There are sports bars and then there are sex bars. The common trait between them is surplus of TV screens. In both, avid aficionados stare fixated at the plasma, salivating over strategy, movement, physical contact, with guttural gusto. As a woman, the images in sex bars overload your eyes, penetrate your pores and leave your body begging for a shower strong enough to wash away the dirty data overload.

Our Virgil into Quito’s nastiest scenes is a cab driver, Miguel. For a living, Miguel shuttles prostitutes from the brothels to hotels, motels and parking lots. He works at Night Katz. Twelve taxi drivers work with him. Initially, there were twenty five men hired for these runs. More than half in the group got laid off for sexually abusing or robbing the call girls after work. Miguel is one more spider in a vast web of facilitators and exploiters.

We finished our reporting day at 9 p.m. in Queens. A black bouncer blocked the blue lit doorway. Posters silhouetting curvy girls and trumpeting prices -- $10 a pop, or fifteen minutes -- plastered the walls. We crossed a second doorway and met the administrator, a man who previously worked at a New Jersey mattress company. He welcomed us inside and gave us the greenlight to film. Monday nights are low key.

At the club, we met a Colombian girl, who had all the elements of our missing profile for the story. She was very traumatized and determined not to speak to us. Off camera, she shared elements of her family's experience at the hands of guerrilla. It was not a happy story. She teared up six times. I encouraged her to tell it for the sake of other women in that situation but she would not budge.

"It didn't make sense," I told her. "She had shared her story off camera for nothing. Why would she not share it on camera for something: the help it could bring to others?"

For a moment, that argument seemed to hold weight. It was the first one out of many that she actually mulled over. Despite three moments of hesitation, she stood her ground. We gave her our number in case she changed her mind. We'll see how that goes. Miguel is now pitching sources that want to sell us such stories. The answer was no and an explanation of basic ethics that hold even when access is difficult.

Accessing Colombian sex workers is one side of the obstacles coin. The other side of the coin is the hermeticism, bureaucratic jargonese and red tape that one needs to cut through when dealing with the NGOs theoretically meant to help this people. The story is there but many forces sabotage our access, close the valves of information flow. Sources sidestep the issue fearing a diplomatic controversy with Colombia or a backlash from the men who represent the cause of displacement (guerrillas, paramilitary, abusive relatives.)

The night ended at Dragonfly in Quito's red light district. The bar was on the same block we circled earlier in the evening looking for minors, transvestites and Colombians working the streets. Amy shot footage from the front seat while Virgil gave us the scoop on the streets who's who: crack whores, drug dealers, underage girls, narcotrafficking night club owners, ad nauseam. Virgil was a breakthrough after many roadblocs. But into what?
-- Dominique Soguel