Alice
I miss you
“I told him I’d found a second job in a grocery store,” she told CNN.
But both jobs were lies.
Valeria, whose name has been changed to avoid stigma, was in the middle of her shift as a model in a house-turned-webcam-studio in the Colombian border city of Cúcuta, performing erotic shows for online clients around the world.
“For the first month it was so hard to do. I felt terribly ashamed,” she says, with her hands clasped in her lap, as the sound of taxi horns and the shouts of a man selling avocados outside pierce through the large open window.
“But I told myself I couldn’t leave,” she recalls. “I don’t really like the work much. But I do it, because I need to.”
Valeria is one of tens of thousands of Venezuelan women working as models in Colombia’s many webcam houses, where they receive a salary and accommodation in return for their performances online, streaming mostly to clients in Europe and North America.
The houses are usually in residential areas where they appear typical from the outside, but inside have been converted into make-shift studios with lights, cameras and sex toys in abundance.
The adult webcam industry itself isn’t new in Colombia, with some studios thought to have opened in the early 2000s, but the ongoing economic crisis in Venezuela, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, sparked the emergence of a patchwork of small, informal webcam houses across Colombia, particularly in border areas where they offer migrants a wage and a place to live.