More than one million tourists travel to Costa Rica every year, thanks to PR campaigns espousing the Latin American nation as a model of eco-tourism, rife with spectacular scenery, tropical rainforests and untouched beaches.

But there’s a dark underbelly to Costa Rica’s tourism industry– one they don’t show you in the brochures or on the country’s official tourism website. But there are countless other websites, ones that boast about Costa Rica’s thriving sex tourism industry, and these have scores of men flocking to the tropical paradise in pursuit of one thing: Cheap sex with young women – even with girls.

Prostitution is legal in Costa Rica, though only with women 18 or older. But laws prohibiting buying sex with minors haven’t stopped the market for underage sex from thriving.

“There are thousands of girls who are being sexually exploited by perverts who think that for 20 or 30 dollars, they can have sex with a child,” says Bruce Harris, who runs a non-profit organization, called Casa Alianza, helping poor and homeless children.

Costa Rica is quickly replacing countries like Thailand and the Philippines as the North American sex tourist’s destination of choice. “They’ve been looking for countries that are closer, easier to get to,” says Harris. “They’re looking for countries where the laws are weak or they’re not enforced; where there is corruption so they can buy themselves out of a situation; where there’s poverty, because where there’s poverty, there are a lot of children who are desperate – and desperate children do desperate things in order to eat.”

There’s no slinking down dark alleyways to find underage sex in Costa Rica. Prospective tourists can get the lowdown on arranging for these trysts over the Internet before they go, and once they arrive, can make contact at hotels in the “Gringo Gulch” area in downtown San Jose or even through taxi drivers. One hotel – the Del Rey – is Costa Rica’s best-known sex destination, and is called “one stop shopping” for sexual adventure online on the World Sex Guide.

Immigration cards tourists are given on arrival warn that sex with minors is an illegal act in Costa Rica, but when you’re talking about an impoverished country, often money talks a lot louder than the rules.

“People come here and think they can do whatever they want because it’s a poor country,” says Harris. “They have no respect for the dignity of children. … They would never do this is Toronto or Vancouver or Saskatchewan. So why do they come here? Because they think they can get away with it.”

The men who go down to Costa Rica to buy sex don’t see it as exploitation. They think they are doing the women a favour – giving them U.S. dollars in exchange for their “company.”

“They love it when you treat them like a lady, and then they’ll come back and reward you … talking to her about her life and liking her will get you a long way,” one man, recorded on hidden camera inside a well-known sex bar, told W-FIVE.

But often, Costa Rican sex workers are too poor to have any other options, and the lifestyle is a necessity, not a choice. “The great majority of these girls who are being sexually exploited are poor, often uneducated … and what they want to do is to make money to help feed their other brothers and sisters,” says Harris. “They’re not doing it because they like it.”

Other women have been trafficked into the country from places like Colombia, Panama, and even the Philippines, Bulgaria and Romania, Harris says. They come believing they’ll be earning decent money working as waitresses or at the hotel, but once they get to Costa Rica, the traffickers take their passports and they are forced into prostitution.

While previous administrations have turned a blind eye to the underage sex trade, a key inaugural promise of President Abel Pacheco in 2002 was to derail sex tourism. But Ana Leon, director of Costa Rica’s National Institution for the Protection of Children, says that’s not an easy task.

“The problem is very complex because there are many people involved who have financial interests … people who are making money out of selling children’s sexual services to foreigners,” she told W-FIVE.

“We have to fight against those who are behind the business. We have to fight against the tourists. Besides being a criminal issue, I think it’s a very serious moral and ethical issue.”

But with so many girls turning to prostitution as a means of escaping poverty, Leon says the government also faces a battle from the sex workers themselves. “A girl would say, ‘I earn $200 a night with two tourists. … Are you going to give me $200 a night?”

Pacheco told W-FIVE Costa Rica’s underage prostitution problem “embarrasses us terribly,” and cited the recent bust of a prostitution ring as an example of how his government is making progress.

But he pinned much of the blame on the tourists, saying “Who is more at fault, the one who sins for the pay or the one who pays for the sin?” The statement begs the question: Do countries that wouldn’t tolerate these practices at home have any obligation to stop their own citizens from engaging in sex tourism elsewhere?

In 1997, Canada passed a law making it a punishable offence to sexually abuse children outside of the country. But with no charges laid under that law to date, Canadian men who visit Costa Rica in search of young sexual conquests have little or nothing to worry about.

“It looks great on paper,” says Ben Perrin, a Canadian who helped found an organization fighting the trafficking of children for sex. “What’s needed now is some form of enforcement that’s effective.”

Perrin say the first step to enforcement would be setting up better connections between countries known to be destinations for sex tourists, including liaison officers on the ground at such destinations.

“How (is Canada) supposed to know that a child in Costa Rica has been abused by a Canadian when there’s no one on the ground to liaise with the local officers?” he says.

But with the problem far outside of Canada’s backyard, the solution still lies with the Costa Rican government to invest in a campaign to save its children from tourists who travel there to exploit them.

Costa Rica has spent years and millions of dollars trying to lure tourists to the country. But unless it finds a way to draw them for the right reasons, it risks becoming known as the “Bangkok of the western hemisphere” – infamous for selling its women and children to foreigners.