Maria Suarez's Story...
Once a Slave
in the United States,
Still Fighting for Her Freedom...
By: Jane Lampman
The Christian Science Monitor
Thursday March 22, 2007
Maria Suarez survived life as a sex slave for five years in Los Angeles.
There are thousands more like her...
For Maria Suarez, a young Mexican, America
turned out to be anything but the land of opportunity. When the
15-year-old came to the United States legally in 1976 to stay with her
sister in Los Angeles, she was full of dreams. but those dreams turned
into a nightmare within two weeks, when the teen was sold into slavery.
Thirty years later, the courageous woman is still confronting the
consequences of that domestic servitude and is fighting for the freedom and
opportunity to remain in America, where all her family resides.
Ms. Suarez became the sex slave of an older man who had bought other
young girls before her. Thousands of women are living in similar
circumstances in the U.S. today, often invisible though sometimes in
plainview. Yet Suarez's story is unique in that her five years of
violation and beatings led to a longer incarceration.
The young girl arrived from her village in Michoacan a bit overwhelmed by
the new country. Her sister, Rita, had lived in Los Angeles for years,
but Maria knew no English and admits she was naive and "ignorant."
"A (Spanish-speaking) woman approached me on the street - she was very
friendly - and offered me a job cleaning house and answering phones," Suarez
says in a telephone interview. "It sounded like a good idea and I was
very happy."
Since her sister wasn't home at the time, she agreed to the woman's urging
that she just come see the house where she would work. But the drive
took more than an hour, and Maria never went home again.
At the house of Anselmo Covarrubias, a man in his late 60s, she was allowed
to call her sister to say she had a job and would be back later. But a
lock was then put on the phone and she learned otherwise. "He told me
he had paid $200 for me and that I was his slave," Suarez says. She
was shown a tiny room with a bed and an altar with a picture of Jesus Christ
above it but many other strange items on it. He then raped her.
"He told me he was a witch, that he knew where my family lived, and I'd
better not tell anyone or he would kill my family, burn down their house,"
she adds. "From then on, my hell started. He abused me mentally,
emotionally, physically and sexually."
During those five tragic years, Suarez was not
wholly confined to the house. Covarrubias got her a factory job on an
electronics assembly line and drove her to and from work each day. On
Fridays, he would take her paycheck from her when she got into the car.
Yet, terrified and superstitious, she told no one. "People asked me
about who picked me up, but I was afraid for my family," she says. He
would take her to secondhand stores for clothes.
For those not familiar with such situations, it may be difficult to grasp
why someone would not just run away. "It speaks to the psychological
coercion, the way people are controlled by fear," says Kay Buck, executive
director of the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST), in Los
Angeles. "People are told over and over that if they tell anyone, they
will be killed, or worse, family members will be killed. Coupled with
violence on a regular bases, it wears down self-esteem."
Maria's captor had rented an apartment in his garage to a young couple.
But he began bothering the young woman, Suarez recalls. "One morning,
I heard him screaming outside," she says. As she tells it, when she
rushed out, she found the young man had hit Covarrubias with a piece of wood
and killed him. When the man told her to wash the wood and put it
under the house, she did what he said. Soon, they were all arrested.
In shock and still not understanding English, Suarez had what was later
acknowledged to be terrible representation by a lawyer who was eventually
disbarred. At 21, she was convicted of first-degree murder and sent to
prison for 25 years to life, even though the man who committed the crime
said she was not involved. Remarkably, she made the best of it -
learning English, getting her GED, leading counseling sessions, and running
marathons in prison for charity.
"She's an amazing person," says Charles Song, CAST's legal services
director. "I expected to meet a bitter, angry woman who hated men, but
she was totally different, very forgiving. She refused to sue anyone
and said she just wanted a little justice."
Released from prison in 2003 after 22 years, Suarez's tribulations didn't
end there. She was immediately placed in federal detention. Immigration
law mandates the deportation of any non-citizen convicted of certain crimes,
regardless of whether they were wrongly convicted. A judge ordered her
deported, but Suarez was saved when she received a "T visa." The TVPA
provides special visas to trafficking victims for three (3) years, after
which they may apply for a green card. But regulations governing that
transition have never been completed by the Department of Homeland
Security. Maria's T visa expires May 2007.
While waiting for an answer on her immigration status, Maria took college
courses with the aim of becoming a social worker and has a part-time job
counseling domestic violence cases. She's also learning to drive.
What means most to her right now is time with her family, who visited her
regularly in prison. "The most beautiful thing is to be free - just to
wake up and take my shower...and go visit with them in the park, have a
hamburger - that's what I treasure."
She also works with CAST, speaking at conferences to educate law enforcement
officials and community groups about slavery. "It's very painful when
you feel you are in a cage... And so many people are still going through
what I went through," she says.