United States 

- Latina Women and Children at Risk

.

Exploitation of Latinas in the U.S. Workplace

Report - 1994 - Montgomery County, Maryland

The Sexual and Economic Exploitation of 

Latin-American Immigrant Women in 

Montgomery County, Maryland

By: Charles M. Goolsby, Jr. - February, 1994

Also available as an Microsoft Word Document

1994 Report on the Sexual Exploitation of Latina Women & Girls in Montgomery County, Maryland workplaces and communities.   Our first report on these issues - from 1994 In response to repeated failures to get the legal and press establishment of Montgomery County and the greater Washington, DC area to respond positively to the urgent needs of Latina victims of workplace and community sexual assault, the author wrote the below report and has distributed it to many local police, press and advocacy organizations during the past 9 years. - Chuck Goolsby     Montgomery County, MD -- 1994  Charles M. Goolsby, Jr.'s 1994 Report on the Sexual Exploitation of Latina immigrant Women and Girls in Montgomery County, Maryland EXCERPT ...All of my work in Latin-American immigrant victim-advocacy has resulted from victims having approached me seeking help. Repeatedly, the official reaction of cleaning contract companies working within Montgomery County to my polite raising of these issues has been to do the following: 1) silence any discussion of these issues by the use of gross intimidation against the victims and myself, 2) fire or force the victims out, and 3) back-up the actions of the perpetrators, protecting them from legal trouble. Latin-American immigrant women have thus gotten the message loud and clear on many occasions that they have become a cheap, disposable resource in the American work-place, underpaid, overworked, and often forced into sexual submission while government and commerce knowingly turn their backs. At this time I have found it necessary to write this report. Since 1988 I have formally presented this information to many persons-in-authority. Time after time, these well-educated, well-paid officials of public and commercial organizations have said "SO WHAT!" This report is a substitute for the muffled CRY OF RAPE from victims who are tired of having become the sexual 'cannon-fodder' of America... - Charles M. Goolsby, Jr. - February, 1994       Also see our page on U.S. Workplace Exploitation focusing on workplace abuse in Montgomery County, MD, and specifically on cases found in this report.   Perspective on why the below report needed writing: From: Chuck Goolsby's Advocacy Newsletter - 1999-2000: Detailed information on Latin Women Worker/Harassment & Other Exploitation Issues.     True Cases from the Frontlines of Impunity The below three workplace sexual and physical abuse cases are all 100% factual.  These cases, which are detailed accounts from the 1994 report, speak for the many victims involved.  These cases also document the voiceless cries of tens if not hundreds of thousands of working women and girls across the United States who face rape and coercion with impunity largely because anti-immigrant hostility and apathy  from government agencies allows it to happen. That must change!  Only public awareness and public expressions of outrage to elected officials, police administrators and local prosecutors will lead to improvement.  Nothing else seems to motivate change. Deliberate Inaction was the official government and corporate response in all of these cases. Workplace Rape: Rockville, Maryland - Case 1 Workplace Rape: Rockville, Maryland - Case 2   Workplace Rape: Rockville, Maryland - Case 3

Comments by Franciscan priest Bartolome de las Casas to  Spain's King Charles-I in 1519, regarding the abuse of Enslaved Indigenous-peoples of the Carib Nation in the Caribbean Islands under Spain's control.

In 1994 in Montgomery County, Maryland and nationwide, Latin-American immigrant women and teen-aged girls are being subjected to work-place exploitation that differs very little from the nightmare suffered by these enslaved Native-Caribbean women in 1519. Many low-wage immigrant workers are routinely subjected to sexual and physical assault, sexual harassment, wage abuses, and the use of illegal threats, reprimands, and firings to silence them.

Would you allow yourself or a loved-one to submit to these outrages?

This hidden sub-culture of crime and human-rights violations affects the daily lives of many immigrant women and teens in our community.

They want and deserve our help!

Surprisingly, local corporations and government entities have at times engaged in intimidation and bureaucratic foot-dragging to deliberately silence this issue. Silence protects the guilty and allows these abuses to flourish. This silence and government inaction sends these victims a very strong message:

They have no rights under law!

Written in honor of human rights activist Ms. Rigoberta Menchu, the first Nobel Peace Prize winner of Mayan nationality, whose family perished in the Guatemalan Holocaust during the 1980's.

Table of Contents:

Definitions used within this document.

About the Author.

A.  Latin-American background:

1: Degrees of the exploitation of women.

2: Urban employment and the rights of women.

3: Rural women and the modern plantation.

4: The five-century oppression of Native-Peoples.

B.  U.S. American background:

1: Intervention and investment in Latin-America.

2: The 1980's wave of immigration and reaction to it.

3: Government relations with the immigrant community.

C.  The present and future

1: A turning of one's back on innocent victims of abuse.

2: The nature of contract office cleaning work.

3: The criteria used in relating this chronology of incidents.

4: A chronology of actual cases within Montgomery County, Md.

 

This report proposes to demonstrate the following premises:

There is a real, widespread epidemic of criminal and civil-law violations being perpetrated against innocent adult-women and minor teen-aged girls in many work-places in Montgomery County, Md., in the Washington, D.C. area, and nationally.

The targets-of and the victims-of this illegal activity are Latin-American women and minor teen-aged girls who work within the low-wage service-business economy, especially within the commercial office cleaning, hotel, and restaurant industries.

The perpetrators of these illegal acts are mostly male supervisors in these industries.

The many victims of these illegal activities are subjected to sexual assault (which often includes rape), physical assault, and very coercive forms of sexual harassment.

The victims are also subjected to a condoned but illegal system of reprimands, wage abuses, and firings, often for refusing to accept the sexual demands of supervisors.

The victims of these illegal acts are usually Central-American immigrant refugees from war and poverty. Salvadorans and Guatemalans are the most frequent victims.

Native (Indigenous), and Mestiza (mixed Spanish/Native) women are often targeted.

The victims do not want these horrible abuses to continue, but they are absolutely dependent on these low-wage service jobs for the very survival of their children, themselves, and their families back home. Many of the victims are single mothers.

The victims and their coworkers are subjected to many forms of coercion and intimidation by these supervisor/perpetrators, which has the deliberate purpose of silencing the victims to protect the perpetrators and allow these abuses to continue.

Latin-American social patterns rooted in the philosophy of machismo, modern forms of agrarian feudalism, anti-Native (Indian) abuses, as well as patterns of violence from Central and South America's many civil-wars all contribute both to the abusive actions of the perpetrators and also to the often submissive behavior of the victims.

This true epidemic of criminal and civil illegality is very-well entrenched in the daily business life of Montgomery County, Md., which is the focus of this report.

The victims encounter American indifference to stopping this epidemic of crime, due in part to anti-Latin-American racism, anti-immigrant hostility, fear of job competition, anti-women hostility, and the view that low-wage workers are inferior.

The victims encounter indifference to their plight from American business managers and owners who run low-wage service-based businesses, due to the above attitudes, due also to the use of intimidation as a legal strategy to protect the business from employee lawsuits, and sometimes due to a bond of common interest (participation in the exploitation of these women) between the perpetrators and their management.

The perpetrators of these illegal acts have tended to receive strong backing from the management and ownership of these service businesses, including some very large local corporations. This support includes the calculated management approval of the use of illegal intimidation tactics against the victims, such as issuing unjustified reprimands, threatening the victims with firing, verbally ordering victims to keep quiet about abuse, and demands that victims not file formal government complaints.

The perpetrators have also received strong backing for this illegal activity from their business clients. In the commercial office-cleaning industry, for example, cleaning companies contract with building owners, management firms, or tenants. The author has witnessed both a local federal agency and one of the largest corporations within Montgomery County, Md. (both were cleaning contract clients) participate actively in deliberate intimidation aimed at stopping victims from filing legal complaints.

The victims have a fear of law-enforcement and government agencies based upon the very-real history of the use of public, police, and military forces in Latin-America to enforce the will of land-owners, corrupt public officials, and dictators.

Very little government informational literature, electronic media and public speaking is effectively targeted at our vast, tax-paying Latin-American immigrant public regarding their rights to be protected by civil and criminal law from victimization.

The victims have at-times received 'the brush-off' from the Montgomery County agencies charged with enforcing civil and criminal laws which should protect them.

One victim was told to "wait for more abuse [sexual harassment and retaliation] to occur before filing a complaint", one assault victim was laughed at in a County Police Station in 1988, and one VERY serious complaint was declared by the Human Relations Commission to be lost, after it foot dragged for 13 months.

Introduction:

The rapid growth in the Latin-American immigrant population in the Washington, D.C. area and within Montgomery County, Maryland has brought about a set of social and economic conditions which allow for the widespread work-place abuse of Latin-American women and teen-aged girls within our community. These conditions exist at a crisis level, in the opinion of the author, and require urgent action by government and private organizations to stop them. All who read this report can help end this abuse.

Urgent action is needed by our elected officials and others to restore the full, basic rights of all immigrant women and children within Montgomery County to live in peace and to enjoy the same rights which other residents of Montgomery County enjoy. These include the right to the dignity of the unquestioned ownership of one's own body, the right to live and work within Montgomery County without being subjected to sex-on-demand and other blatant and unpunished forms of sexual harassment and assault by persons in positions of authority, and the right to job security without being subjected to a widely condoned system of random and arbitrary punishments and firings in the low-wage service sector, which are both illegal and widespread within Montgomery County. These abuses are very real, every-day threats to the lives and the dignity of many Latin-American immigrant women and teenagers.

The analysis of the issues covered within this report may introduce the reader to some new and eye-opening perspectives on an urgent problem which literally affects the daily-life of thousands of working women and teen-aged girls who are your neighbors, who may go to, or whose children may go to your children's schools, and who cross paths with you every day. The women and teen-aged girls who are the subject of this report have come to the United States seeking the opportunity to escape war, live in peace, work hard (which they are well-known for), and contribute their many talents to this society.

Unfortunately, a combination of the historical legacy of the oppression of women within Latin America, (which has migrated here with the immigrant population), the serious post-traumatic stresses affecting many Latin-American war refugees, illiteracy, a lack of English skills, poverty, the tight job market, employer exploitation and job-discrimination, immigration reform, racial hostility, and government's inexplicable deaf-ear on these issues have all converged upon the immigrant community.

The convergence of these complex factors has resulted in a very simple reality in Montgomery County, Maryland and by extension nationwide. That reality is that unlike her African-American, European-American and other native-born American sisters, who generally have a much better understanding of criminal and civil laws and usually know something about the legal process and how to access it, poor, tax-paying Latin-American immigrant women and teen-aged girls have been left virtually abandoned when it comes to getting local government and the business community to protect them from being routinely subjected to the most severe forms of sexual harassment and sexual assault within the modern American work-place. The history-of and the reality-of this crisis is the subject of this report.

While Montgomery County prides itself on being a place where the respect for human-rights is a top priority, the reality is very different. Minorities in general, women, and especially immigrants are subjected daily to abuses that few other residents ever face. When they complain, they are stepped on.

Definitions used within this document.

This paper attempts to bring about a cross-cultural communication with the objective of resolving a serious crisis within our communities. Several terms used within this document require clarification.

As this paper investigates working conditions for women, that term is defined. American is also described. Latin-American, Latino, Hispanic, Hispanic-American, Native-American, Indigenous-American and Indian are all debatable terms. Not all Spanish speakers from the Americas accept any one of these terms to describe themselves. Some reject the above terms in favor of identification by national origin.

A similar argument on semantics exists within the community of the original, indigenous (Native) inhabitants of all of the Americas. I have made an effort within this paper to settle on a set of standard terms which are clearly understandable and which respect the dignity of each of these ethnic communities.

The term 'Women', and also the phrase 'Women and Teen-aged girls' for the purposes of this report refers to both adult-women and teen-aged girls within the work-force in the United States.

The term 'Native' is used within this document to refer to the original inhabitants of the western hemisphere (indigenous inhabitants). Many Native-Peoples view all of the original inhabitants of the Americas as having a common identity, and others prefer tribal or nation-state based identity.

The Native nations mentioned within this paper include the Mayan Native-People resident in the modern nation-states of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico; the Inca Native-People from the Aymara and Quechua speaking groups resident in Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, and many smaller nations of Native-Peoples inhabiting the Americas, totaling 80 million people.

The term 'Mestizo' refers to people of combined Spanish and Native-Latin-American heritage. Within countries in Latin-America, the great majority of the population is of Mestizo heritage.

The term 'Latin-American' is used in reference to all residents of those American countries where Spanish is the national language. This includes residents of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, The Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

The term 'U.S. American' is used within this document to refer to the United States of America. This term is used to distinguish between the U.S. and the rest of the Americas. Latin-American school history and geography courses as well as daily conversation all refer to 'America' (North-America, Central-America, The Caribbean, and South-America) as a single multi-state entity.

The term 'Machista' refers to men who follow the social philosophy of 'machismo' (macho-ism). Machismo represents a lifestyle which involves a view of women as human-beings who are literally inferior to men. Machismo impacts heavily on social-justice for women in Latin-America.

Neo-Feudalism refers to modern survivals of the medieval European agrarian-based social-system of feudalism. It enforces the strict separation-of and exploitation-of women and 'lower-classes.'

About the author -

Before I expand on this topic, I will detail some of the qualifications and life-experiences which I believe allow me to speak out with accuracy and authority on these very charged legal and social issues.

I, Charles M. Goolsby, Jr. have made the defense of basic human rights a cornerstone of my life work for over 20 years. A am a man of African-American, Muskogee Native-American, and European decent who respects and intensely celebrates ALL of those ancestral heritages. I thank my parents for providing me with a good basic education and a good compass of moral common sense in this life. Professionally, I am a computer systems engineer with a very large federal computer services contractor in Rockville, Md. I have worked part-time for the Montgomery County Government since 1987. I am currently a part-time civilian information systems support specialist with the County Police Department.

I speak to these issues from the point of view of a veteran of over fifteen years of both paid and voluntary community service work within the Latin-American community of Washington, D.C. and Montgomery County, Md. During the period from 1978 to 1981 I worked actively with many community service organizations, including: Centro Adelante - working with housing and immigration issues; the Latin-American Youth Center - involved in on-the-job training for young people; the School of Rumba -the area's first Latino music school teaching Afro-Caribbean traditional and modern music, where I was a student and then an instructor; and El Centro de Arte, a long-existing focal-point of Latino folkloric music, dance, and theater in the D.C. area. In addition, I have performed with over two dozen folkloric and popular music ensembles in the Latino community. My work with these and other community groups and the many friendships that grew from that work gave my life focus during my twenties, allowed me to serve my community in many ways, and gave me complete fluency in written and spoken Spanish.

During 1980 and 1981, I worked in the production and announcing of radio news and Latin-music programming on one of the D.C. area's first bilingual programs, Salsa De Las Americas on WPFW-FM, 89.3. The "Sauce of the Americas" program combined popular Spanish language music with weekly discussions of issues covered infrequently elsewhere, such as news about Central-America's civil wars.

During this same time period I assisted in coordinating the public-relations, musical entertainment, and logistics for over 30 public cultural events, mostly benefit fundraisers for non-profit Latino community groups. I provided calendar of events information for the Spanish language newspapers El-Barrio and EL-Latino, and for the radio show Salsa De Las Americas. I also produced my own calendar of events newsletter called 'What's Happening This Week,' which publicized non-profit fundraiser events.

Also during the early 1980's, I personally identified over ninety non-profit organizations within the Dupont Circle to Columbia Heights 'Columbia Road corridor'. Seeing a lack of public access to these services, I assisted many organizations, such as El Hogar De La Familia (The Family Place, providing support to teenage mothers), the Ayuda legal services agency, and the Andromeda mental health center by providing more effective distribution for their public-service literature and public calendars-of-events.

My voluntary work with folkloric groups has included those representing the cultures of Bolivia and Chile: with the Andean quartet Rumisonko ['Heart of Stone' in Quechua, an Incan Native language]; Colombia: with Grupo Tyrona, of which I was musical director in 1984, with El Ballet Folclorico de Patricia Medina, and with Colombianos Unidos, a thirty member folkloric dance ensemble of mostly teen-aged members, with whom I performed many times at the Expo '92 world's fair in Seville, Spain; the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Puerto Rico: with the folkloric Quintet 'Esto No Tiene Nombre' [This Group Doesn't Have a Name]; and also Ecuador: with the folkloric-dance and music troupe Ruminahui ['Face of Stone' in Quechua]. I have also performed with and promoted many commercial Latin bands.

Since the mid-1980's I have focused on putting-to-work the social-service advocacy skills which I learned in the Adam's-Morgan community of Washington, D.C. to assist Latin-American immigrants within Montgomery County, Md. As a well-known local musician, as a person fluent in written and spoken Spanish, and as a concerned community resident who knows about Maryland human relations and employment law, I have worked hard to help fill a growing void within the local immigrant community.

The void which I try to help fill involves doing my share to improve the quality of life and defend the dignity of a segment of our community who are currently suffering severely under the strains of mass-joblessness, are being locked out of the job-market due to racism, increased immigration law enforcement and other factors, are abused on the job without redress, and have a real lack of access to the legal and social services which they pay for with their taxes just as much as any other ethnic group in our County.

Since 1988 I have assisted six Latin-American immigrant women in beginning formal complaints of race and sex discrimination related sexual harassment and assault before the Human Relations Commission of Montgomery County, Md. I have intervened for, sought legal assistance for, and advocated for victims of sexual assault, sexual harassment, non-payment of wages, and against the widespread use of arbitrary and discriminatory work-place punishments and firings of Latin-American immigrant women injanitorial jobs. These illegal acts have occurred, and still continue to occur, within many private, federal, and local government office buildings located within Montgomery County, Md.

All of my work in Latin-American immigrant victim-advocacy has resulted from victims having approached me seeking help. Repeatedly, the official reaction of cleaning contract companies working within Montgomery County to my polite raising of these issues has been to do the following: 1) silence any discussion of these issues by the use of gross intimidation against the victims and myself, 2) fire or force the victims out, and 3) back-up the actions of the perpetrators, protecting them from legal trouble.

Latin-American immigrant women have thus gotten the message loud and clear on many occasions that they have become a cheap, disposable resource in the American work-place, underpaid, overworked, and often forced into sexual submission while government and commerce knowingly turn their backs.

At this time I have found it necessary to write this report. Since 1988 I have formally presented this information to many persons-in-authority. Time after time, these well-educated, well-paid officials of public and commercial organizations have said "SO WHAT!" This report is a substitute for the muffled CRY OF RAPE from victims who are tired of having become the sexual 'cannon-fodder' of America.

A Latin-American Background - 1: Degrees of the exploitation of women.

The topic of women's rights relative to the 'third-world' generally brings to mind the outrageous practices of 'bride-burning' and the murder of baby-girls in rural India, wife-murder without penalty in Brazil, and the sexual enslavement of girls and women in the sex-for-sale industries in The Philippines and Thailand. The above issues cover perhaps the most gruesome and vile aspects of the exploitation of women in poverty. The U.S. American press has covered these issues as being typical of the third-world.

Sex-based oppression within the Americas is, we like to believe, much less severe than the above examples. Civil and criminal laws protecting women from exploitation are well-developed, if not even close to perfect, within the United States. While a whole range of social and economic relationships between men and women within the U. S. give wide latitude for the continued exploitation of women by men, the law as written, and the increasing economic and political power of women does give some degree of control over one's options and alternatives. The recent appointment of the Honorable Ruth Bader-Ginsburg as the second woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court will probably speed that trend.

Latin-American cultures are diverse and dynamic. Many positive things may be said in relation to Latin-American concepts of family interaction and personal interactions within communities. These cultures, when compared to cultural norms within the United States, may be said to be spiritually healthier than our own in many respects. The importance of religion, the intense celebration of cultural heritage, the very close interaction between parents, children, extended family, and friends, the minimal importance of racial difference in most Latin countries, and the nearly open inclusion within many Latin-American countries of African, Native-American, Spanish, and other world traditions within the common national culture are mostly very positive lessons which U.S. Americans can and should learn more about.

Having said that, Latin-American cultures also have many deeply-rooted traditions which expose women to severe exploitation in daily life. The heritage of European agrarian-feudalism, the (related) exploitation of people based on their social status and position in society, poverty, and the (ongoing) violence and abuses surrounding the conquest of Native-peoples have all worked against women's rights.

Also, the philosophy of machismo, a widely followed male code of honor and conduct, (especially in rural areas) places strict limits on, and very clearly defines, the 'correct' behavior of men and women. Machismo legitimizes the domestic abuse of women and work-place economic and sexual exploitation.

In addition, while Latin-American countries do accept many Native-Peoples and heavily Native mestizos (mixed-bloods) into it's cultural folds, the reality is that Native-Peoples are the most exploited and impoverished social class/ethnic-group in all of the Americas. The Native and Mestizo rebellion which is occurring in Chiapas, Mexico at the time of this writing affirms that reality. That reality holds true in regard to the sexual and economic exploitation of rural and urban Native-Latin-American women.

It would be unfair to single out Latin-America regarding these problems, My purpose here is to explain the historical roots of the exploitation of Latin-American immigrant women as a background for understanding why that group, as immigrants to the U.S., are vulnerable to such widespread exploitation.

A Latin-American Background - 2: Urban employment and the rights of women.

It has only been within the last ten years that (mostly urban) women have entered the work-place in large numbers in Latin-America. Expanding economies, huge rates of inflation, single parenthood, and poverty-driven need all affect that trend. Within Latin-America, business is based on trading favors for favors. What favors do you think Latin-American women are expected to trade in the urban work-place?

Two personal friends from South America have related to me stories of their being subjected to attempted rape by potential employers during their first job interviews as teenagers. A friend from Peru stated that she had to break a lot of furniture to get out of that situation. She also stated that denouncing the assailant to the police would have been impossible, as he was a wealthy member of the community, capable of buying-off the judicial entities involved. A friend from Ecuador also made a super-human effort to escape her first job interview/attempted rape. She did not report this violent assault to anyone.

I have had casual conversations with several Latin-American men regarding this topic. Conversing with an Ecuadorian accountant and businessman during a visit to Quito, Ecuador, he stated to me that "well, of course, any woman who applies for an office job must also 'like' the boss." Literally translated, a female applicant for office employment is expected to sleep with the boss. In a recent conversation with a Colombian friend, I explained to him the nature of a sexual abuse case involving Latin-American women workers in Maryland. He stated unsympathetically that "If a male supervisor has several female workers working under him, he has the right to sexual privileges from them". This man regards himself as a "Machista" (macho-ist). A Salvadoran cleaning supervisor, who is a party to a severe incident of sexual exploitation of women workers under his control, was heard stating that 'America gives too much freedom to women, that's what's wrong with it'. This cleaning supervisor also calls himself a 'Machista'.

In December, 1993 I asked a Guatemalan friend of mine to describe any incidents known to him of the sexual-economic coercion of working women within his home country. My friend proceeded to explain to me how a major retailer, which he described as being like a Sears and a supermarket combined, traditionally advertised during the winter holidays for temporary help (as is done here, of course). According to my friend, this large retailer systematically accepted job applications only from women, and then only from the young women whom they regarded as being the prettiest. The male managers would make it known to these high school girls that permanent employment was available to them in the company after their graduation. The only requirement was accepting a sexual relationship with those managers now! My friend noted that these managers could buy everyone's silence if needed.

My Guatemalan friend mentioned in the above paragraph related to me a second incident in which a female high school friend, who was tall, blond (uncommon in Guatemala), and was 'beautiful' by Guatemalan standards, was asked by a Chief of Police to come work for him. This teen-aged-girl soon became pregnant with the child of her boss. An abortion was arranged for by the girl's employer to hide the situation from the Police Chief's wife. The sexual relationship apparently continued after the abortion.

Throughout Latin-America, and in many other countries of the world, women and teenagers who enter the urban work-force are forced to submit to sexual pressures that are (in theory) illegal in the U.S.

A Latin-American Background - 3: Rural women and the modern plantation.

The agrarian-based social system of feudalism as it existed in Europe still has followers within atin-America. Feudal society is heavily dependent upon the differential treatment of various social classes, and women are one social class which faced and faces major disadvantages under feudalism and it's modern spin-offs. Regardless of one's personal politics, few can deny that the last half century of civil wars in Latin-America have been movements of whole societies away from agrarian feudalism and toward democracy. Women have experienced many improvements in social and economic power and status with these changes. These societal changes have not caught on as fast in rural areas as they have in the cities.

During conversations with friends in Quito, the capitol of Ecuador, South America, I learned that some of the sexual practices common under European feudalism still exist today. While the country of Ecuador is one of the most stable and well educated in South America (the 'Switzerland' of South America), it's rural provinces are dotted by plantations. Ecuador's population is 40% full-blooded Native Americans, and 50% mixed Spanish and Native-American, 5% African-descended, and about 5% full-blooded European. On most of these plantations the descendants of the Spaniards and mixed-blood Ecuadorians manage their operations with cheap Native labor, who (oddly enough) are the original owners of that land. These farm workers usually live on the landowner's property. It is common in daily conversation to hear talk of how such-and-such a plantation owner is the father of many of the children of the Native-women on his plantation. The lighter complexion of these children is one barometer of the extent of this behavior on a given plantation. In 1992, 1 million Native-Ecuadorians held a strike to demand an end to this plantation system. These social practices exist in many Latin-American countries.

This custom, oddly enough, is exactly the topic of a Spanish language video-cassette available at Montgomery County, Md. Public Libraries: 'Sol en Llamas', (Sun In Flames) which relates how the debutante daughter of a wealthy 'White' Mexican plantation owner goes through a spiritual crisis as she comes to find out that she is the half-sister of many of the Native-Mexican children of the plantation's farm workers whom she grew up with. This film takes place during the 1960's in Mexico. Mexico produces the majority of films for the Latin-American market. I have also seen the theme of the sexual demands on female job applicants related on-screen in Mexican films. It is treated as a mere fact of life.

On February 1, 1994, a National Public Radio news piece about the Chiapas, Mexico rebellion stated that the (now waning) feudal plantation system there treated Natives as a mere natural resource, like lumber. They were expected to work hard from infancy till death in exchange for basic provisions!

From the time of the Roman emperor Caligula (according to Fellini's film about him), in which he got, by way of his power relationship with his peons, the first sexual experience with just-married brides, to medieval Germany, where the local baron also got first dibs on new brides, to the southern U.S. American plantation, where (according to 'Roots') the overseer got to sleep with the slave girl (one more time) the night before her wedding, to the modern neo-feudal plantation in parts of Latin-America, the story is the same. Women were and are treated as property, and in the feudal plantation system, the plantation owner AND HIS SUPERVISORS had and have the right to use his 'property' the way they see fit. The rural and urban work-place abuse of Latin-American women has it's roots in this history.

A Latin-American background - 4: The five-century oppression of Native-Peoples.

As if this mix of social chemistries weren't enough, consider the effect that civil war and wars of Native- American genocide have had on the exploitation of Native-American women within Latin-America. As a person of African and Maskoke Native-American decent, the exploitation and modern-era genocide of Native-People in all of the Americas is a subject I've followed for twenty years, and which I have worked actively to stop. Of the Native-Americans within my family, I will relate that one of my great-grandmothers, who was Native-American, was 'married to?' a Caucasian man when she was 13 and he MUCH older. Does one get the picture? This story has repeated itself across the Americas for 500 years.

The 'Native-wars' within Latin-America were carried out differently than the methods of whole-sale extermination and 'reservationization' (sic) carried out against Native tribes within the United States. The English colonists tended to migrate to America in family groups, and progeny tended to also be European. Within Latin-America, the male conquistador migrated by the thousands to Latin-America seeking fame and fortune. Men vastly outnumbered women among the Spanish colonists. Intermarriage with Native-American and African women was commonplace, and the uniquely U.S. American concept of segregation never even came close to stepping foot in Latin-America. Also, the Inca empire in western South-America, the Maya Empire in Central-America, and the Aztec Empire in Mexico were all technologically close to the conquering Spaniards. Despite the violent Spanish overthrow of these empires, mass-murder of Native-Peoples had tended to be restricted to rebellion (liberation) control. This general 'policy' towards Native-Peoples changed during the early 1900's, and mass-murders of innocent Native-People have occurred with frequency in a number of Latin-American countries, up to this present day. This 'change' grew mainly out of the U.S. market (and thus U. S. corporate) demands for arable lands for export crops, especially coffee and bananas, and more recently, for petroleum from Guatemala.

I will cite here a few examples. In the period from the 1870's through the early 1900's, during the era known as 'The Coffee Republic', communally owned tribal land reserves in El Salvador were eroded (stolen) by an economic arrangement in which trade goods sold on credit, and taxes due, had to be paid off by these Native-Peoples with real property. This system of stealing Native reserve lands was also implemented in Oklahoma, in regard to the Cherokee, Maskoke, Choctaw, and Chickasaw tribes, any elsewhere during this period. By the 1920's most Native-Salvadoran land was in the hands of Spanish-descended plantation owners, who used (and still use) the virtually land-less Native-Peoples as cheap labor for their coffee plantations. During the great depression, the coffee market collapsed, causing the now almost unpaid Native farm-workers to consider rebellion. At that time just a handful of families owned most of the arable land in El Salvador. In 1932, rebellious farm workers killed several members of these elite plantation families. The government of El Salvador responded by sending troops to murder 20,000 Native-Salvadorans, mostly around the Izalco Volcano near San Salvador. Most of the victims were men and boys. It doesn't take much to figure out what happened to the women and girl survivors.

The popularity of hard-core machismo and the very poor track record regarding women's rights in El Salvador to this day were likely influenced historically by this and other related atrocities. As the mother of a Salvadoran Mestizo friend once said: "me da pena" (it's embarassing [to talk about Native-Salvadorans]). Massacres of Native-Salvadorans and Mestizos also occurred during the 1980's civil war.

In the late 1970's, conditions of social injustice and global politics resulted in guerilla wars being fought on a major scale in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. In Guatemala, who's war I followed closely, the government murdered an estimated 80,000 to 150,000 mostly Native-People in the mountainous highlands of it's northwestern region. This was done under the guise of 'counter-insurgency warfare,' and the training and weapons for this exercise was provided by the U.S. I recall receiving reports of entire villages of 600 or more people being murdered en-mass. The Supreme Court of Guatemala itself has declared that the period of 'civil war' resulted in 200,000 orphaned children. Guatemala has a 60 percent full-blooded Native-population who speak 23 Mayan dialects. Mayan is their primary language.

Throughout the war in Guatemala (still ongoing), and in neighboring El Salvador, the disregard for the dignity of women has been a recurring theme. From the rape and murder of 4 U.S. American nuns by Salvadoran forces, to the deliberate strafing by soldiers and pilots of groups of women and children (stories of which Salvadoran immigrants have related to me from personal experience), to the army tactic in Guatemala of raping the women of a Native town, crowding them into the town church, and hurling grenades into the crowd, women in Central America have faced decades of incredible abuse.

A major factor affecting the willingness of Central-American victims of crime and human-rights violations to come foreword and file a formal complaint is their memory of how things are done in Central America. If you speak-up to denounce injustice, you very likely will pay with your own life.

During the 1980's a Washington Post editorial commented on the fact that six simultaneous wars were being waged in Latin-America against Native-Peoples at that time. These 'wars', whose results and lop-sided unfairness to the victims parallel Bosnia very closely, took place in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua (under the Sandinista government), and Peru. Many of these wars continue to this very day.

Peru, who's fight against the terrorism of the Shining Path guerrilla movement has led to extreme countermeasures (to be polite), was the subject of an Amnesty International report in August of 1992. Most of the combat has taken place in rural, almost purely Native (Inca) areas, where Spanish is a second language, and the Inca dialects of Quechua and Aymara are first languages. Over 8 million Peruvians, Bolivians, Ecuadorians, and Chileans speak Quechua as their first language. The Amnesty International report stated that a woman does not have the right to her own body in the war zone. Specifically, that the Peruvian government brings troops from the coastal areas of Peru, who have no cultural ties to the Inca peoples, and that these troops have the right to use Inca women in the war zone as they see fit. Note that the Guatemalan government uses the same tactic of occupying a Native region with conscripts from other regions of the country. The old Soviet Union always stationed non-local troops in 'their' republics.

While I have stressed the experience of Native-women and men from the Americas, the dynamic of post-traumatic stress affects all Latin-American immigrants who lived through wars in Central and South America. A Washington, D.C. Public Schools survey of Salvadoran immigrant students found that 50 percent had witnessed a shooting. Also, many Native and non-Native immigrant women were systematically detained, tortured, and raped (usually by rightist government forces) during anti-guerrilla campaigns in a dozen Latin-American countries. While the U.S. Federal Government offers psychological counseling for war refugees from Southeast Asia for example, where are the services for this population?

In have detailed the above history of Native-Peoples' exploitation because it is a very-real social force which carries through very directly to the issues of the current-day economic and sexual exploitation of Latin-American women in Montgomery County, and by extension, nationwide. It has been my observation, from direct personal experience, that the sub-group within the Latin-American immigrant community which is most likely to face the most severe forms of economic and sexual exploitation in the work-place and elsewhere is the Native woman from Latin America, and especially the Native-woman from Central America. I have seen it happen time after time. Modern human relations law within the United States has not been written to even begin to address remedies to this hidden corner of the discrimination/exploitation pie. In many cases Native and other Latin-American women have adapted to a code of conduct (without choice) which requires that they submit to the demands of men, and is an extension of the Machista value system which literally regards women as being less than men. This social reality has been an engine for the widespread sexual and economic exploitation of both Native and Non-Native Latin-American immigrant women in the United States, and within Montgomery County, Md.

Involved within this dynamic is a 'code of silence' traditional to all of the Native cultures in the Americas. As in Japanese culture, Native-Peoples strive to do anything necessary to save face for themselves or another Native-person in difficult and embarrassing situations. This tradition is based on a deep respect for the privacy and dignity of all persons within one's cultural group. It is not timidity.

In the mid 1970's, while researching Native-American issues at the undergraduate library of the University of Maryland - College Park, I found an article regarding this 'code of silence' in the nation's largest Native-American newspaper, Wessaja, published by the Native-American Historical Society in San Francisco, Ca. This article mentioned the work of a well known Lakota (Sioux) psychiatrist, who had taken a team of Native-women to a boarding school for junior high school girls from far-away reservations. It was located in a 'White' town in the upper northwestern U.S. This doctor's team concluded that 80 of the 120 students had been raped by town locals, who took advantage of the fact that Native-American victims of abuse, especially women and teen-aged girls, would not speak to law enforcement authorities regarding their victimization. Within this article the local Sheriff expressed the hope that some of the girls would come forward. None had at that time. The team of Native-women had been the key to bringing this story out. The original U.S. Government justification for sending young Native-Americans to boarding schools was to separate them from "the heathen ways of their ancestors!"

I have been reminded of that story in Wessaja several times recently, when, as part of my victim advocacy work in Montgomery County, I have tried to convince Latin-American women, and especially Native-Latin-American women to come forward and tell their stories of sexual assault and forced, non-consensual sexual contracts between their supervisors and themselves. Between the threat of retaliation (which can extend back to your country of origin) and the traditions which promote silence in these cases, very few women come forward. Those that do are brave indeed. However, coming forward can bring with it a new set of nightmares when these victims confront a sometimes hostile government bureaucracy.

As a footnote, please note that while many Native-women from South-America are proud of who they are, the ferocious repression of Native cultures in Central-America has made many Native and Mestiza Central-Americans ashamed of who they are. This lack of self-esteem contributes to their abuse.

B. U.S. American background -1: Intervention and investment in Latin-America.

My objective in this section is to give the reader a basic understanding of some of the historical events which have motivated the current mass-immigration of Latin-Americans into the United-States. While neo-feudalism and other factors have contributed to Latin-America's poverty, injustice, and war-driven exodus, it is important to understand that the past intervention of the U.S. Government and U.S. American corporations in the economic and political life of Latin-America for over 100 years has been a major cause of the current immigration to the U.S. In a nutshell, past misdeeds have come back at us.

The United States, being a close neighbor of Latin-America, has always had a strong influence on the political, social, and economic development of the region. Historically, U.S. American interest in the region has been motivated by the desire to profit from exploiting it's vast natural resources and very cheap agricultural labor, the desire to protect that market from the world via the Monroe-Doctrine, the later desire to deny the Soviet Union a base of support in the Americas, and most recently, since the early 1980's, the desire to promote democracy. The U.S. has long had a vested interest in Latin-America.

A survey of this historical relationship could go back as far as the English-Spanish rivalry which lead to the Battle of the Spanish Armada, or to the later competition by both countries to grab as much Native-American land as possible. After their independence from England and Spain, the U.S. sought to keep Latin-America in 'it's backyard.' Latin-American nations sought freedom from U.S. domination.

Given that African slavery and Native-American genocide were both valid activities in both Latin America and the United States during the 1800's, it shouldn't be too surprising to the reader that the more powerful United States would look at 'little brown' Latin-America with an eye towards profiting from the exploitation of it's people and land. In 1857 for example, a wealthy American businessman, William Carter, paid a large sum of money to be named the president of Nicaragua. One of his ideas was to re-institute African slavery there. He was shot by a Nicaraguan Army firing squad the following year.

In the post-slavery period, American agricultural import businesses invested heavily in acquiring land in Latin-America, especially in Central America. These countries were eventually dominated in their political and economic life in the early 1900's by American corporations such as United Fruit, thus becoming known as the 'banana republics'. In several cases these U.S. American companies paid-off dictators to send in their armies to force the mostly Native and Mestizo peasants off of their land by the tens of thousands, thus breaking up a centuries old system of subsistence and small scale (neo-feudal) plantation agriculture. These now land-less peasants became the cheap-labor pool working the U.S. American owned export-crop mega-plantations. This system remains virtually intact in some countries.

The U.S. American military intervened on numerous occasions throughout the twentieth century in Central America to maintain in power those (neo-feudal) dictators who protected this system. The 1954 CIA overthrow of the elected president in Guatemala to prevent land-reform, for example, was followed by 19 military dictators before elections were held again in the mid-1980's. Unfortunately, the death of 80,000 to 150,000 Native people also occurred during these dictatorships. The 1980's civil wars in Central America grew out of popular reaction to these injustices and the desire to end the dictatorships.

B. U.S. American background -2: The 1980's wave of immigration and reaction to it.

The previous description of the roots of poverty and social injustice in Central America explains to the reader one of the major reasons why the United States is receiving so many immigrants from Latin-America. This history, combined with the devastating civil wars fought since the 1980's, the oppression of women, and the lack of educational and job opportunities, especially in Central America, have all fueled the current wave of immigration. Also, U.S. American commerce has benefited greatly by over 100 years of exploiting (draining) Central-America's human and natural resources at the expense of local development. These immigrants have sought refuge from the resulting upheavals shaking their homelands. During the current economic recession, U.S. sympathy for these immigrants has gone from warm to cold.

Latin American immigration increased markedly during the late 1970's and early 1980's when I was working actively within Washington, D.C.'s Adams-Morgan/Mount Pleasant area (known as El Barrio). During those years the complexion and features of immigrants on the street changed. As the wars in Central-America raged, more and more Native and mixed-blood Central-American faces began appearing. Salvadoran and Guatemalan war refugees came by the tens of thousands, becoming the majority immigrant group, taking over from Caribbean Latin-Americans. Large numbers of women and children came here, many by-themselves (risking robbery and assault during the crossing), to escape war.

What impressed me about Washington, D.C.'s Adams-Morgan/Mount Pleasant Barrio at that time was that virtually everyone had a job and homelessness was hardly ever seen. This is in stark contrast to the present situation. If you look at those areas now you will see large numbers of unemployed men drinking beer on the street. Drug dealing and prostitution have also become problems. More than anything else, the U.S. Immigration Reform Act of 1986 served to throw many thousands of undocumented immigrants out of their jobs, wreaking a catastrophe of abject poverty, hunger, fear, and very stiff competition for the few jobs still open to them in the day-labor, cleaning, and food industries.

A related problem for immigrants during the early 1990's has been the rapid growth in the U.S. of popular hostility toward them. A November, 1993 survey cited in a Washington Business Journal article on the work-place abuse of undocumented workers (December 17, 1993), states that 79% of voters surveyed want undocumented hires deported. This hostility is a natural outgrowth of the fear of competition for jobs. The same article mentions that Latin-American immigrants do drive down wages in the lowest paying jobs. This has in fact made the competition tough for native-born U.S. Americans in the low-wage economy. Conversely the article states, these lower wages have kept prices down on many commodities. The article goes on to explain that many of the highest-risk and most dangerous jobs in construction are performed by undocumented immigrant day-labor, who have no access at all to worker's compensation or other benefits. Few would contest the proposition that most U.S. Americans are not interested in many of the low-wage jobs which immigrants take. Care to clean 20 toilets tonight?

U.S. citizens make a valid point that the rate of U.S. immigration should be limited. However, the 1986 Immigration Act has meant disaster for the existing immigrant community. Both legal and undocumented Latin-American men, women, and children are openly and grossly exploited in a tight job market where bosses do as they please, knowing that few will dare to complain, regardless of the abuse.

B. U.S. American background -3: Government relations with the immigrant community.

The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act embodies the current federal response to the issue of foreign immigration into the United States. In addition to the devastating impacts for the immigrant community detailed above, the Immigration Reform Act did have the positive effect of granting amnesty and resident-alien status for those undocumented immigrants who luckily arrived in the U.S. before 1982.

During 1993, U.S. Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) proposed the Immigration Stabilization Act. This bill is also supported by the Federation for American Immigration Reform. This bill proposes reducing legal immigration and harshly penalizes employers who hire existing undocumented workers.

At the level of state government, officials in California, Florida and Illinois have all demanded federal payments to compensate them for the huge impact of the cost of social services and other services provided to immigrants. Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly of Washington, D.C., during testimony before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission hearings on the Mount Pleasant riots, stated that "The frustrations have been festering for 12 years because federal policy has forced immigration into this area with no programs to support this thrust." Clearly, recent immigration has impacted heavily on localities and social-services.

Balancing the perceived 'drain' on U.S. American resources to accommodate this immigration is the economic contribution which immigrants make to the economy. Latin-American immigrants pay taxes just as any other group within the United States. In regard to undocumented immigrants, many don't even file a tax return, thus loosing money that would be refunded to any other worker. An addition, as the baby-boom generation moves into it's senior years, the ratio of tax-paying workers to social security recipients is expected to shrink from the current 5 workers supporting 1 recipient to an early 21'st century ratio of 2 workers supporting 1 recipient. Immigrants and the entrepreneurial zest they bring with them can do much to develop a larger tax base and a higher level of productivity in the U.S. Despite the perceived job-competition strain during this recession, immigration can have a positive long-term impact.

Touching on a critical local government issue, the rates of hate-crimes and of formal human-rights complaints within the United States have increased markedly since the early 1980's. Previously, the rate of human rights complaints had been going down within the U.S.  Federal support for the enforcement of federal civil rights and other anti-discrimination laws was restricted during the 1980's. This has created an undeniable trickle-down effect of setting an example of intolerance for the public, for business, and for local government. Combined with the current recession, this has allowed the virtual open expression of racial hatred and the political acceptability of cutting funding for human relations work. The 500 monthly public inquiries to the Montgomery County Human Relations Commission and the 100 plus hate crimes reported here each year reflect that reality.

Immigrants are frequently victimized by racial, sexual, and national-origin based harassment and hate-violence incidents in Montgomery County, Md. In 1993, an official of the County Human Relations Commission stated to me that Montgomery County is polarizing rapidly along racial-lines.

This official expressed deep concerns that this trend would eventually lead to a situation of open hate violence between ethnic groups. This official also stated that key County officials are turning their backs on this crisis.

C. The present and future -1: A turning of one's back on innocent victims of abuse.

The bottom line of this crisis comes down to the following: Latin-American immigrant women and teen-aged workers within Montgomery County, Md. are routinely subjected to: 1) criminal sexual assault, 2) criminal physical assault, 3) extreme forms of sexual harassment designed to force compliance with the sexual demands of supervisors, 4) illegal reprimands and firings used as retaliation against those who resist. Lastly, some government and business officials have actively worked to hide this criminality.

These criminal acts and human-rights abuses routinely occur within office-buildings and other work-sites within Montgomery County, Md and nationwide. The majority of the incidents which I have investigated have occurred in office buildings within Montgomery, County, Md. As stated previously, all of the cases in which I have intervened have involved alleged victims approaching me for assistance. I have been approached in these cases because I am fluent in Spanish, because I am knowledgeable (from a lay standpoint) about human relations and employment law, and because in some of these cases, I have worked within the involved buildings and I witnessed some of the harassment actions of the perpetrators.

As stated previously, I have at times paid a heavy price for coming forward to formally advise the powers that be of existence of these problems. I have been subjected to threats to my job security on several occasions, and many other forms of intimidation have deliberately been perpetrated against me with the goal of silencing my advocacy work in support of these innocent assault and harassment victims.

It would also only be honest of me to say that several actions taken by the Montgomery County Human Relations Commission in response to the problems of Latin-American immigrant women amount to local government turning it's back on innocent victims crying out for help. This includes one Human Relations Commission staffer having told victims to hold-off and suffer more abuse before coming to them, and delays in sending complaint documents to a victim (delaying the case) for OVER 1 YEAR.

While the episodes of local government inaction which I've witnessed in relation to the topic of this paper cannot be labeled criminal, they are highly insensitive. In addition to the above incidents, on June 1, 1992 I wrote the Honorable Mr. Neil Potter, the Montgomery County Executive, a 35 page report titled "Racism and Sexism in Montgomery County." It details many incidents of the abuse of Latin-American immigrant women, and also incidents of abuse suffered by other residents of Montgomery County, Md. (excerpted here). I never heard back from Mr. Potter. Also in 1992, the author's sincere application for one of three open, volunteer seats on Mr. Potter's Hate-Violence Committee was denied.

Ultimately, government and private industry leaders have set the tone for this society's reaction to the crisis detailed in this report. U.S. and world leaders have found it acceptable to do almost nothing in Bosnia in the face of the murder of 200,00 innocent men, women, and children, and to do nothing in the face of 40,000 girl and women victims of Serbian 'rape camps.' Is this is 1994 or 1944? In the same way, the complacency of the King of Spain in 1519 and the leaders of Guatemala in the 1980's, both of whom allowed the mass rape and mass-murder of innocent Native-Peoples to occur, and close to the mentality of certain government officials and local captains-of-industry. Many of them have knowingly contributed to covering-up the issues here at hand, turning their backs on innocent victims of abuse.

C. The present and the future -2: The nature of contract office cleaning work.

I have detailed the historical background of this present crisis to help familiarize the reader with the complex nature of the problem of the work-place sexual and economic exploitation of immigrant women, especially in contract cleaning companies. Below are listed some of the conditions which can be found at the typical contract cleaning company work site. These sites often have several dozen workers.

• Cleaning companies work on contracts won by them, usually obtained from competitive bidding.

• Cleaning companies have every reason to suppress the open discussion of the issue of work-place sexual harassment and other employee abuses. Silence protects both their overall reputation and it protects individual cleaning contracts from cancellation due to the investigation of these issues.

• Cleaning companies generally hire men as their contract site supervisors and assistant-supervisors.

• The majority of the workers at most cleaning contract work sites are women and teen-aged girls.

• The majority of contract office-building cleaning is done after hours on part-time or full time shifts. Most of these cleaning contracts are worked from 5 pm to 9 pm, or on 8 hour night shifts.

• Most contract office cleaners and supervisors in the Washington, D.C. area are Central-American immigrants. Most of these immigrants come from the countries of El Salvador and Guatemala.

• The structure of work within office-cleaning teams usually involves having one or more persons (usually women) clean the building's bathrooms, having one or more persons (usually men) hauling bulk trash from the floors being cleaned to trash dumpsters, and having large work areas within the office building vacuum-cleaned, dusted, and the trash collected (usually by women).

• The jobs of bathroom cleaners and floor-persons (usually women) involve working for extended periods of time in large office-buildings behind closed and locked doors during business off-hours.

• The only persons who have access to these locked office areas during the hours when cleaning operations take place are usually the cleaning contract supervisors, their assistants, and guards.

• These male supervisors within the average large-scale office cleaning contract have the unlimited ability, with their pass-keys, to enter the isolated work areas where their women workers labor.

• According to an official of the Montgomery County Human Relations Commission, and also from my personal observation and from my victim advocacy work, it is exactly under this set of conditions that the harassment, intimidation, and sexual and physical-assault of workers occurs.

• The supervisors who are also perpetrators of these illegal acts take advantage of isolation, the locked offices, and the English-Spanish language barrier between their staff and office workers.

C.The present and the future -3: The criteria used in reporting this chronology.

On the following pages is related a chronology of true events. They are known to be true to the author either from direct personal knowledge of the incidents involved, or because the sources of this information are known-by and are trusted-by me. They involve episodes of the economic and sexual exploitation of Latin-American immigrant women in the work-place. All of these events occurred at work-sites within Montgomery County, Md. Most were brought to my attention by victims seeking help.

The information within this chronology in presented in this report under the following conditions:

The alleged victims of these episodes are not named. This is done to protect the privacy of these women, and to protect them from possible retaliation by the alleged perpetrators. Victims in these cases typically fear being fired from their jobs, if they are still employed by the company, and they also fear direct physical retaliation against themselves by the perpetrators of these abuses.

The names of the commercial businesses whose supervisory or staff personnel are allegedly involved in these civil and/or criminal law violations will not be mentioned. I will gladly provide government law-enforcement, human-rights, judicial, and legislative bodies with this information.

The names of the work-sites involved, where the alleged victims worked for service providers (usually contract office-cleaning companies) at a contract site, are identified by name and address.

As part of this chronology, I have included excerpts of correspondence which I have sent over the past several years to officials of the government of Montgomery County, Md. regarding several very serious incidents of the alleged economic and sexual exploitation of Latin-American immigrant women in Montgomery County, Md. This correspondence consists mainly of sections of my June, 1992 report to the Montgomery County Executive, "Racism and Sexism in Montgomery County", and memoranda to the Montgomery County, Md. Human Relations Commission regarding other very serious abuse cases.

There is a critical factor here which has served to the benefit of the alleged perpetrators of these incidents of serious sexual harassment and sexual assault against Latin-American immigrant women. That factor is that many of the victims of this sexual abuse are adult and teen-aged women who are either married or live with a partner. As an official of the Montgomery Human Relations commission explained to me in early 1993, while discussing a serious, ongoing set of sexual-abuse incidents at a Montgomery County office building complex, going to the press would likely result in incidents of family break-up and domestic violence for not just some of the actual victims, but potentially for any woman who worked within that complex. I followed that advice for a year, only to see conditions at that site deteriorate. Also, although I brought 2 victims from this complex in to file formal complaints in January, 1993, one victim, who has a very serious complaint, has not received her complaint paperwork from the HRC 1 year later!

This chronology is presented here because the level of these abuse events within work places in Montgomery County, Md. are growing at a rapid rate. The logic of maintaining silence is a moot point, as this on-the-job abuse is as-bad or worse than any potential domestic violence which victims may face.

C. The present and the future: 

-4 A chronology of actual cases within Montgomery County, Md.

Chronology Table of contents. (Sexual Assault, Rape, Sexual Harassment, Other Discrimination)

CASES: