Fortune-seeking women swell with desire for drug barons

John Harlow and Sally Gillespe, Bogota

THE sorry television saga of a pretty young woman who undergoes breast enlargement to win the heart of a drug dealer is gripping Colombia, where the series reflects an unparalleled boom in plastic surgery.

The story of Katherine, a desperate teenager struggling to escape poverty, is told in a nightly drama called Sin Tetas No Hay Paraiso, or Without Breasts There Is No Paradise.

More and more young office workers, who earn an average of �120 a month, are paying �800 for breast augmentation. Five years ago 30,000 Colombians had implants; this year more than 100,000 procedures are expected to be carried out..

Gustavo Bolivar Moreno, an investigative reporter and author of a bestselling book about would-be molls that inspired the series, has been praised for revealing the bleak truths about many young women�s ambitions. �All adolescent girls are self-conscious about their bodies,� he said. �But I have met 13-year-olds saving up surgery money specifically to reach their ultimate goal � a cocaine smuggler.

�Not a doctor, or even a footballer, but the type of criminal who, 13 years after the Medellin cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar was killed, still enforce their aesthetic on a generation of women in a brutal fashion.

�Even when the women have gone under the knife to measure up, they are merely used and discarded in the worst possible ways,� he said.

Sin Tetas follows the rise and fall of a girl who prostitutes herself to pay for a D-cup that will attract the attention of a glamorous local thug with dark glasses, armed guards and a swimming pool. In one episode she says she wants to become a moll �because even if my man dies, I will be out of the mud�.

The saga continues until next month but the story of Katherine and her friends is unlikely to end happily. �Her smile was wondrous, but her breasts became her road to hell,� said a trailer for the series on Caracol TV.

Young women interviewed in Bogota last week said they recognised Katherine in the programme. Johanna, a communications student aged 22, said: �It�s really popular because it shows real life. Girls like to be skinny but men want them to have big chests so they go along with it.�

Diana, a 21-year-old student, said: �Of course it�s exaggerated and not all girls go to such extremes to get the surgery, but enough do.�

It remains unquantifiable how many women are setting their sights on a drug dealer, but a Bogota police report suggests up to 350,000 young men, out of Colombia�s 41m people, are or have been involved in the drug trade.

�Americans like to go blonde, but here they like to go big,� said a member of the Colombian Plastic Surgeons Society. �Sometimes you have to calm them down a bit before they damage themselves.�

The Bogota surgeon, who asked not to be identified, estimated that one in six young women in richer cities such as Medellin and Cartagena had had some �work done�, a higher rate than in Beverly Hills.

Some Colombian celebrities are taking a stand against the trend: Shakira, the 29-year-old pop star whose latest hit, Hips Don�t Lie, reached number one, said she considered breast augmentation but then turned against the idea: �I worried that I was not going to be looking good enough for my fans, but I realised I was good looking enough for myself.

�Now I see all these poor women trying to get out of the ghetto with plastic surgery and my heart sinks. I understand why they do it, but not only is the pressure on them cruel but it makes us natural girls look a little bit small.�

Source Times Online