MEXICO CITY (AP) — Montserrat Fuentes sits on the same street corner where she has worked for 20 years. But the normal throng of female sex workers every Friday night is nowhere to be seen.
Instead, the busy road in Mexico City, where about 2,500 sex workers make their living, is covered in construction, part of the Mexican capital’s wider preparations leading up to the 2026 FIFA World Cup in the summer.
Fuentes, 42, and others say they have seen their earnings cut due to government projects to clean up parts of the city before opening their arms to sports fans around the world. Street vendors also say they are pushed and don’t know what will be left of them after the competition.
“What we’re seeing in Mexico is something that a lot of the world has faced when there’s an event of this magnitude. They always want to fix their city, make it look beautiful,” she said. “But the ones who get hurt are always us at the bottom of the ladder.”
The soccer World Cup, which will be hosted simultaneously by Mexico, the United States and Canada, is expected to be a $3 billion economic driver in Mexico as visitors flood airports, hotels, restaurants and sports venues, according to the Mexican Soccer Federation.
But in a country where more than half the workforce is informal, many Mexicans who work in precarious conditions fear they will be left behind.
Mexico City’s government said it was taking steps to offset the impact on sex workers and vendors and had ongoing talks with workers.
Sex workers’ earnings hit by World Cup build-up
Tensions have been building in recent months in Mexico City, where the opening ceremony will be hosted, as the local government has rapidly renovated its iconic Azteca stadium, improved public transportation and built public works in historic working-class neighborhoods.
Fuentes and many of the sex workers on Calzada de Tlalpan, which runs past the stadium, said the construction of a bike lane starting in late 2025 has cut their income by more than half. Large dividers prevent cars from pulling to the curb to negotiate. The city later announced the nighttime closure of subway stations running along the road for the Cup’s construction, leaving many women stranded.
“The only thing the government sees is how much money (the World Cup) will make them,” said Elvira Madrid Romero, president of sex worker advocacy organization Street Brigade. “Tourists come to celebrate at the expense of the poor.”
Sex work is not criminalized in Mexico, and the capital remains an economic lifeline for some 15,000 people, including transgender women who struggle to find a fair wage in other sectors.
Many single mothers in the Madrid coalition worry about how they will put food on the table or pay the rent. Her organization negotiated with local authorities, who promised small monthly payments and food deliveries that are a fraction of what the women need to get by, she said.
In September, Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada also announced 58 points along the route where sex workers will be able to meet clients.
“We want a World Cup … with fair play and a just society,” Brugada said in September.
But the women have seen no such points or help from local authorities and refuse to be moved from the areas where they work, Madrid said.
Global sporting events have a fee
Fuentes had to get a second job selling food in the morning after working all night to pay the rent, leaving her exhausted. She began sex work 20 years ago when she was removed from selling food downtown during another government cleanup effort.
Despite the coalition’s insistence that they won’t budge, Fuentes worries the same thing could happen to him again, especially as he sees local authorities move street vendors off the main thoroughfare and onto sleepy side streets.
“Even if we raise our voices, we can’t really do anything,” she said. “All we can do is hope that when the World Cup is over, things will go back to normal… We don’t want to be forced to move.”
Such pushes by local governments are common ahead of global sporting events, which often sit at the intersection of wider social and political tensions and are widely criticized by activist groups as “social cleansing”.
During the 2024 Paris Olympics, the city government rounded up African migrants and homeless people and bussed them out of the city. When Brazil hosted the World Cup in 2014, advocacy organizations reported that tens of thousands of people were evacuated from their homes.
Mexico City is already experiencing simmering tensions as an influx of foreigners, mainly from the US, has increasingly pushed people out of some neighborhoods. Critics say authorities have done little to offset housing shortages and rising prices that come with a tourism boom once promoted by the government.
Salespeople moved from their jobs
For others who work along the boulevard, like 68-year-old smoothie vendor Esperanza Toribio Rojas, the prospect of commuting is no longer hypothetical. She said it was an impending inevitability hanging over her head.
Toribio is among hundreds of vendors selling food, clothes, tools and other goods in the tunnels that run under the boulevard that provide access to the subway stations serving the World Cup stadium.
For decades, traders worked in stalls provided by the local government when the passages were crime-ridden and littered. Now shoppers walk past families sharing meals and ask the price of hanging clothes.
“We are the ones who brought this passage to life,” Toribio said. “Back when there was a lot of crime, they never cared to do anything here.”
The vendors said they were surprised early last year when local officials descended on the area and said they had to make way for a city project announced by the mayor in November.
The “Steps to Utopia” initiative, according to Brugada’s office, will “prepare the area” for the competition, turning underground passages into “safe spaces with more than 300 cultural, sports, educational, health and wellness activities.”
Local trader leader Jaír Torruco said between 100 and 200 traders were driven out, while around 250 others, like Toribio, refused the government’s offer, which they said was not enough to support themselves.
They are still negotiating with authorities in an effort to stay in their stalls, Torruco said.
The government in Mexico City said it offered support to those it displaced and said vendors would be able to return to their stalls later. Toribio and others say officials don’t believe it, and said they were given three months in a temporary space that had to be rented, and that those who moved into a downtown plaza struggled to make ends meet.
Surrounded by her children and grandchildren, Toribio said she doesn’t know how she would afford to move the business that has become her life’s work.
“Today, the government sees this place, they see that there is life and they want to take it for themselves,” Toribio said. “This is our legacy.”
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Martín Silva Rey in Mexico City contributed to this report.
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