By Colbert I. King
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Last Tuesday morning, one mile north of the White House, I sat in the upstairs dining room of a Dupont Circle cafe having a cup of tea with a slave. Well actually she's now a runaway slave who's living in the Washington area home of a good Samaritan.
But yes, she could have been considered a slave, if you define that as being bound to a specific area of land, forced to work without compensation, stripped of her passport and left at the absolute disposal of a master.
She is African. However, unlike her ancestors who arrived in America on slave ships, she came here voluntarily. She was, however, deceived about her working conditions, and she began her involuntary servitude once she entered her master's suburban Maryland household.
Our meeting took place in the presence of her lawyer, Elizabeth Keyes of CASA of Maryland Inc.'s Domestic Worker and Trafficked Persons Project. CASA and the Break The Chain Campaign of Washington, D.C., have represented dozens of immigrant domestic workers held in similar slavelike conditions.
The ground rules for the interview limited the amount of information that could be disclosed in today's column because a lawsuit against her alleged employer-master won't be filed in federal court until next month.
But details about the exploitation and degrading treatment of this young woman, and women from other impoverished nations, will appear in future columns devoted to the topic of 21st-century slavery in the nation's capital.
America prides itself on being among the nations that "have eliminated servitude as a state-sanctioned practice," to quote the State Department's June 2006 Trafficking in Persons Report, which documents such abuses in foreign countries. Truth is, traffickers are also at work in the nation's capital. What's worse, they couldn't get away with their abusive practices without the weak oversight of the U.S. government. Chief among the federal enablers: Condoleezza Rice's State Department.
The State Department gets fingered because so many of today's human traffickers and slavers are diplomats, flaunting U.S. and local laws, under the protective shield of the department's interpretation of diplomatic immunity.
Here's a case I can tell you about.
The lawsuit does not allege trafficking or slavery, but it aptly illustrates the claims of egregious labor exploitation by diplomats in Washington.
Lucia Mabel Gonzalez Paredes of Paraguay says she was hired in Argentina two years ago by Jose Luis Vila and his wife, Monica Nielsen, to perform housework and take care of their soon-to-be born baby. Vila, learning he was being posted to the Argentine Embassy in Washington, asked Gonzalez to move here with him and his wife to take care of the infant, because his wife wanted to pursue a legal education in the United States.
To obtain a State Department visa for Gonzalez, Vila and Gonzalez signed a contract specifying that she be paid $6.72 an hour to work a 40-hour week, with overtime pay for extra hours.
In fact, once here, Gonzalez was paid $500 a month for cooking, housecleaning, running errands, doing laundry and caring for the baby, including providing physical therapy. She says she actually worked an average of 77 hours a week performing all of those duties, receiving an average wage of $1.60 an hour. Oh yes, she was promised health insurance, but she ended up having to pay all of her medical bills.
These allegations are contained in a lawsuit that Gonzalez brought against Vila and Nielsen in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The defendants have not responded directly to the charges; instead they have claimed diplomatic immunity at the request, they say, of the government of Argentina. Fortunately for Gonzalez, a very good federal judge, Paul Friedman, is hearing the case.
Gonzalez's claims mirror those made by thousands of other women brought to Washington from impoverished countries. They say they are lured here under false guarantees, exploited with impunity -- sometimes sexually -- and then must endure their abusers dancing away under the defense of diplomatic immunity.
Condoleezza Rice can change all that.
The State Department routinely recommends immunity for diplomats in lawsuits brought by domestic servants, finding that contracts for services, including the hiring of domestic help, don't fall within the meaning of the "professional and commercial activity" exception to diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
If Rice wants to show the world that the Bush administration's concerns about trafficking in people and labor and sexual exploitation apply equally in America -- and if she wants to ensure that women such as Lucia Gonzalez have legal redress for violations of their rights -- then the secretary of state has an opportunity.
Judge Friedman has asked for the State Department's views in the Gonzalez case. All that Rice has to do is interpret labor contracts for domestic servants as within the scope of the commercial activities exception. That will keep America from siding with the exploiters.
Even that, as future columns will show, would be only a first step. Much more is needed to end this scourge.
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