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  1. #1
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    Smuggled Women, Modern Slaves, Tell Their Tales in New York

    Smuggled Women, Modern Slaves, Tell Their Tales in New York
    BY DANIELA GERSON - Staff Reporter of the Sun
    May 18, 2005
    URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/13991

    The five young women, all with strong, indigenous features and long black hair straight down their backs, broke into giggles like gossiping schoolgirls. For a moment, their harrowing journey appeared forgotten.

    Just weeks ago, the women said, they suffered thirst, hunger, and other abuses from smugglers, who had shepherded them from small villages in Ecuador to "stash houses" in Los Angeles, where they were held captive.

    A few had met on a frantic boat ride to Guatemala, others in a detention center in Los Angeles. Yesterday, in a conference room next to the Ecuadorian Consulate, the women were struggling for a chance to stay legally in New York.

    The director of a community advocacy group based in Los Angeles, the Latin America International Coalition, said some of the women were forced to come to America and others paid smugglers more than $10,000 to get them in. All, he said, were victims of modern-day slavery.

    "They are misled," the director, Osvaldo Cabrera, said in Spanish. "They say everything will be good, everything will be okay. At first, they want to go, but when they go, they suffer. A lot die. We find they trick them and they lie."

    One, Blanca, whose last name is being withheld because she is said to be at risk from smugglers, told The New York Sun that her trials started when she went looking for work cleaning houses in her village of 400 near Cuenca, Ecuador.

    There a woman informed Blanca that she knew of good work. At first, the woman said she would lend Blanca the money. Soon, however, she "forced me to go," Blanca said.

    Blanca, who does not know how to read her own name, said she hesitated.

    "I was afraid," she said, shivering under the unfamiliar chill of air conditioning. "But she told me she was going to kill me if I didn't go."

    An 18-hour bus ride, Blanca said, took her to the port city of Esmeraldas. From there, with four other women, "crying from fear," she entered a rickety uncovered boat.

    "We didn't know where the boat was going," she said.

    The boat, she said, was packed with scores of passengers, many of whom, she suspected, had paid, at least in part, the smuggling fee. She didn't know for sure. The seven guards accompanying them forbade them to talk, she said.

    After four days, the food and water ran out. Passengers fainted. The floor they slept on was wet with salt water.

    When the boat arrived off the coast of Guatemala, it was anchored offshore.

    "If we tried to escape, we would die," Blanca said, tears beginning to well up in her eyes as she relived the journey.

    After the sea voyage, they were transported, again by truck, packed up against each other, to a town where for three weeks they were kept in a stash house without windows and without air, she said.

    The guards were masked so "we couldn't recognize them."
    They did not touch her, Blanca said - but she said her sister-in-law was sexually abused.

    One night they were taken to the border and crossed into Mexico by foot. With a group of 250 now amassed, again squeezed together in trucks, they made their way to the Arizona desert border. There were stops at more stash houses, and there were changes to public buses and back to trucks, Blanca said. It took weeks.

    At the border, she said, they were split into groups of about 35 and herded across the frigid desert at night for six days. Again, food ran out early, this time after only three days.

    The smugglers, or "coyotes," were familiar with the route and its hazards.

    "They knew when the immigration authorities were coming and they passed the other way," Blanca said.After a night near Phoenix, she was taken by another truck to a stash house in Los Angeles.

    There they met some of the worst conditions yet, the Ecuadorian women recalled. With no windows, it was hard to breathe. There were rats and there were cockroaches. The toilet was stopped up. There was no running water. It was so crowded that there was not enough room on the floor for them to lie down to sleep, so the women took turns resting as they sat.

    One man escaped, but he was caught and the coyotes beat him. They threatened to cut off the fingers and ears of anyone else who tried to escape, the women at the consulate said.

    On May 4, the Los Angeles Police Department received a desperate call. A man, who identified himself as an illegal immigrant, said he had escaped a house where about 50 others were being held captive, according to court documents in California.

    LAPD officers and immigration agents stormed the house and found 60 undocumented immigrants being held captive. The same day, they received another call, about a possible second drop house 20 blocks away. When agents arrived there, they found 90 more smuggled immigrants trapped inside a stifling hot building littered with dirty clothes, roaches, rodents, discarded food, and human waste, the court documents said. The captives said the smugglers locked them inside and fled after seeing television coverage of the discovery of the first drop house.

    Of the 150 immigrants, 98 were from Ecuador, with the remainder from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico.

    Rather than celebrating the arrival of the immigration authorities, the women said, they were trembling and crying. Particularly after their ordeal, they all desperately wanted a chance to work in America.

    "We were afraid," Blanca said. "We didn't want to return to Ecuador."

    Nevertheless, they found them selves arrested, handcuffed, and taken to immigration detention centers.

    A spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Virginia Kice, said all of the migrants were interviewed and gave no indication that they were kidnapped, or forced to come against their will. They probably all put money down before they left or indicated they would pay, Ms. Kice said. She also warned that some illegal immigrants fabricate or embellish horror stories to win visas.

    As a result of the raids in Los Angeles, two Guatemalan men have been indicted on charges of harboring and concealing illegal aliens. The men charged were relatively low-level operatives, according to court papers, working off portions of their own smuggling fees. The suspected leaders of the smuggling rings are still at large.

    Last Thursday, pending immigration trials, 11 of the migrants were released on their own recognizance.

    Mr. Cabrera, working with the Ecuadorian Consulate in Los Angeles on the immigrants' case and aided by donations from Southern California businesses, received enough money to help the women buy new clothes.

    He also helped eight of them buy plane tickets to New York, where they have relatives.
    The uncle of one of the young women, Jose, said he has watched the number of undocumented Ecuadorian immigrants like himself skyrocket in recent years.

    "Our country is in crisis and so a lot of people are coming," he said, adding that after 13 years of living illegally in America, he did not want his last name used.

    The economic and political situation in Ecuador is increasingly desperate. Last month, for the third time in three years, the South American country's president was ousted.

    In New York, the Ecuadorian immigrant population is said to have in creased nearly 50% in the first years after the 2000 census, to 169,000, according to the 2003 American Community Survey of the Census Bureau.

    The conditions have also become more dangerous, Jose said, with many of the easier crossing points into America, such as Tijuana, Mexico, now heavily patrolled.

    Mr. Cabrera is trying to help the women receive humanitarian visas based on abuse he said they suffered as victims of trafficking. He hopes lawyers can be found to assist them on a pro bono basis.

    Mr. Cabrera said that if the women are returned to their homeland, they will be at risk of attack from the smugglers.

    They are also at risk if they stay here. The coyotes still expect $12,000 from many of the women, he said.

    Dangers aside, the women all gave the same reasons for wanting to stay in America.

    A 22-year-old, Yolanda, said she wants to support her year-old son in Ecuador. There, she said, people survive on $3 a day and there was little work for her aside from digging up potatoes.

    "We want to work," she said.
    FAR BEYOND DRIVEN

  2. #2
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    God help me! I must have just crossed over the limit for myself. Usually, I'm the biggest sap in the world. I have SAP written across my forehead.

    LET THEM GO BACK AND DIG DAMNED POTATOES!!

    I just don't give a hoot anymore. We have AMERICAN WOMEN raising their own children who need the help. Not ILLEGALS -- Not anymore!
    Join our efforts to Secure America's Borders and End Illegal Immigration by Joining ALIPAC's E-Mail Alerts network (CLICK HERE)

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