The mass arrival of Brazilian prostitutes in a small, sleepy Portuguese town has unleashed a furious battle with their clients’ wives which has turned into a bitter international dispute involving the national government, the Euro 2004 football tournament and Time magazine.
Not since the dukes of Braganza won the Portuguese crown in the 17th century has the name of this historic walled town, best known for its fairy tale castle and tucked away in the remote, north-eastern region of Tras-Os-Montes, travelled so far.
But yesterday most towns folk were distinctly uneasy about the reason for their fame: a cover story by Time on the prostitutes v wives war that has seen the Portuguese government threaten to withdraw advertising for the Euro 2004 football tournament finals from its pages.
It all started in May when a group of women calling themselves ”the Mothers of Braganza” drew up a petition demanding something be done about the Brazilian meninas who had come to work in the town’s expanding network of nightclubs and strip joints. Up to 300 South American prostitutes were estimated to be in the town of no more than 28 000 people. ”It is … time to fight for a town with more dignity,” the women wrote. ”We want to avoid taking justice into our hands, but if we are obliged to, we won’t turn aside.”
The meninas, they said, were marriage wreckers, luring their husbands away with sex, drugs and, some claimed, witchcraft, and making the men squander their money.
Some wives reportedly even tried to fight the Brazilian witchcraft with spells of their own.
Their petition, delivered to the police chief and mayor with more than 100 signatures, had little success.
But it brought an unspoken truth into the open. The Brazilians were doing a roaring trade in half a dozen clubs, with names such as Top Model and Montelomeu.
They wandered around town in large groups during the day, chatting excitedly into mobile phones, giving extra business to the town’s hairdressers but upsetting what one local referred to as ”society women”.
What nobody expected, however, was that Time would feature the petition as part of a report about prostitutes from the developing world flooding into Europe.
One of the ”mothers”, who asked that her real name not be used, said yesterday the prostitutes had pushed her marriage to divorce.
”The truth is there are lots of bitches in Braganza,” she told the Guardian. The prostitutes now had her phone number, she said: ”They have been calling me and abusing me … I have no power to make them go and they never will.”
But many other women in Braganza see things differently. ”The four ‘mothers’ who started this should be ashamed. It is not the fault of the Brazilian girls … the mothers are worse than them,” said Monica Pinto, a 26-year-old who sells newspapers in the city centre.
”If the men don’t get any kindness at home then they will go looking elsewhere … most people in town think like me.”
Local authorities, meanwhile, are worried that they could lose tourists and that the name of Braganza will forever be associated with prostitution. ”We are not in Thailand and Braganza is not a paradise for sex tourism,” the local Catholic bishop, Antonio Montes, declared. He was also quick to point out that ”the people who visit prostitutes are not assiduous churchgoers”.
The town’s civil governor, Jose Manuel Ruano, was also dismayed: ”I do not understand how they managed to turn an untruth into an international problem.”
And the mayor, Jorge Nunes, called yesterday on the editor of Time to visit the town, saying the people of Braganza were ”shocked and hurt”.
Sources in the office of Jose Luis Arnaut, a junior minister working for the prime minister, Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, told Portuguese journalists Time would lose advertising for the Euro 2004 tournament, some of which had appeared in the same European edition whose front page spoke of ”Europe’s new red light district”.
”In the case of Time, because of this report, and merely for marketing reasons, we are mulling the suspension of these adverts for a week or two,” a government spokesperson admitted to Reuters.
Time’s Europe editor, Eric Pooley, stood by the story. ”We have no regrets about the journalism,” he told Reuters. ”The global movement of sex workers is certainly not confined to Portugal.” – Guardian Unlimited Â