18-year-old woman enslaved for 13 years freed in Bolivia

18-year-old woman enslaved for 13 years freed in Bolivia
Irish Sun
Wednesday 5th August, 2009
(IANS)

An 18-year-old woman who was kept confined and forced to work for nearly 13 years has been rescued by the police in the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba, the La Razon newspaper has reported.

The victim was recruited by a labour agency in the Amazonian province of Beni when she was just six and had been forced to work without compensation since, police told the newspaper Tuesday.

'We know that this woman does not understand about money and lived as a slave,' Monica Tellez, who is in charge of legal services for the law enforcement agency, told La Razon.

Police found the teenager at the business where she had lived for nearly 13 years, Tellez said, adding that the victim 'had only a roof over her head and a mattress'.

The victim 'lived with dogs', the law enforcement official said.

Police have not ruled out the possibility that the young woman was sexually abused.

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Page last updated at 11:17 GMT, Thursday, 14 May 2009 12:17 UK

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/media/images/45770000/jpg/_45770288_teresadeisy_226.jpg

Teresa Barrio, pictured with her
granddaughter, calls herself a slave

Outrage at 'slavery' in Bolivia

A senior UN official recently described as "unacceptable" the alleged forced labour of indigenous people by landowners in Bolivia. The BBC's Andres Schipani reports on the contentious issue of "slavery" from the eastern province of Santa Cruz.

Teresa Barrio was born on a patch of scrub on a Bolivian plantation. This is where she has lived and worked. This is where she expects to die. But she has no affection for this place.

The 65-year-old grandmother knows little of other people's lives but she knows her own has been harsh: toiling in fields for a pittance, sleeping in a mud hut, losing sight in one eye and losing five of seven children to disease.

There is no cash in the pockets of her ragged skirt, nor, she says, does she feel free to leave the vast farm where she has worked hard all her life.

"All my life I've been here and at the end of it I have nothing and have nowhere else to go," she says.

Her hamlet of 13 Guarani families - all workers on the plantations near the town of Camiri in Alto Parapeti region in the eastern province of Santa Cruz - built a school but ranchers destroyed it, she says.

"They didn't want us to learn, they want things to be like they always have been," Teresa's granddaughter, Deisy, says.

More:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8047960.stm