Served Cold

Revenge is a dish best served cold.  –  proverb of uncertain origin

I’m sure all of you remember the ridiculous “Secret Service prostitution scandal” of April 2012; a group of G-men who were sent to Cartagena, Colombia hired whores as such men nearly always do, and one of them made the mistake of thinking he could cheat his escort by denying her the agreed-upon fee.  Unfortunately for Agent Cheapskate (AKA Arthur Huntington), sex work happens to be legal in Colombia; the wronged lady, Dania Suarez, went to the cops, and there followed months of hand-wringing in which the Ruling Hypocrites pretended that fair and typical business transactions were themselves the problem, rather than government agents trying to turn such transactions into rape.  We were forced to endure the farce of government officials who frequently partake themselves  pretending that “this just is not part of our [institutional] culture” and insisting that they would make magical proclamations which would ensure that never again would even the lowliest government actor ever, ever pay for sex, as long as the Capitol building stands.

Well, the public forgot about it as soon as the media found something else unimportant to obsess about, but you can bet the White House didn’t.  Grudges do not merely dry up and blow away in Washington, so I’ve been waiting to see what sort of petty revenge the executive branch might choose to inflict on the sex workers of Cartagena; a recent cluster of articles would seem to be its harbingers, though I suspect the vengeance itself will be both worse and more long-lived.  The first was this one from two weeks ago:

As nearly two dozen Secret Service agents and members of the military were punished or fired following a 2012 prostitution scandal in Colombia, Obama administration officials repeatedly denied that anyone from the White House was involved.  But new details drawn from government documents and interviews show that senior White House aides were given information at the time suggesting that a prostitute was an overnight guest in the hotel room of a presidential advance-team member — yet that information was never…publicly acknowledged…the way the White House handled the scandal remains a sore point among rank-and-file members of the Secret Service more than two years later.  Former and current…agents said they are angry at the White House’s public insistence that none of its team members were involved and its private decision to not fully investigate one of its own — while their colleagues had their careers ruined or hampered…The agents were told that they jeopardized national security by drinking excessively and having contact with foreign nationals…

Some of you may have wondered why I didn’t mention this story in that week’s TW3 column; it was because I suspected there was more to come.  I didn’t have long to wait:

…a privately funded organization, Operation Underground Railroad, [executed] what they called Clear Hope; a mission that would prove to be the biggest child trafficking rescue operation in history.  One hundred and twenty-three children were saved [on October 11^th] in three simultaneous operations based in Colombia and resulted in the arrest of 15 perpetrators…

“Privately funded” means “we don’t need to tell you where we get our money”.  I’m sure the organization’s having been founded by a retired CIA agent has absolutely no bearing on that funding, or with the disturbing spectacle of a “private” organization working hand in glove with a US government agency to carry out operations in a foreign country:

A popular Colombian beauty queen was arrested this past weekend for her alleged role in a child prostitution ring aimed at foreign sex tourists.  The United States Immigration and Customs (ICE) led a joint operation, Cristal II, in cooperation with the Colombia’s Navy and Coast Guard to arrest 22-year old Kelly Johana Suárez Martínez Moyam and four others during a party attended by 25 minors, among others…An additional three were arrested in Armenia and four in Medellín for their involvement…The arrests took place…just a short boat ride from Cartagena…Undercover agents posed as foreign sex tourists to break up the child prostitution ring…Kelly Johana is not the typical ringleader for a child prostitution ring, but her credentials and her reputation…make her an effective recruiter of young girls and boys…

As regular readers know, the term “child prostitution” is a lie; actual children in the sex trade are very rare, and most so-called “child prostitutes” are 16 or 17.  Dr. Thaddeus Blanchette, who has studied sex work in neighboring Brazil for over a decade, has this to say about the subject:

…in ten years of work researching Rio de Janeiro’s brothels…I have not encountered a single child prostitute.  Frequent police raids on these establishments also generally come up a cropper.  There are a few cases, of course, but I can count them on the fingers of one hand, from over a ten year period.  Where, then, are these legions of child prostitutes?  If the police and I and my co-researcher, Dra. Ana Paula da Silva, can’t find more than a handful in all the hundreds of commercial sex venues in Rio de Janeiro…where are these kids?…

It’s true that Colombia is not Brazil, but they’re a lot more alike than, say, Colombia and Washington, DC.  So when cops and government bureaucrats report something that contradicts years of work by respected academics, you’ll have to forgive me if I ask for their proof.  And when the operatives involved just happen to work for a different division of the same government branch that was embarrassed by other members of the same industry in the same region of the same country, and the targeted individual just happens to share a surname with the sex worker at the center of the earlier scandal, don’t be too surprised if I assume that their real motivation is the execution of a vendetta.