Slave Next Door (29 page)

she spoke only French and Swahili. The girl was taken into custody by

the Department of Child Services. “Bongo Man” was picked up and held

by the authorities. Sensing a larger issue, the police contacted the U.S.

State Department, who notified ICE in Washington, D.C., who called

ICE Connecticut, who in turn got in touch with assistant U.S. attorney

Krishna Patel. She sent ICE agents to the Meriden house to interview the

couple who were passing themselves off as the girl’s parents.

The immigration officials suspected they had uncovered a child

smuggling ring. The couple, who were from the Congo, had been using

the woman’s own children’s passports to smuggle in other children,

bringing them first to Meriden and from there across the border into

Canada. But suspicion was one thing, evidence and proof quite another.

Records kept by the couple indicated that groups of children had arrived

from Rwanda, but no record showed that they had left Connecticut. At

the time ICE interviewed the couple, only two children were still in their

control, ages seven and twelve, in addition to the girl whom “Bongo

Man” had taken in.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office ordered surveillance on the couple, and

one day ICE agents followed the woman to Newark Airport. Here she

was observed meeting a young boy, and she and the boy were taken into

“secondary inspection.” They both maintained—falsely, as it turned

out—that he was her son; both were paroled into the country and

ordered to appear within the week at the U.S. Customs and Border

Protection Office in Hartford. Instead, the woman ran, taking the boy

with her. Patel correctly assumed she would try to enter Canada with

the child, and she issued a warrant. They were caught at the border and

returned to Connecticut.53

Meanwhile, “Bongo Man” became an informant, giving up the oper-

ation as far as his knowledge of it allowed. He admitted that the woman

and her partner had been operating a trafficking ring, importing chil-

dren from Rwanda and selling them across the Canadian border. At first

blush, it would appear that the government had a solid case of human

trafficking. They had the couple, the testimony of an accomplice, and at

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least a few of the children. But certain essential ingredients were miss-

ing. Authorities hadn’t a clue as to the identity or location of the traf-

ficker who had been receiving the children in Canada; there was no

record of a transaction and no clear purpose for which the children

were allegedly sold. “Bongo Man” lacked information on this crucial

aspect of the scheme, and with his impressive criminal record he made

a less than credible witness.

Almost certainly, many children had been smuggled into the country

and trafficked and sold into Canada. But the remaining few children—

clearly terrified of being returned to Rwanda—would say nothing to

implicate their “mother,” and without victims, buyers, or even a hint as

to what they were being trafficked
into,
the burden of proof was simply

too weighty to make a case for human trafficking. The couple, Hussein

Mutungirehe and Abiba Kanzayire, were charged with thirteen counts

of smuggling children into the United States and harboring aliens.54 By

the time the verdict was delivered, they’d been in custody for a year;

Hussein was sentenced to an additional six months, while Abiba was

sentenced to time served. Both were deported to Rwanda.55 Had the

Department of Justice been able to charge and prove child trafficking,

they would have faced the possibility of life in prison.56

As the trial was taking place, the U.S. Attorney’s Office—suspecting

that the children had been stolen from, or sold by, their families in

Africa—had the FBI contact the U.S. embassies in Canada and Rwanda,

as well as various nongovernmental organizations and clergymen, in an

attempt to find relatives of the remaining children. Word was put out

that if people would agree to give a DNA sample no charges would be

filed against them; there was not a single response. The number of chil-

dren trafficked by this Congolese couple, and their subsequent fate, will

probably never be known.

The fact that these children are lost, casualties in the battle against

slavery, points to a crucial dilemma. Human trafficking is a crime that

regularly transcends borders but is normally combated with laws that

stop at the border. There is little doubt that Canadian law enforcement

would be willing to do its part to find these children and help build a

case against their traffickers. Even the poor and shaky government of

Rwanda would likely help out if given some support to do so.

International cooperation is critical, and treaties and agreements have

been forged that support that cooperation, but as with so much of the

work against human trafficking and slavery, the dedicated resources are

simply nowhere near what is needed to get the job done. Yet when we’re

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talking about children being sold as commodities, resources should

hardly be a question.

W H AT ’ S W R O N G W I T H T H I S ( M E N TA L ) P I C T U R E ?

A lot of jobs simply don’t exist anymore. Social change and especially

technological revolution can cause traditional occupations to disappear

from our lives and our memories. Take the “umbrella translator,” for

example, a job that has gone the way of the dodo. Translators provided

a one-man umbrella recycling service working from stalls or barrows on

city streets. If the wind turned your umbrella inside out and snapped its

struts, you’d simply hand it, along with a little cash, to the next umbrella

translator you met, and he’d hand you a new (well, rebuilt) umbrella. Yet

one ancient occupation never seems to go away—that of slave. Maybe

this is because, unlike the specialized umbrella translator, slaves can be

put to any use imaginable.

One of the greatest challenges America faces in ridding itself of slav-

ery is that nearly all Americans think they know exactly what slavery

looks like: an African American, in chains, picking cotton under the hot

southern sun. The problem is that this picture of American slavery is

older than, and pretty much as dead as, the umbrella translator. Both are

artifacts of the nineteenth century. But while one job has completely dis-

appeared from our memories, the image of the other is as clear and bright

in our minds as if we ourselves had seen slaves in the fields. It is right that

we should never forget the horrors of antebellum plantation slavery. But

if all we can see when we hear the word
slave
is a picture from
Gone with

the Wind,
our eyes will be shut to the slaves of the present.

Of course, the slaves in this chapter also have their echoes in the past.

Slaves were singers and acrobats in ancient Greece and Rome as well as

America in the nineteenth century. Such afflictions as mental illness and

hearing loss have never been a protection against exploitation; if any-

thing, such disabilities simply open another avenue to control by the

ruthless. Slaves have been assembled in sweatshops to make clothing for

thousands of years. The importation and sale of little African children

across borders is nothing new, and neither is the use of slaves as body

servants or hairdressers. What’s wrong with our mental picture is that

these
jobs are left out of our common image of how slaves are used.

This is America, land of the freethinker. We applaud the innovator

and entrepreneur who comes up with new ideas, angles, and products.

We’re amazed and impressed when someone makes a fortune from

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doing something as simple as writing software that helps us auction off

the junk in our garage over the Internet. And again, perhaps that’s how

we picture the innovator—as someone doing something clever, original,

and useful. But we need to remember that criminals can be clever too.

They’re often pushed much harder toward innovation than the rest of us,

since failure in their business can mean prison, while success can mean

huge profits.

The fact is that slavery can be used in almost every job that we can

dream up and then some. We have to be just as observant and imagina-

tive as the criminals if we are going to recognize the slaves next door,

singing to us in the choir, selling us a trinket for a dollar, or braiding our

hair. One of the neighbors of You Zhi Li assumed his house was just a

“flophouse for legal or illegal immigrants who were new to Las Vegas,”

so he looked no deeper, and since the residents “weren’t boisterous” or

“very noisy” they were just left alone. We tend to have our attention

drawn to the noisy and the dramatic, but slaves are usually silent, timid,

and retiring. They know that if they speak out or draw attention to

themselves they will be punished. Slaveholders make this clear—that

slaves should never answer questions, offer help, show themselves to

strangers, or reach out in any way. And if the safety of your own family

back home is on the line, or you already know the kind of beating you’ll

get, you keep quiet. To see the slave next door, we have to look past the

silence and offer that hand or word that could be the key to someone’s

freedom.

But there is another way slaves reach into our homes. Yes, people come

to America with hopes of a better life and find themselves enslaved, but

all around the world are people in slavery who, though they will never

come to the United States, produce raw materials and goods that
will.
As

the next chapter shows, in our homes and our lives every day we touch,

hold, use, value, share, and give to our children goods made by the hands

of slaves.

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6

E AT I N G , W E A R I N G , WA L K I N G ,

A N D TA L K I N G S L AV E R Y

Slavery probably crept into your life several times today, some before

you even got to work. Rolling off your bed, standing on that pretty

handwoven rug, maybe you threw on a cotton T-shirt. In the kitchen did

you make a cup of coffee, spoon in a little sugar, and then kick back

with a chocolate croissant and your laptop to check the headlines? After

a shower, maybe you drove to the station. Waiting for the train, perhaps

you made a couple of calls on your cell phone.

All in all a normal day, but slavery was involved in almost every step.

Hundreds of thousands of rugs are handwoven by slaves in the “carpet

belt” of India, Pakistan, and Nepal. Cotton is grown with slave labor in

India, West Africa, and Uzbekistan, the world’s second largest producer.

Coffee cultivation also encompasses slave labor, mainly in Africa.

Enslaved Haitian workers harvest the sugar in the Dominican Republic,

the largest exporter of sugar to the United States. The chocolate in that

croissant can also be the product of slavery, from the cocoa farms of the

Ivory Coast. Even the steel and iron in your car can be polluted by slav-

ery. From a quarter to a half of all U.S. imports of raw iron in different

forms come from Brazil.1 In that country slaves burn the forests to make

charcoal, which in turn is used to smelt ore into pig iron and iron into

steel. In America, the single largest consumer of Brazilian iron and steel

is the automotive industry, though the construction industry also uses a

large amount. Pressed against your ear, that cell phone keeps you con-

nected to friends and family but also to slavery. Cell phones (and lap-

tops and other electronics) just don’t work very well without a mineral

called tantalum. In the Democratic Republic of Congo poor farmers are

rounded up by armed gangs and enslaved to dig tantalum out of the

ground. Every one of us, every day, touches, wears, and eats products

tainted with slavery. Slave-made goods and commodities are everywhere

in our lives but, paradoxically, in small proportions. The volume is unac-

ceptable but rarely critical to our national economy or quality of life.

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And slavery in our lives is not restricted to cotton, coffee, cocoa, steel,

rugs, and cell phones. The list goes on and on, with new commodities

and products turning up all the time. Some of them, such as shrimp,

might surprise you.

H U C K L E B E R RY F I N N I T A I N ’ T

If there is an archetypal picture of rural youth, it is the barefoot lad

with the fishing pole over his shoulder. The dusty riverbanks, the lazy

heat, the straw dangling from his lip, it all says that halcyon days are

possible in our youth. Today even this picture out of Mark Twain is