Young virgins being auctioned off to top bidders in Colombia, mostly to foreign tourists...

The city that the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar made his personal fiefdom in the 1980s has gone through a major public image overhaul in the past decade. Murders, drug trafficking and kidnappings have plummeted in Medellín as upscale shopping malls, a new transit system and tourism have flourished in the “city of the eternal spring.”

While the city has enjoyed a renaissance of late, some of the nasty vestiges of the bad, old days still remain.

Up on the city’s sprawling hillside slums, street gangs that sprung up in the wake of Escobar’s death are luring young girls, most between 10 and 15, into a vicious business where their virginity is auctioned off to the highest bidder – mostly drug barons and foreign sex tourists.

“They start drawing them in with perks from a culture of high consumerism,” Luís Pardo, Director of NGO Corporacion Consultoria de Conflicto Urabano (C3) told the Independent newspaper. “They offer them brand-name clothes, trips to luxury restaurants, top of the range whisky and cocaine, and the girls end up as part of this network.” Full story...

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