For the young girls who work the frontier gold towns in the Amazon rain forest, Santa Claus is bad news. At this dusty gold camp near the Bolivian border, the jolly symbol of Christmas never brings presents or good cheer, he brings unwanted babies.
The prostitutes, some as young as 10, say a girl is with a "Papai Noel" if she's starting to show the signs of pregnancy. Helena, who is 17 and already a four-year veteran of the trade, is eight months into her first Santa Claus. There are images of mostly blond European and American models, torn from the pages of magazines and stuck to the walls, and a new mosquito net hanging over her bed.
In the soft afternoon light, the net shimmers and looks a little bit like a wedding veil. What's even worse, social workers say, is that girls like Helena know little about how their bodies work or how to prevent pregnancy, and are too poor to raise the children on their own. He said most adolescent births here occur in girls between 14 and 16, and it's not unusual to find year-olds in their third pregnancies.
Haddad said the majority of births in girls of 10 and 11 are by Caesarean section because their bodies aren't mature enough to permit vaginal childbirth.
In the state of Acre in the western Amazon, nearly 35 percent of babies are born to girls between 10 and 17, according to statistics collected by Haddad's staff and the municipal government of the state capital, Rio Branco. Like Helena, most of the girls are prostitutes who work in Rio Branco or the numerous gold camps in the outlying regions. According to a recent United Nations survey, Brazil has an estimated , child prostitutes, the highest incidence in Latin America and the second-highest in the world after Thailand.
