And Colombian cops are insanely corrupt. Notoriously corrupt. I lived there for a few years, in bogota. There was an area nearby where I lived called “El Bronx,” where everyone knew what it was. A drug and prostitution den, where cops stayed away (i guarantee you that was due to bribes)…until they got off duty and went to score or fuck.

I was dating a Colombian girl who wanted to go down there and see what it was about, but I pushed back. Shortly after I left the country, I saw in the news that the place finally ended up getting raided and they found countless dead bodies and everything else you can imagine.

And in my time in the country, dudes going to a brothel to hang out and drink was…super common. I hated it, but I was dragged to one on multiple occasions without knowing where we were going. One time I was on a bunch of acid and had this dude we were hanging with yapping in my ear all night about what kind of shady shit goes on there, how they kill people who don’t pay, etc. Meanwhile, I’m nips deep in a heavy trip and had literally like $1.50 in my pocket that I didn’t tell anyone about until the morning when I could finally get out of there. I gave it to a cabbie and told him to get us as close to my house as he could.

You’re very right, corruption is rampant and the root cause of issues like this. I paid off cops on numerous occasions. It was literally expected. I literally paid the cops to give my drugs back. Insane. But after they’d shake me down, they’d always say what’s up when they passed. It’s a big, unwieldy problem, unfortunately.

This world’s pretty fucked up. I remember being disillusioned of socialism back in the day (still am) but shit like this makes me wish there was some magical better system than our shitty capitalism.

I mean there is something better than “shitty capitalism”. You can call it what you want, market socialism, social democracy, cool capitalism, but look to Norway for a pretty good example of what we could have:

2/3rd of Norway’s GDP is driven by the public sector, most of the hydropower is owned socially, trains are socially owned, 20% of housing is socially owned through housing coops, gigantic social wealth fund that could singlehandedly fund UBI from like half the returns it makes every year, they have almost 60% union density without a Ghent system like Sweden and Finland, very low income inequality, low on the hours worked per week by country list, high GDP per hour worked… I could go on.

And there’s more cool stuff like that in other countries around Europe too, Vienna’s approach to social housing, Italian and Spanish worker cooperatives, most of the electricity companies in Denmark being socially owned through cooperatives, 90% of Finland being a member in their grocery coops… like, there are so many examples of good things spread out everywhere - we just need the political will to do them more.

Its true, the world is pretty fucked up and maybe they would starve but that is still no excuse: they (sexual tourists) could use their money to help them, instead they choose to exploit them. The people that have sex with minors and prostitutes that are vulnerable/poor are pieces of shit humans beings. I am all in favor for legalizing prostitution, as long as its not exploiting vulnerable people.