The first time Elena Eva Reynaga was arrested for being a sex worker was in 1976, amidst the military coup in Argentina. She was detained for almost 100 days. The cell, she recalls, was “two by two with a toilet, or rather, a pit – with cockroaches, rats”.
Facing what she describes as constant police harassment, brutality and arrest, Reynaga stopped working until the early 1980s, “when democracy returned to the country,'' she told me. “But”, she added, “democracy did not return for us”.
The criminalisation of sex work in Argentina meant that, if caught, sex workers faced “prison for 21 days, or paying around $700 a week so that the police wouldn’t take you”, she said.
