home, still in the throes of economic crisis.

Mother-of-three Patricia, 30, was beaten, raped and sodomised by a drunken client -- but she keeps on working in a brothel in Calamar, in the center of the country.

"There are customers who treat you badly and that is horrible," she says.

"Every day, I pray to God that they are good (to us)."
Eventually, even those were confiscated, so Alegria made her way south to
This 35-year-old lost her job as a newspaper carrier in 2016 because "there was no more paper to print them."
Then, she said, the man she was due to marry "died of a heart attack due to a lack of medication."
Jhon Jaimes, an MDM psychologist, says the women suffer from "anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder."