When The Meninas Came To Town

Once a month, Paula goes out into the night to find her husband, to show him that she knows he is not just playing cards as he claims. Since she does not have a car, she gathers her baby daughter in her arms and carries her through the streets of Bragança, a remote mountain town in northeast Portugal, stopping at one brothel and strip club after another, sometimes until dawn. Paula marches under the high stone walls of Bragança’s medieval castle and along winding roads into the hills to reach the clubs, where neon signs cast a pink glow on the cars belonging to the men of Bragança. “Some of the places I have walked, if you knew, you would say I am crazy,” says Paula, who spoke on the condition that her real name not be used. Once she spots her husband’s car, she waits. She glares at the brothel door, daring him to come out, imagining him inside with what she calls the “bitches and whores” — some of the 300 or so Brazilian prostitutes who have moved into Bragança in the past few years. But when he finally stumbles out the door, all she can do is stare at him. She cannot find the words. He looks back, and then he gets into his car and leaves.

Bragança’s meninas brasileiras, or Brazilian girls, are part of the estimated $50 billion global sex trade that profits from the hundreds of thousands of women transported across national borders by human traffickers — often through coercion, sometimes willingly — to be sold or rented on the other side. A tiny fraction have found their way to Bragança, a town of 27,600 tucked into the corner of Portugal’s isolated Trás-os-Montes (beyond the mountains) region. But there’s nothing small or insignificant about the effect the meninas have had on the town, which for 800 years was known mostly for its storybook castle, complete with a “Princess Tower” where at least one heartbroken maiden is said to have jumped to her death. As Paula and an activist band of other wives see it, the meninas have invaded and degraded their town. To explain the hold these Brazilian women have over their husbands, the wives tell themselves stories, accusing the prostitutes of using drugs and even witchcraft to seduce the men. “The men are the most guilty, but the meninas are the most dirty,” says Paula. And earlier this year, as seven strip clubs and countless private brothels opened in Bragança, the wives decided to fight back.In May, they drew up a manifesto and brought their grievances to the mayor and the police chief, calling for a “war on prostitution.” Over the summer, there was a flurry of action — official statements, police raids, camera crews. The spotlight on Bragança widened to include neighboring villages, where locals suddenly felt emboldened to complain that their children couldn’t sleep at night because of the noise in the street, and violence has been on the rise — including a case in which a jealous wife is said to have beaten up a prostitute.

Now it’s becoming clear that the Brazilian women are not leaving Bragança. Like cities and towns all over Europe, Bragança has been snapped into place like a Lego town, becoming one stop along the endless networks of migrant prostitutes and the men who move them. The only difference is that in Bragança, which could not be reached by major highway until the 1990s, the recent appearance of hundreds of young, dark, tightly dressed and extremely available meninas was harder to ignore. People would have tried to look the other way, but Paula and her small crew of wives dragged the mess out into the town square. And so everyone was forced to talk about what happened here — about the dozens of unexpected ways that Bragança has been altered by its own small piece of the global trade in human beings.

On a warm September night at the top model disco, Bragança’s teachers, construction workers and students sit on stools and couches and drink. They are watching eight pretty young Brazilian women take turns dancing with a pole on a makeshift stage, twirling and arching under the low colored lights. In between dances, the women talk to them; they tell jokes and giggle and don’t mind if the men touch their hair. “We come to see friends, to drink and to watch the girls,” says Georges, who, like his father, is a regular. And 90% of the younger men also come to choose a woman to have sex with after they leave, Georges says. “It is discreet, anonymous. It is one night.”

At this early hour, just before midnight, the women could be mistaken for college girls — tight black clothing, skirts hiked up, eyes bright. Later they will take their clothes off for money and leave with men for more money. But now, they are singing along to Brazilian pop under red lights, and they are laughing and seem happy. Anita, 25, is one of the veterans; she arrived a whole two months ago. In July, she tells me, she kissed her crying mother goodbye and boarded a plane out of Brazil to Paris (where there is said to be less scrutiny of Brazilian “tourists”). She knew full well she would be working as a prostitute. In Paris, she was met by her new boss, Top Model owner Manuel Podence, who had paid for her flight and would drive her to Bragança to work at his club. And to her great relief, she says, he was very kind. (Other Top Model employees agree.) That first night, Podence showed her and a few other new arrivals the shining monuments of Paris, lit up as in the movies. “It was splendid,” she says now, sitting on a sofa at Top Model, Jennifer Lopez’s Jenny From the Block blaring in the background.

Anita has a sweet smile and brown doe eyes underlined with pencil. She is wearing a blue miniskirt and beige sandals with straps that crisscross up to her knees. Like many of the other Top Model girls, she is not glamorous, but she is pretty and approachable. Her long brown hair has been carefully highlighted and brushed. She is warm and affectionate, touching your hand to make a point, eager to please. All the qualities of a successful prostitute.

After the Eiffel Tower, Anita drove with Podence to Bragança. “I thought it looked so big,” she says now, smiling at her own naiveté. To the rest of Portugal, Bragança has always been known as a little backward. The town’s importance peaked in the 15th century, when it was a fiefdom of the powerful dukes of Bragança, who left the place but went on to rule Portugal from 1640 to 1910. Through it all, the fortress and surrounding mountains protected Bragança from invaders, preserving its traditions and separateness. Today, there is no industry to speak of, the primary occupation is farming, and the invaders work in the town’s booming “nightlife” industry.

Anita heard about Podence and the Top Model club through a friend of hers who had already left Brazil for Bragança. Anita decided to follow her “because of poverty,” she says. Back home in Rio de Janiero, she worked at a shopping mall and took classes in “tourism.” She earned ?100 a month. Now she earns that in a slow night. When Anita arrived, she owed Podence ?2,700 for her airfare, Paris hotel and transportation to Portugal (she says the airfare itself cost ?800). For many immigrant prostitutes, this debt is a yoke that binds for years. But Anita says she paid it off in 20 days. At Top Model, men pay j30 to have a drink with her, ?20 of which she gets to keep. For ?70, she will perform a table dance. After her shift ends at 5 a.m., she leaves with anyone willing to pay a minimum of ?250 to spend what’s left of the night with her in a hotel.

Not all women who come from Brazil are so willing or well-informed, of course. “A lot of girls were not told they would be prostitutes when they agreed to come,” says Silvia Costa, a doctor at the local medical center, which regularly treats prostitutes. It is an old trick. Lorena Ramos came 10 years ago, well before the boom. She had answered a newspaper ad to be a waitress, she says. Her new boss picked her up from the airport and took her back to an apartment divided up by mattresses. Ramos eventually ran away and turned the man in to the authorities. She now works in a veterinarian’s office in Bragança and reads tarot cards for people in her free time. The surge of Brazilian women on the streets “makes me very sad,” she says. “They go around in big groups. There are a lot of complaints from society ladies. They feel uncomfortable.”

The U.N. describes trafficking as recruiting or transferring human beings into exploitative situations through force or other forms of coercion or deception — or through “the abuse of a position of vulnerability.” Anita doesn’t consider herself exploited. Some advocates would argue, however, that her economic desperation, her lack of options, made the job offer inherently coercive. Many other cases occupy an even grayer zone. Like Anita, Vanilsa Aparecida Santana da Silva came to Portugal “for a better life,” knowing she would be a prostitute. Seven months ago, when da Silva arrived in Moimenta da Beira, a town 170 km southwest of Bragança, her brothel owner took her passport and return ticket. And half an hour after her arrival, her first client was waiting for her — the father of the brothel’s owner, a house tradition for new prostitutes. Da Silva was told she could not spend more than 20 minutes with each client, or risk losing her share of the money. Before she came, the owner had promised da Silva that if she gave him the names and numbers of five friends back in Brazil, he would lower her ?3,000 debt by ?1,000. He reneged on his side of the deal after she gave the names, she claims.

“I’m not against prostitution. I am against being lied to,” da Silva says. After one week, da Silva, who used to lead a union for rodeo riders back in Brazil, launched a sit-in. For three days, she refused to leave her room and loudly demanded her passport. Finally, the owner threw her into the street — and her passport, too. She is now living in Chaves, 60 km west of Bragança, trying to find a way to bring her two children over from Brazil and become legal. “The girls who become prostitutes do it because they have their necks in a noose,” she says. “If the owners of factories and businesses would pay for our way here, we would do other jobs.”

At Bragança’s health clinic, the prostitutes do not come in with stereotypical concerns — fears of aids, for example. Most of the women insist their customers use condoms, says Costa. But, she says, they complain of other, chronic kinds of pain. “They have psychological problems, especially anxiety. They worry they won’t be able to become mothers one day because of diseases,” she says. They talk of headaches, insomnia and “imaginary” maladies. “They aren’t at peace with themselves,” she says.The prostitutes are always in motion. They float from one disco to another. They leave Portugal when their three-month “tourist” stay is up, then re-enter later from Spain. It is a nomadic life, punctuated by violence, police interrogations and, sometimes, deportation orders. But while it lasts, many of the women are able to send fistfuls of cash to their children and parents in Brazil. As da Silva says, “Prostitution is not easy money. It is fast money.”

But Anita, for one, says she has found what she came for. She sends money home to her mother, who she says knows her daughter is an artista da noite, as the Brazilians say. Recently, she was able to move out of the apartment Podence keeps for his new dancers and into her own place. “I have my tax number, my bank account. I am normal.” Anita has only one month left as a “tourist” in Portugal. But she says she does not know if she wants to go back to Brazil. She has friends here now. “I came here of my own free will,” she says. In the background, one of her fellow dancers is wrapped around the pole, completely nude save for a white bridal veil.

Three years ago, this club was a casa fado — a house of Portugal’s traditional, mournful fado music, a sort of blues-opera hybrid that weaves together vocals and string instruments. Then, about two years ago, the meninas brasileiras began to arrive in droves, lured by the common language and Bragança’s proximity to the Spanish border. Soon Top Model and six other clubs opened up, becoming the town’s most profitable enterprises.

One of them, a strip club called Montelomeu, opened up last year on the edge of the town’s nature sanctuary, its red neon sign lighting the hillside like a carnival. Montelomeu, “M.L.” for short, had an unusual feature: three dozen bedrooms ringing the dance floor. Soon it was pulling in hundreds of local men every night. A half an hour in a bedroom costs ?30, according to Portuguese media accounts. At the peak of the fever, M.L. even sponsored the local football club. “Nobody could imagine that this could happen here,” says Bragança’s mayor, Jorge Nunes, sitting in his office beneath an oil painting of the castle. “But there are lots of activities that people just learn to live with.”

The meninas made themselves more noticeable in Bragança by sticking together. They bought their groceries and got their hair done together, always together, often gripping mobile phones and giggling like schoolgirls. Some were overweight, but the majority looked young and healthy and wore slightly sexier clothing than the traditional Portuguese women. “It caused people to talk,” remembers Helena Fidalgo, a local reporter for LUSA, Portugal’s national news agency. “I would go into a shop and the shopkeeper would look out the window and say, ‘Oh, here come the girls.'” Shortly afterward, Fidalgo noticed a neighbor’s wife move out and, the next day, a young menina move in. She asked the police chief if any of this was illegal. But he just laughed, she says. “I had nothing to write about.”

In some ways, the meninas were a boon to Bragança, as one service sector fueled others — from beauty salons to taxicabs to Chinese restaurants. “In the times of vacas gordas [fat cows, or during the heyday], they used to come 17 and 18 a day, and sometimes they had to stand in line,” says Ana, a hairdresser in Bragança. Which is not to say everyone welcomes the meninas, especially the ones who are black. “I’m not racist,” Ana says. “But there are many hairdressers who are. They refuse to receive them in their shops.”

Iwould not trade my hometown for anything in the world,” says Podence, owner of Top Model — and perhaps Bragança’s biggest booster after the mayor. Podence, 37, wears red Puma sneakers, jeans and a gold cross. He slouches across town smoking Marlboros, shaking hands with police officers and kissing meninas on the cheek. He is the quintessential southern European businessman — making the work look incidental, never rushing a drink. But Podence is at Top Model seven nights a week until 5 a.m., chatting with the clients, cueing the pole dances, watching everything.

Over a dinner of wild boar and pig’s ears, Podence makes no apologies for what he does. As he sees it, he runs a nightclub where people have a good time. “After work, the women can go wherever they want. But I know they’re not going for free,” he says smiling. Podence helps arrange hotel reservations for clients. And he loans the women money to get from Brazil to Bragança. But it is the market that drives the trade, he says without sentiment: “It is like an anthill — one woman comes here and everyone follows.”

As for the men who spend money they don’t have on these women, and the families that suffer because of that, Podence is a realist. “There are hundreds of marriages that break up, and it’s not just because of Brazilian women,” he says. Married men buy sex because there is something missing at home, he says, and not just in the bedroom — a theory echoed by many of the prostitutes. Recently, a man paid j150 for three bottles of champagne and a long talk with Anita. “And he didn’t even touch me!” she says. Another man called her repeatedly from his business trip in Germany, relaying stories from his day. “I said, ‘Why don’t you call your wife?’ He said, ‘Well, she doesn’t listen to me.'” The meninas, says Podence, “are like psychologists. They listen to these guys. And these guys tell them things they don’t even tell their lawyers.”

One day last spring, the wife of one of Podence’s customers showed up at his club and demanded to know which woman her husband was seeing. “‘What does she do that I don’t?'” Podence says she wanted to know. “I felt I had to be very blunt,” he says. “First of all, you weigh 15 kilos more than she does. Second of all, these women will do anything for money.” He blames the “conservative Portuguese” wives for forcing the husbands to go elsewhere — and a surprising number of his countrymen seem to agree with him. “In marriage, women see themselves almost exclusively as mothers rather than wives,” says Marília Neres, spokeswoman for the Portuguese Department for Foreign Immigration and Frontiers. “The women forget that they should also be good wives and companions.”

Even Ramos, who says she was tricked into becoming a prostitute 10 years ago, is reluctant to condemn the johns for creating demand. Sitting at a café on a sunny afternoon, Ramos talks about prostitution less as an industry and more as a natural phenomenon. “Before marrying, women make themselves attractive to men. Then they let themselves go. Time is scarce; people worry about finances; kids arrive,” she explains in the patient voice one might use to relay a recipe for soup. “The men have a macho, Latin mentality. They have to feel they can conquer other women. And Brazilians — it’s true — are very exotic, very sensual. It’s no one’s fault,” she says, just the logical result of a modern Latin culture bumping up against a traditional, European one, the old colony coming home.

The wives, then, do not even enjoy the thin righteousness of victimhood. No one is very interested in how their husbands “let themselves go” after marriage, or whether the wives are sexually and emotionally satisfied. So rage is layered upon jealousy, which is layered upon sadness. And that is not a sustainable combination, as a student of male-female relationships like Podence should have known. “Of all the places I have been, Bragança is the only paradise,” he says, sipping his port, “except for four old hags who are going to ruin that for me.”

Paula is a large woman with a wide smile and fierce eyes. She is not the type to be shamed into silence. One day last year, she ran into Maria, another Bragança wife, on the street. (Both women have requested their real names be withheld.) They started talking, and Paula asked her, ever so delicately: “Does your husband run around with those bitches?” Maria said yes, and they agreed to meet at a café later. They shared parallel stories — of husbands who came home later and later with increasingly dubious excuses, of money that leaked away inexplicably, of women’s names programmed into their spouses’ cell phones. “I used to always have to tell my husband to change his shirt, that it was dirty,” says Maria, an attractive, petite woman with dark, deep-set eyes and a soft voice. “And he’d say, ‘Oh, I’m fine like this.’ Now, he changes his shirt all the time.”

For a long time, says Paula, “I was stupid. My eyes were closed.” Now that her eyes are open, there is precious little that Paula does not see. “I know where these whores live. I can take you there at 9:30 at night and four of them will come out and taxicabs will take them to M.L.,” she says. What she does not see, she hears about. “Even if I don’t know the secrets of my husband, people come and tell me,” she says. “What he did to me in my life, I could kill him.”

“I think they give the men drugs,” Paula continues. “He used to work day and night. Sometimes we had arguments, but then it passed.” If not drugs, then maybe witchcraft; some Brazilian immigrants are known to practice magic. They put flowers at crossroads to win men’s hearts and the names of their enemies on the soles of their shoes. So some Portuguese wives have tried counterspells, going to witch doctors to have their husbands cleansed.

Men around here have been using prostitutes forever, though they used to travel farther to find them. What’s changed — in addition to the meninas‘ arrival — is the attitude of the wives. “It has always been considered correct to have an arranjo [kept woman],” says José Lopes, a psychology professor at the University of Trás-os-Montes. “In the mountains, the [wives] still walk behind the men, burdened down with loads on their heads.” The wives tolerated the cheating because they had no choice. But thanks to television and better job opportunities for women, this is changing, he says. “Women have got more autonomy.”

Eventually, Paula, Maria and two other Bragança wives decided to go above their husbands’ heads. “Our lives are already buggered. These women must not bugger anyone else’s lives,” Paula says. They produced a manifesto: “It is not a time for indifference and adjustment, but rather a time to fight, fight for a town with more dignity where it is possible to breathe in peace,” they wrote. And then, ominously: “We wish to avoid taking justice into our hands, but if we are obliged to, we won’t turn aside.” They signed it “the Maes [mothers] of Bragança.”

Last May, they took the manifesto, along with several hundred signatures, marched to the Bragança police station and demanded to see the chief. “They just arrived and said their husbands are spending all the money with the Brazilians,” remembers the chief, António Magalhaes de Oliveira. “I told them I would look into it.”

Prostitution used to be legal in Portugal. Between the 1940s and 1970s, especially under the suffocating dictatorship of Ant�nio de Oliveira Salazar, brothels were permitted. But the women were under constant police surveillance and their bosses kept 90% of their earnings, according to VISAO magazine, the Portuguese weekly. Today, prostitution dwells in a messy netherworld. “It’s not permitted but it’s not prohibited,” says Ana Maria Rodrigues, Bragança’s deputy police chief. Forcing or tricking women into prostitution is illegal, as is “pimping,” or facilitating prostitution. But these are hard crimes to prove. Any arrests that do get made usually stem from the women’s immigration violations.

In other words, “In Portugal, there is no such thing as prostitution,” says chief Oliviera in his office in September. The meninas do not sound like a priority. “It’s the wives’ problems to solve with their husbands, not the problem of police,” he says. “It’s an emotional problem, not a social problem.” The wives, he says laughing, “better start making themselves more interesting to their husbands!”

After getting no satisfaction from the police department, Paula and the others went down the street to the mayor’s office. “I told them that family differences can happen for a multitude of reasons,” remembers Nunes, a very calm man. This is a parable about globalization, he says, about the increasingly seamless exploitation of desperate people. But it is at the same time “an ancient situation,” he says, “about relations between men and women.”

Had the women stopped there, that would have been the end of it: a couple of startled officials and a nice walk. But then the maes went to the media. Fidalgo, the news agency reporter, wrote the first story on April 30. And suddenly everyone wanted to hear from the maes. THE MEN OF BRAGANCA HAVE LOST THEIR HEADS, announced Jornal de Notícias, a Lisbon daily. But most of the coverage ridiculed the maes. The weekly Expresso quoted one disco owner summing up a common theory: “The husbands arrive home and find their wives smelling of [cooking] fat, full of problems and in a bad humor, but the Brazilians are clean, smell nice and are sweet and affectionate.” This outrages the maes, of course, but they sound too weary to care much anymore. “I have always treated my husband very well. We lived together for 12 years,” Maria says quietly. “I was always his friend. I was absolutely destroyed.”

Maria and Paula say they have no regrets. At least they forced people to stop acting as if everything was normal. After the media blitz, Mayor Nunes called for the legalization of prostitution. The Bishop of Bragança, D. Ant�nio Montes Moreira, tried to use the ordeal as a teaching moment. “Recent events in our city form a basis for an appeal to all of our Christian community,” he said. “We must all make a redoubled effort to bring dignity and sanctity to Christian marriage.” The police have conducted more raids, and five discos have recently closed, but the sex industry adapts quickly. A large number of apartments sprinkled throughout Bragança are used as “private” brothels. And the slumping economy may have had more to do with the disco closings than the police. “There could be five or six more opening tomorrow,” says Rodrigues.

New clubs filled with dancing meninas and lonely men are opening in nearby towns. In Chaves, a man named Carlos, his wife of 13 years and his Brazilian mistress spoke to a reporter from tvi, a national TV station. Then his mistress returned to Brazil, and Carlos returned to his wife. He seriously considered following the mistress to Brazil, he told Time, but decided to stay for the sake of his baby daughter. He doesn’t see anything special about Brazilian women. “Portuguese women are very pretty. I fell in love with the Brazilian girl because I liked her. It was one of those things,” he says. “I am sorry but not repentant.”

Maria’s divorce has been finalized. Her son is seeing a psychologist, and she is on antidepressants, having lost 14 kilos. She has taken an hiv test, which was negative. Paula is in court, pursuing her own divorce. Her small daughter remains visibly terrified of male strangers. Paula says she would like to leave, start a new life somewhere she does not have to see her husband or his mistress while on her way to the grocery store. But she has a life here — and an obsession — and cannot easily imagine a way out. There is one thing the women say they know for sure. They know that if they need to circulate another petition in Bragança, the people who laughed at them will not laugh anymore. Now they will sign.

Outside the strip club called M.L., which is guarded by dogs and large bald men, Pedro, the manager (who requested that his last name be withheld), complains of police attention. As he talks, early on a Wednesday night, a steady stream of men walk past him and into the club. But Pedro insists business is down. “Every two days the police are here. They ruin the ambience.” Worse than that, Pedro says, he senses a permanent change in tone in Bragança. “This has been talked about too much to be forgotten.”

— With reporting by Martha de la Cal/Bragança