Alika Kinan Sánchez (born 24 June 1976) is an Argentine feminist and anti-human trafficking activist. After a police raid at the brothel where she was being sexually exploited in 2012, she began advocating for the abolition of prostitution. She attracted media attention in Argentina when she sued her exploiters and the city where the brothel was located. She became known worldwide when the United States Department of State gave her an award for her anti-trafficking activism.
Childhood and family Kinan's family had enough money to provide her a good education, but her life began to spiral downhill when her father began to abuse her mother. Kinan has said that her mother, along with her grandmother and her aunts, were prostituted. She has described how her father used to tell stories after dinner about how he met her mother and how he rescued her from the zulo. (Zulo is a word with many meanings. In this context, it could mean either a small, wretched apartment, or a brothel.) Kinan was raped at age fourteen. Her parents separated when she was fifteen and her younger sister was nine, and her father stopped supporting the family.
Abandoned by parents, enters sex work A year later Kinan's mother went to Buenos Aires, leaving her to care for her sister. (According to some sources, Kinan's mother took Kinan and her sister to Buenos Aires and Kinan later returned to Córdoba.) Kinan tried cooking and selling a local pastry but couldn't earn enough to support herself and her sister. Her father refused to help her. Reportedly, he told her "You know what you have to do," implying that she should become a prostitute. She worked for someone for three months but received no pay. A friend suggested working at Aries, a brothel run out of a private apartment.
Kinan remembers her decision to enter sex work:
Kinan was seventeen at the time. She remembers her first client as being grotesquely fat and smelling like talcum powder. She still remembers the odor:
After that, she worked at bachelor parties and continued seeing individual clients. She received 40% of the clients' fees, which was enough to rent a place for her and her sister. While still underage, she attracted the attention of the police and spent more time hiding from them than servicing clients, which would have reduced the amount of money she could earn to support herself and her sister. She says
At one point during this period, Kinan seems to have also been supporting her father. She says that he lived with her and asked her for money. He also threatened to get a lawyer and take her younger sister away from her.
Ushuaia Up to this time, Kinan had been moving back and forth between Cruz del Eje and the city of Córdoba. Another woman recommended that she move to Ushuaia, in Argentina's Tierra del Fuego region. Kinan was told that she would get many clients who paid well in dollars, and she could keep 50% of the clients fees, as opposed to the 40% that she kept in Córdoba.
Different sources report her age at this time as fifteen, eighteen, nineteen or twenty. She was born on June 24, 1976 and went to Ushuaia in 1996. Reportedly she arrived in Ushuaia in April, which would make her 19 but only two months from her twentieth birthday. A plane ticket was sent to her and in Ushuaia she began work at a nightclub called Sheik where, as promised, she kept 50% of the clients' fees. After a while she rented a place and sent for her sister, paying for her school, English classes, computers, clothing, and food.
(Various sources give the name of the nightclub as "El Sheikh", "El Sheik", "Sheikh", and "Sheik". Photographs of the nightclub show a sign saying "Sheik", so that is the name used in this article.)
Marriage According to Kinan's ex-husband, Miguel Pascual, they met in 1996, the same year she arrived in Ushuaia. She had already changed employers and was working at the nightclub Black & White. He paid her managers extra to spend extra time with her, but she wasn't informed and as she comments, "... obviously I did not see any of it." Pascual served three yearlong tours of duty on a ship that supplied Spain's Antarctic bases. He and Kinan saw each other during those three years when his boat docked in Ushuaia. He told her he wanted her to be his life partner. Kinan was apparently in danger at the time:
In a different interview, she didn't mention the pimps with guns, but she indicated a similar degree of desperation:
So he took her on vacation in Barcelona where his family had businesses and drove Mercedes, and she ended up staying with him in Spain and bringing her sister over.
In Kinan's description of the marriage, she worked at businesses owned by her husband's family. One source says that he collected half her wages, another says that he collected all of her wages. She wasn't allowed to use the car and was required to function as the maid. To support her sister, she secretly sold her eggs. (It must have been extremely difficult to hide this from her husband without a car.) She says her husband quickly became violent.
A few days before the start of the trial, Pascual gave a very different description of their marriage, which he described as "hell from the first day." He claims that it was she who assaulted him, and that he defended himself without hitting her.
Kinan says that at some point after the birth of their second child, her husband sent her to a brothel. Her husband denies the accusations of forced labor and forced prostitution.
Over nine years they had three children. According to Kinan, one night when the oldest was eight, she refused to do her homework and her father hit her hard enough to cause bleeding. Kinan decided that she needed to leave Spain and persuaded her husband to take them all back to Argentina. According to her husband, Miguel Pascual, they moved to Córdoba in Argentina in 2008, and separated in 2010. At that point he returned to Spain and Kinan returned to Ushuaia and Sheik to support herself and her children.
As with Kinan, there are some discrepancies in different versions of Pascual's story. At one point he said that he and Kinan separated, and he continued sending money for their daughters until he discovered that she had returned to sex work. In another account he claimed to be present when she made the phone call to Sheik to ask about returning to sex work. In this telling, they separated because she was returning to sex work, and he later stopped sending money because she married another man whom she was supporting.
Brothel work Following the police raid at the Black & White nightclub/brothel, news outlets published information about the brothel's operations. Much of this information relates to aspects of brothel operation that aren't described in news reports describing Sheik. Kinan worked at Black & White immediately before leaving for Spain. This section uses information about both Sheik and Black & White to give a more complete picture of the working conditions that Kinan would have encountered.
Alika Kinan's experience at the two brothels were probably common for sex workers across the southern Cone area. Descriptions of brothels in two Chilean cities not far from Ushuaia and in Ushuaia itself closely match the business operations of Sheik and Black & White. Information and employees seem to have moved more or less freely between the six brothels of Ushuaia, which were located within a few blocks of each other. When many of Ushuaia's sex workers migrated to Punta Arenas in Chile after the police raids shut down the brothels in Ushuaia, it was a one-time group migration, but it probably followed a path previously forged by individual sex workers moving between the two cities. No two businesses operate in exactly the same way, but these two brothels can be taken as a rough proxy for legally regulated brothels in Patagonia.
Management Sheik The primary manager at Sheik was Pedro Montoya, who was involved with the brothel throughout its existence. During an earlier period, his co-manager was his wife Claudia Quiroga, who owned the property where the brothel was located. The on-site supervisor under Quiroga was Corina Sánchez.
At the time of the police raid, Quiroga and Sánchez were no longer involved. The co-manager was Montoya's girlfriend Ivana Claudia García, and the on-site supervisor was Lucy Alberca Campos. García's brother Jorge Etcheverry worked as a recruiter for the brothel.
During the trial, Kinan described how the managers used surveillance cameras to monitor the women:
One woman was described by the managers as "like the fish, you use everything but the head." (Equivalent to the American expression "butterface" or the Australian expression "prawn.") This was cited at the trial as an example of the managers' contempt toward the women. At the trial, one of the police witnesses said that the managers mislead the women in order to recruit them, and then belittled them for their poverty and poor education. Kinan remembers the following scene:
On the other hand, Kinan felt that the managers were
As Kinan points out, it was good business to keep workers healthy and productive. The feeling that the managers were her family is not surprising, given that between the age of sixteen, when she was left to support herself and her sister, and the age of thirty-six, when the police raided Sheik, the brothels of Ushuaia and her husband were the only ones who concerned themselves about her health, housing, and financial support.
Black & White The primary manager at Black & White was Victor Morales, nicknamed "Jefe". His daughter seems to have been second in command. Other people involved in some sort of managerial capacity included his ex-wife, his current girlfriend, and his son.
Like Sheik, Black and White had security cameras. One woman was so unnerved by their presence that she left shortly after arrival.
Workers Sheik There were seven women working at Sheik at the time of the police raid, three from the Dominican Republic, one from Paraguay, and three from Argentina. All of them were supporting children with no assistance from the fathers. Most of them hadn't finished formal basic education and had no good alternatives to sex work. One of the women had only the clothes she was wearing when she moved to Ushuaia to work at Sheik.
Black & White Black & White's web site promised twenty-five women. During the police investigation the number of women employed varied from twelve to twenty. At the time of the raid it employed eighteen women. The majority of them were from the Dominican Republic,
but some came from other provinces in Argentina, or from Colombia.
Most of them were in their twenties. A woman who was thirty eight said that Morales was initially reluctant to hire her because of her age.
Among the women who were described, one had left home and was struggling to support herself, one had debts, and two had been doing sex work in Rosario, Santa Fe and came to Ushuaia for the job. One of the women was mentally ill and her condition prompted the police to end the investigation and raid the brothel.
One of the women interviewed by the prosecutors during the Black & White investigation testified that she had been seventeen years old when Morales recruited her. She said that he brought her to Ushuaia along with two other underage girls. When they arrived at the house they would live in, they found other employees of the brothel who were also underage.
However, at the time of the police raid, all of the women employed by the brothel were legally adults.
Government involvement in the brothels When a sex worker first arrived at Ushuaia, she would first be taken to the police station where the provincial police would take her fingerprints,