Medellín is rewriting its Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial — the city’s master map of land use, expansion and permitted activity. Into that technical process, councillor Andrés Tobón has inserted a sharp political claim: prohibit paid-sex activity in public space and block the opening of new commercial establishments whose main business is sexual services. Existing venues would remain under current use rules; new ones would not. Street work would be written out of the public realm.
This reporting is part of the Sex Worker Visibility Project: coverage of how law, zoning and institutional power land on people who sell sex, and what workers themselves say when cities try to manage them by erasure. If that work is useful to you, support it on Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee.
Tobón’s public case is that street-level paid sex in Medellín is not “free” labour. He links it to criminal structures — groups such as La Terraza and Caicedo, associated with La Oficina — and to commercial sexual exploitation of adults and minors. He has named specific corridors: the city centre, Cundinamarca, Barbacoas, parts of El Poblado. The administration, he says, has reduced activity in some tourist zones; the rest still need the lupa. His amendment would close the normative gap that, in his view, still allows exploitation to occupy streets and parks.
Sex-worker organisations answered within days. Sintrasexco and the Sindicato de Trabajadoras Sexuales de Antioquia rejected the framing. Fidelia Suárez, president of Sintrasexco, put the labour line plainly: sexual labour in Colombia is work; workers are not criminals; they are the ones paying extortion to the same structures the councillor says he wants to fight. Valery Ramírez, speaking for the Antioquia union, warned that equating voluntary adult work with trafficking and minor exploitation is legally and practically dangerous. Prohibition, she argued, does not remove the demand or the workers. It pushes the work further from visibility, into places where violence and extortion are harder to report and easier to enforce.
That dispute sits on contested legal ground. Colombia’s Constitutional Court has, in earlier rulings, treated prostitution exercised in the full use of freedom as capable of recognition as work, and has extended labour protections in related sex-industry settings such as webcam modelling. A May 2026 Penal Chamber decision of the Supreme Court of Justice, issued in a case involving the commercial sexual exploitation of minors in Medellín, used much harder language — describing prostitution in structural terms as violence and inequality rather than neutral commerce. The two lines are not the same document, and they do not automatically cancel each other. Local policy fights still turn on which frame politicians choose to quote.
The POT is not a criminal statute. It is a planning instrument. Using it to prohibit public-space sex work and freeze new commercial venues is a classic local strategy: avoid a national labour debate and achieve removal through land-use rules. The practical effect, if adopted, would be to shrink the legal geography of the work while leaving the economic and coercive pressures intact. Workers already describe street control by groups that charge for a corner. Removing the corner without removing the group does not free the worker; it relocates the fee and the risk.
Tobón’s proposal is still in study. It has been aired in the council and with the municipal administration; it has not yet been locked into an approved amendment. That timing is useful. It leaves space for the labour argument to be heard before the map is redrawn: that adult consensual work exists, that the Constitutional Court’s autonomy line still matters, and that the city’s real enforcement problem is the organisations that tax and threaten workers — not the workers who stand on the pavement.
For the Sex Worker Visibility Project, Medellín is a clean illustration of a pattern that repeats across cities. When officials collapse trafficking, minor exploitation and adult voluntary work into one category, the policy that follows is almost always spatial exclusion. When workers answer that they are labourers under extortion, not the source of the crime, the question becomes whether the city will target the structure or the person standing in public view. The POT amendment forces that choice into the open.