Génesis González perfectly remembers the girl she was when she was 12 years old: a small, silent servant in a house with too many rooms, marathon work days, and forced to sleep on a mattress in her boss's library.
The little money she received from her was sent directly to her mother.
“I worked in parts.
One day with the rooms, another with the dining room... because the house was very big," explains Génesis, 23 years old and who in 2014 left the Venezuelan border city of Maracaibo for the Wayúu indigenous reservation (ethnicity to which he belongs) of Kaitnamama. , in the Colombian department of La Guajira.
The level of control that her employers exercised over her exceeded any limit, she says, choosing everything from whether she could take a break to how to redo one of her tasks.
“I had to clean the windows one by one and the lady would run her hand over them to see if they still had dust,” explains this young mother.
Like her, there are thousands of Wayúu indigenous girls—the largest indigenous community in Colombia and Venezuela, with around 700,000 members on both sides of the border—who suffer child labor exploitation in “conditions of servitude,” according to Colombian experts in human trafficking and children's rights.
Minors induced, mostly by their own mothers or community leaders, to leave their home to serve in the homes of other families;
just like their mothers and grandmothers already did.
All of this, in a social context in which indigenous child labor has been normalized in the face of decades of poverty and marginalization by the Colombian State.
THE COUNTRY
interviewed in the municipality of Uribia, known as the indigenous capital of Colombia precisely because of its large Wayúu population, half a dozen women from that community who as children or adolescents were subjected to the practice of “criadazgo”, equated both by the penal code Colombian and human rights organizations to the crime of human trafficking.
Criadazgo consists of girls, in this case from Wayúu families from rural areas and impoverished environments, being taken to work as boarders in the homes of relatives or wealthier families in exchange for maintenance, and in the best of cases, access to school.
It is one of the forms that includes human trafficking, a crime that includes “sexual or labor exploitation, for the purpose of begging, organ extraction, servitude or slavery, etc.,” lists the Colombian educator. Mayerlin Vergara Pérez, winner of the 2020 Nansen Prize for Refugees, awarded by UNHCR, for her work rescuing sexually exploited minors.
“People focus a lot on sexual exploitation, and other modalities — such as servitude — tend to be made invisible,” adds this expert, regional coordinator of the Renacer Foundation in La Guajira.
#NoMeLlamoMaria
In La Guajira, Wayúu domestic workers, mostly girls, are known as “Chinitas” or “Marías,” a derogatory nickname used by some of their employers.
In 2017, the Wayúu communicator and gender specialist, Olimpia Palmar, started an online campaign to denounce this widespread practice as an act of discrimination.
“They can sell it, it has a price, it is unkempt and unkempt.
She can't speak Spanish.
She can't go to university.
“María is the acceptance of the denial of the existence of Wayúu women,” the activist denounced on the internet along with the hashtag #NoMeLlamoMaría.
María Julia rests on a hammock in her house in Uribia.Patricia Martínez Sastre
The experts on gender and child exploitation consulted cannot determine with certainty when this practice began to expand in Latin America, but women who have suffered it as children assure that little has changed, and that it continues to be normalized in Colombia.
Sometimes mothers themselves encourage these agreements, in order to give their daughters a better life.
But it is common that what was agreed upon — monthly salary, access to school, etc.
— is not respected once girls travel hundreds of kilometers and find it very difficult to return home.
Although the Wayúu indigenous people are traditionally artisans, and their ancestral lands have an important reserve of minerals and hydrocarbons, in the department of La Guajira 6 out of every 10 people suffer from monetary poverty, according to 2022 data from the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE). ), and almost 40% cannot feed themselves adequately due to lack of resources, according to the Association of Food Banks of Colombia.
This, together with the lack of an educational shelter — with departmental school absenteeism of more than 35% among children over 5 years old, according to official data — makes Wayúu children “much more likely to face child labor exploitation” than non-indigenous, according to a 2023 report from the International Labor Organization (ILO). In Latin America alone, nearly 14 million children between 5 and 17 years old are today subjected to child labor, according to the same report.
The indifference caused by criadazgo in Colombia, both in society and in the progressive Government of Gustavo Petro, is not entirely an exception.
Also in Paraguay, some 47,000 girls and adolescents were exploited as servants more than a decade ago, according to figures from the Secretariat for Children of the Paraguayan Government from 2011. “It was normal to see girls of 12 or 13 years old cleaning the sidewalks of the house very early, or in the supermarket or in the shopping malls.
You could tell that they were servants,” recalls Faustina Alvarenga, co-founder of the Articulation of Indigenous Women of Paraguay (MIPY).
But the practice, says this expert, has been disappearing in recent years given the high schooling rate, even in rural areas (96% among children between 10 and 14 years old, according to 2022 data), in addition to strong awareness campaigns. , educational and legislative changes for the protection of minors.
Part of this social evolution, explains Alvarenga, occurred after the violent death in 2016 of Carolina Marín.
This 14-year-old peasant girl was beaten to death by the partner of her midwife-tutor, with whom she lived in the town of Vaquería, about 240 km from Asunción.
Today in Paraguay there is a somewhat more reliable registry, with adolescents registered with the Municipal Council for the Rights of Boys, Girls and Adolescents (CODENI), and authorized to work, from the age of 12, a maximum of 4 or 6 hours a day. , as long as they continue studying and never at night.
“Yes, there will be people who believe that we are still in the Middle Ages, right?” adds Alvarenga about the difficulty of eradicating this abuse.
“But it is no longer so normalized,” he adds, although he claims that there is a lack of data and analysis of how this exploitation is affecting the indigenous population bordering Brazil.
Meanwhile, in Colombia criadazgo is a reality that few know about.
And those who do find it so attached to the social fabric that there is currently no policy aimed at mitigating this particular type of trafficking.
“I didn't let myself get hit”
Like González and Marín, Colombian Edilia Ipuana was only 14 years old when she began working for a wealthy “alijuna” family, a word in the Wayuunaiki language with which the Wayúu describe non-indigenous people.
It was 1987 and she had just moved to Maracaibo, where the black gold
boom
seduced both nationals and foreigners.
The agreement that her older sister, also a domestic worker, made with the family seemed simple: the girl would be in charge of taking care of a six-month-old baby and completing household chores.
In exchange, she would receive food and a roof to sleep under.
Edilia Ipuana, in Uribia. Patricia Martínez Sastre
The midwife, a businesswoman, and her husband, manager of the Santa Rita municipality racetrack, agreed to pay her about 60 bolivars a month (about $13 at the exchange rate at the time).
On weekends, the girl could sleep at her sister's house, but even there she couldn't forget what she describes today as a daily humiliation.
Every day, she worked from sunrise to 11:00 p.m.
Her bosses did not allow her to use the same bathroom as them, to taste the food that she painstakingly prepared for them, or to use the same dishes as hers.
She had no time or strength left to go to school.
“The lady was bad, but I didn't let myself be hit,” says Edilia, 49, remembering how she got angry when she accidentally bleached some clothes while she was learning how to wash clothes.
However, after six months she couldn't take it anymore and she returned to her indigenous reservation in the Colombian Caribbean, where she shepherded until she was 16 years old.
Unlike Edilia, her niece Lorena, 25, appreciates the opportunity to be a domestic worker.
She claims that it is what has allowed her to go back to school.
Since she was 17, she has worked for a wealthy family in Uribia, and for a few months now, she has been studying high school at night.
She says that the woman has always treated her “like a daughter,” giving her clothes and taking care of her.
But she has never been registered with social security and she earns about 300,000 Colombian pesos a month ($75) for eight hours a day;
almost a quarter of the minimum wage (about $290).
With that money, she covers her educational expenses and those of her three younger siblings, in addition to financially helping her mother, who also worked as an irregular domestic worker until old age.
“I want to finish [my studies]
so I
can have a better future,” says Lorena, surrounded by hammocks and kitchen utensils in the yotojoro (cactus wood) house where she lives with her mother — where there is no water service. , collection or electricity——, in an indigenous neighborhood on the outskirts of Uribia.
Her dream: to study nursing at university.
Unpunished sexual assaults
When a minor is completely dependent on her employers, the risk of abuse goes beyond the workplace.
Of the seven women interviewed for this story, four said they had suffered some type of sexual assault or abuse in their years as domestic workers.
His attackers enjoyed total impunity and were not reported.
Many girls are treated as a possession, coming to believe that not only their time, but also their body, belongs to their bosses, experts on gender and human trafficking agree.
“They don't just see you as an object that can clean the house, wash clothes or make food.
She is also seen as a sexual object due to that same power relationship,” explains Mayerlin Vergara, from the Renacer Foundation.
After herding goats until she was 16, Edilia had to work for another family in order to survive.
One night, she claims, her midwife's husband tried to rape her in her room.
The young woman says that she struggled until she broke free and locked herself in another room, terrified, to wait for the return of her midwife.
“My whole body hurt,” remembers this mother of three daughters, proud today that none of them have to work in other people's homes.
She never reported the assault.
The other women interviewed for this article didn't either, some saying they didn't even know they could do it.
Deomaris González, 34, was sexually assaulted when she was 14. The woman she worked for then, in Maracaibo, did not learn her name and called her “girl.”
In addition, they made her “eat separately, clean the house and wash the dogs,” says this mother of four children.
She had to leave school at 13 and sent the little she earned to her mother and six of her siblings.
One night, when the woman was away, one of her sons — who was twice her age — began to touch her in a sexual way, until she ran away.
The next day, she says, she left the house without receiving her salary.
Today she tells EL PAÍS that she cannot imagine her 7-year-old daughter Esmeralda — a petite, playful girl with green eyes — working as a maid, alone and far from her.
She explains that she suffered a great uprooting, because at the age of 18 she had already worked in five different houses, out of pure necessity.
For many indigenous girls like them, especially in La Guajira, not working is not even an option, and the abuse and mistreatment that they may suffer in other people's homes rarely pierce the veil of a society that prefers to look the other way.
The Colombian Institute of Family Welfare (ICBF) is the entity in charge of ensuring the protection of girls, boys and adolescents.
However, it does not collect any data on the prevalence of human trafficking for bondage in the country;
which complicates its eradication.
The only information provided by this entity to EL PAÍS speaks of 4,893 minor victims of child labor, nationwide, whose rights have been restored from 2019 to 2023. Among them, there are only three children officially rescued in all of La Guajira.
According to Vergara, Renacer coordinator in that department, it is urgent to carry out intercultural dialogues, which encompass several jurisdictions, in order to take the first step in the fight against trafficking: identify the crime and those who suffer from it.
But it is also necessary, says this expert, “to provide timely attention focused on victims and develop joint prevention processes between communities and institutions.”
A dialogue that has been almost non-existent for decades.
For Deomaris, Colombian boys and girls should, like so many others, be able to spend their childhood studying and not in other people's homes, and she asks the workers to defend themselves.
“To all the women who work as domestic workers today, I would tell them not to allow themselves [to be mistreated by their employers],” she exclaims.
“We are also human beings and we are equal to them.”
***
This report was made possible thanks to the financial support of Meridian International Center through the IVLP Impact Award.
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