Early on, Argentina’s government condoned prostitution. It let it thrive in the rapidly expanding colonial settings, not only because of the massive amounts of money the state received from the brothels in the form of taxes (in 1920, 25 percent of the state’s money was generated by brothels), but also because, as a Catholic state, it believed that this necessary evil “protects good women, families and gender order.”* However, Zwi Migdal’s crimes and corruption motivated Julio Alsogaray, a federal police commissioner in Buenos Aires, to act. He had been working for a decade on his mission “to clean up the pollution of Argentina”† and had forged an alliance with Jews who condemned the pimps when, on New Year’s Eve 1929, into his office walked Raquel Liberman. The twenty-nine-year-old prostitute, the widowed mother of two boys, had arrived from Poland seven years before. She had tried to get out of prostitution by investing her savings in an antique shop. Time and again, Zwi Migdal sent goons to ransack her shop, forcing her back into a brothel.

Liberman’s cooperation was what Alsogaray had been waiting for. In May 1930, after seventy years of Zwi Migdal operating with impunity, a ten-day police raid, accompanied by photographers and newspapermen, arrested three hundred pimps. Unsurprisingly, the union had been tipped off, and hundreds of Zwi Migdal members had fled the country—temporarily. Of the men arrested, only 112 went to trial, and of those, only 3 were sentenced to prison. The others were exiled, but they returned within three to five years. Unrelated to these events, in September 1930, a coup d’état brought a nationalist, fascist, and puritanical government to power in Argentina and the constitution was replaced, outlawing brothels and abolishing regulated prostitution (though allowing private exchanges of sex for pay).

Earlier, in 1913, the government of Brazil declared that it would not be a clearinghouse for the white slave trade. It deported 120 pimps, who transferred the running of their brothels to madams until they could return, which they did shortly afterward. However, in 1930, as in Argentina, a military coup d’état put the dictator Getúlio Vargas in power, and he aligned Brazil with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. He soon singled out the Jews as responsible for the country’s economic woes. Jews were barred from entering the country, and pimps and prostitutes were sent back to their now Nazi-occupied countries of origin, where they most likely perished.

Zwi Migdal was weakened but did not cease its operation throughout South America. It continued until 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland and traveling there was no longer possible.