Slave Next Door (2 page)

early morning till midafternoon, Maria cooked, cleaned, scrubbed, and

polished. If Maria dozed off from exhaustion, or when Sandra decided

she wasn’t working fast enough, Sandra would blast pepper spray into

Maria’s eyes. A broom was broken over the girl’s back and a few days

later, a bottle against her head. At one point, Bearden tortured the

twelve-year-old by jamming a garden tool up her vagina. That was

Maria’s workday; her “time off” was worse.

When Maria wasn’t working, Sandra would chain her to a pole in the

backyard without food or water. An eight-foot concrete fence kept her

hidden from neighbors. After chaining her, Sandra would sometimes

force Maria to eat dog feces. Then Maria would be left alone, her arms

chained behind her with a padlock, her legs chained and locked together

till the next morning, when the work and torture would begin again.

Through the long afternoon and night Maria would fade in and out of

consciousness from dehydration, and in her hunger she would some-

times scoop dirt into her mouth. Like most slaves in America, Maria

was in shock, disoriented, isolated, and dependent. To maintain con-

trol, Bearden kept Maria hungry and in pain.

About one-third of the handful of slaves freed in the United States

each year come to liberty because an average person sees something he

or she just can’t ignore. Luckily, one of the Beardens’ neighbors had to

do some work on his roof, and that probably saved Maria’s life. Looking

down over the high concrete wall into the Bearden’s backyard, the neigh-

bor saw a small girl chained up and whimpering; he called 911.

The police found Maria chained hand and foot, covered in cuts and

bruises, and suffering from dehydration and exposure. She was too

weak to walk and had to be carried to freedom on a stretcher. Her skin

was badly burned from days in the sun. (In Laredo, Texas, the
average

summer temperature is ninety-eight degrees.) Photos taken at the time

show one of her eyes bloodied and infected and thick welts and scars on

her skin where the chains had cut into her. She had not eaten in four

days. The district attorney said, “This is the worst case I’ve ever seen,

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worse than any murder. It’s tragic all the way around.” Later, at

Bearden’s trial, the policeman who found Maria wept. “She was shaking

and crying and had a scared look in her eyes. She was in severe pain,”

Officer Jay Reece testified. He explained that he had tried to remove the

chains from Maria’s arms with bolt cutters but couldn’t. As he tried to

move her arm to cut the chains, she twisted and whimpered because she

was in so much pain. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Reese

said, and sitting in the witness box, this policeman began to cry.

It is hard to imagine, but Maria was one of the lucky slaves. In

America, most slaves spend four to five years in bondage; Maria’s

enslavement lasted only seven months. Sandra Bearden was arrested,

and the Mexican government brought Maria’s parents up from Vera

Cruz. Her father blamed himself for what had happened. “We made a

decision that we thought would be good for our child, and look what

happened. I made a mistake, truly, and this is all my fault,” he said.1

Unlike most slaveholders in America, Bearden was caught and con-

victed. Like most slaves, Maria got nothing, except the fare for the

twelve-hour bus ride home. She had just turned thirteen.2

We all ask, “How could someone so abuse a child—to stake her in

the sun, feed her excrement, beat her bloody. . . . Surely, only a monster

could do this.” Yet Sandra Bearden’s treatment of Maria is not unusual.

How a seemingly normal person can descend into a spiral of violent

control and abuse of another is one of the mysteries of slaveholding—a

mystery we have set out to solve in this book.

The simple truth is, humans keep slaves; we always have. To under-

stand this, we must come to know what it is in the human heart that

makes slavery possible. For this book we set out to uncover slavery in

modern America. Our search for answers took us to slaves and slave

masters, to experts, counselors, and doctors, as well as to leaders of

government, law enforcement, and groups whose sole mission is to

rescue and support victims. Some of these stories broke our hearts,

sometimes the excuses and rationalizations made us boil with anger,

and sometimes we met real unsung heroes who gave us hope that

America can put an end to slavery once and for all.

E Q U A L O P P O R T U N I T Y S L AV E RY

Most Americans’ idea of slavery comes right out of
Roots
—the chains,

the whip in the overseer’s hand, the crack of the auctioneer’s gavel. That

was one form of bondage. The slavery plaguing America today takes a

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different form, but make no mistake, it is real slavery. Where the law

sanctioned slavery in the 1800s, today it’s illegal. Where antebellum

masters took pride in the ownership of slaves as a sign of status, today’s

human traffickers and slaveholders keep slaves hidden, making it all the

more difficult to locate victims and punish offenders. Where the slaves

in America were once primarily African and African American, today

we have “equal opportunity” slavery; modern-day slaves come in all

races, all types, and all ethnicities. We are, if anything, totally demo-

cratic when it comes to owning and abusing our fellow human beings.

All that’s required is the chance of a profit and a person weak enough

and vulnerable enough to enslave.

This is capitalism at its worst, and it is supported by a dramatic alter-

ation in the basic economic equation of slavery. Where an average slave

in 1850 would have cost the equivalent of $40,000 in modern money,

today’s slave can be bought for a few hundred dollars. This cheapness

makes the modern slave easily affordable, but it also makes him or her

a disposable commodity. For the slaveholder it’s often cheaper to let a

slave die than it is to buy medicine to keep the slave alive. There is no

form of slavery, past or present, that isn’t horrific; however, today’s slav-

ery is one of the most diabolical strains to emerge in the thousands of

years in which humans have been enslaving their fellows.

S O H O W M A N Y S L AV E S A R E W E TA L K I N G A B O U T ?

According to a U.S. State Department study, some 14,500 to 17,500

people are trafficked into the United States from overseas and enslaved

each year.
3 They come from Africa, Asia, India, China, Latin America,

and the former Soviet states. Nor are native-born Americans immune

from slavers; many are stolen from the streets of their own cities and

towns. Some sources, including the federal government, have put out

extremely high estimates of the number of U.S. citizens—primarily

children—caught in slavery. The fact is, the precise number of slaves in

the United States, whether trafficked in from other countries or enslaved

from our own population, is simply not known. Given the hidden nature

of the crime, the best numbers on offer are rough estimates. We do know

that slaves in America are found—or rather,
not
found—in nearly all

fifty states, working as commercial sex slaves, fruit pickers, construction

workers, gardeners, and domestics. They work in restaurants, factories,

laundries, and sweatshops. Each year human trafficking and slavery in

America generate millions upon millions of dollars for criminals who

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prey on the most vulnerable: the desperate, the uneducated, and the

impoverished immigrant seeking a better life. Brutalized and held in

slavery for years, those who survive face indifference, official confusion,

stigma, and shame as they struggle to regain control over their stolen

and deeply damaged lives.

While no one knows for sure how many people are enslaved in

America, a conservative estimate would be around fifty thousand and

growing. Even for those who have worked in this area for years, these

numbers are staggering. More astounding is the fact that this is a crime

that, as a rule, goes unpunished. This lack of punishment is reflected in

a remarkable parallel in American crime rates. If we accept the govern-

ment’s estimates, about seventeen thousand people are trafficked into

slavery in the United States in any given year; coincidentally about sev-

enteen thousand people are murdered in the United States each year.

Obviously, murder is the ultimate crime, but slavery comes a close

second, especially considering the other crimes associated with it, such

as rape and torture. Note that the national success rate in solving murder

cases is about 70 percent; around eleven thousand murders are “cleared”

each year. But according to the U.S. government’s own numbers, the

annual percentage of trafficking and slavery cases solved is less than

1 percent. If 14,500 to 17,500 people were newly enslaved in America in

2006, the fact is that in the same year the Department of Justice brought

charges against only 111 people for human trafficking and slavery; 98 of

them were convicted.4 And those figures apply only to people trafficked

from other countries; no measures exist for domestic slavery victims.

In July 2004 then-President Bush talked about the rate of arrests and

convictions for human trafficking in the United States: “Since 2001,

we’ve charged 110 traffickers. That’s triple the number charged in the

previous three years. We’re beginning to make good, substantial

progress. The message is getting out: We’re serious. And when we catch

you, you’ll find out we’re serious. We’re staying on the hunt.” Strong

words, but the unvarnished truth is, with less than 1 percent of the

offenders apprehended and less than 1 percent of the victims freed, the

flow of human “product” into America continues practically unchecked.

A N U N B R O K E N L E G A C Y O F B O N D A G E

This book is about slavery in America today. Yet there has always been

bondage in this country. That fact bears repetition—there has never

been a single day in our America, from its discovery and birth right up

to the moment you are reading this sentence, without slavery.

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It began when the Spaniards landed. In 1493, on his second voyage

across the Atlantic, and before even establishing a colony, Christopher

Columbus enslaved hundreds of Taino Indians and shipped them home

to Spain. The wave of armed and armored conquistadores following

Columbus brought a plague of butchery and enslavement upon the

Indians, destroying entire cultures. With the age-old rationale that any

foreign society is inferior, the Spaniards used the “God-told-me-to-do-

it” argument to justify a policy of rape, slaughter, and enslavement in

their quest for riches.

When the Spaniards found that the Indians, not surprisingly, were

dying in droves from brutality and European diseases, they began to sail

to Africa for slaves—
bozales,
as they were called. In 1518, King Charles

of Spain gave royal consent to begin what would become the 350-year

trans-Atlantic slave trade. Ultimately, every European power claiming

land in the New World followed Spain’s example. French, Spanish,

Dutch, Portuguese, and English settlers from the Canadian North to the

bottom tip of South America owned slaves. There was a heavy concen-

tration not only in the southern colonies of Virginia and Georgia but also

on the farms and docks of the northern settlements of Massachusetts

and New York. Slave labor in America became an accepted social and

economic reality. Once again, the “heathen” state of the victims, along

with the difference in their skin color, made for an easy—if false—moral

distinction in the minds of the slavers.

Most of us are not aware that following the American Revolution

Congress passed a series of increasingly stringent laws banning the

international slave trade (while leaving the
institution
of slavery

untouched), culminating in a law that made trafficking in slaves a hang-

ing offense.5 Congress, however, did little to enforce these laws, and

both slavery and the slave trade flourished until the Civil War and the

passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. It’s a safe bet that a vast major-

ity of Americans believes that slavery ended in 1865; nothing could be

further from the truth. It continued more quietly and on a smaller scale,

but without pause.

While legal emancipation might have come with the Thirteenth

Amendment, that didn’t stop the southern planters from re-enslaving

countless thousands of African Americans. Crops in the South still

needed planting, cultivating, and harvesting, and there was a vast popu-