Vulnerable to Exploitation : Camper Slave Case Shows Risks Faced by Illegals

The two immigrant women had gone in search of work. Instead, they allegedly were made virtual slaves, held captive and tortured in a rickety old camper for months as it traversed poor Latino neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles County.

Both women eventually escaped to tell a story that, immigrant experts said, represents the brutal extreme of a form of exploitation that is all too common among illegal aliens.

“You flee a country that is so dangerous, and then this should happen--something worse,” one of the women, a 24-year-old Salvadoran who had been in the United States only two days when she was abducted, told The Times.

Changes in the immigration law, which fine employers who hire the undocumented, have made it increasingly difficult for illegal immigrants to find work. Women, especially, must rely on word-of-mouth job tips, often from strangers. Newly arrived immigrants place unfounded trust in someone who speaks the same language. The result can be broken promises over wages and conditions--or worse. And when the worst does happen, the victims are reluctant to go to the police.

“What happened to those women is . . . an extreme case because of the degree of abuse, but it is part of a continuum of abuses that the undocumented face every day,” said Leo Chavez, associate professor of anthropology at UC Irvine. “In a sense, immigrants, especially women, are like lambs. They are vulnerable and easy targets.”

The camper truck case came to light last week when police sought public assistance in capturing the camper owner. On Sept. 2, a 27-year-old Guatemalan woman escaped after allegedly spending 14 months in captivity and, desperate for protection, contacted police. The second woman, a 24-year-old Salvadoran who police said had been held captive three months before fleeing last year, heard about the case on the news and, overcoming a fear of authorities, also came forward.

On Monday, police captured the man who owned the camper, along with two alleged female accomplices. The three, still in custody without bail, have pleaded not guilty to more than 50 felony counts, including slavery, kidnaping and rape. Six small children who also lived in the camper were placed in protective custody.

After the arrest, the two women were reunited at the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, where they sat in a lobby, comparing scars and wounds and matter-of-factly swapping stories of times they had tried to flee, of things their captors made them do.

Pain Inflicted

They recalled the pain inflicted by the chains, the handcuffs and, especially, the electrical wires they said had been attached to their arms, cheeks and legs.

“Every time he would apply the shocks, he would stick a rag in my mouth so I would not scream, and he would handcuff my hands behind my back so I would not move,” the Salvadoran said.

“I kept thinking, ‘Why not just kill me all at once, just go ahead and kill me.’ ”

The Guatemalan--her leg still bruised and bandaged, her face still swollen and marked--told of how she would faint each time her captor applied the electrical shocks to her cheeks. Toward the end, he would place the wires inside her mouth and shock her that way, she said.

Heard of Available Work

“No one can imagine such suffering,” she said.

It was June of last year when the Salvadoran heard that work was available from a man in a beat-up, beige and white camper parked in the Pico-Union district. When she went to the camper, she said, he overpowered her, slapped handcuffs onto her wrists and dragged her inside. Five weeks later, the Guatemalan, laid off from her job in a factory, received the same job tip, went to the camper, and was similarly abducted, she said.

Both were shackled at night to keep them from escaping. During the day, the man, who identified himself in court this week as Paul Garcia, 38, always carried a gun and threatened to kill them if they tried to flee, they said.

“I asked God, one day, let me escape,” the Salvadoran told The Times. “I prayed all the time for the strength to endure the beatings.”

Three Locations

Over a period of nearly a year and a half, Garcia parked the camper in three different locations, according to police and neighbors. Each time the camper and its occupants rolled quietly into a new community--Pico Union, South-Central and, finally, Azusa--strangers took pity on the man and his band of small children in old clothes, offering them water, food, odd jobs.

Garcia would knock on a stranger’s door and receive permission to park in a hidden alley or back yard, where he would set up camp. Never did anyone suspect that he might have held hostages inside the camper, where they were allegedly beaten and tortured.

Neighbors said the group refused offers to use bathrooms and stoves. During the day the children played close to the camper. By all accounts, the women spent hours on their knees, hand-washing clothes from a bucket.

The group used a portable toilet and Garcia would treat the waste in plastic bags with chemicals and throw the pouches away in a nearby dumpster, said one merchant on South Broadway, one of the locations of the makeshift campsite.

Curtains Always Drawn

They bathed outside, washing themselves with wet towels. They would use water from the faucets or hoses of neighboring buildings or houses.

The curtains usually were drawn on the camper, and no neighbors reported ever being able to look inside. At the same time, everyone interviewed said they never heard anything unusual, such as screams or beatings. And at least one neighbor said it appeared as though escape would not have been difficult.

Nevertheless, several neighbors reported that the women with Garcia acted furtively, concealing their faces or hiding--”like a squirrel,” in the words of one neighbor.

“It is sad, all this happening right under your nose,” said Carol Cota, a Pico Union resident who lives in front of one alley where the camper parked. On occasion she invited the children in to watch television because she felt sorry for them.

Held Without Bail

“They looked so poor,” she said. “But, you know, everybody’s living in the streets these days. I’ve been there. I know what it is to be poor.”

Efforts to interview Garcia and the two women arrested with him, Yolanda Garcia, 28, and Margarita Ruvalcaba, 30, were unsuccessful. All are in jail, ordered held without bail.

One employer who had given Garcia odd jobs knew him only as Michael; another neighbor thought that his name was Manuel. When Garcia was arrested, he identified himself to police as Robert Anthony Gonzalez. In court last week he said his name was Paul Garcia, and that he was born in Mexico without a birth or baptismal certificate.

“We may never know what his real name is,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Andrew J. McMullen, who is prosecuting the three.

Kept Close Watch

The handful of people who gave Garcia work, as well as residents who talked with him, described the average-sized, dark-haired man as articulate, fluent in both English and Spanish. He kept to himself most of the time, working on his 25-year-old truck and keeping close watch over the women and children.

Claiming at one point to be a Vietnam veteran, he seemed fascinated with guns, and he showed off his collection of at least 14 rifles and handguns and several gun catalogues, they said. After his arrest, detectives searching the camper found numerous guns, several pairs of handcuffs, chains, wires, 16 boxes of ammunition, a typewriter, blank birth certificates and a church seal.

At times, those who knew Garcia said, he would call the women in his camper “dumb” and “stupid.” And he boasted of his survival skills, proud of his self-contained encampment.

But time and again, Garcia managed to gain sympathy by presenting himself as a poor immigrant struggling to provide food and shelter for his large, extended family. Often he would bring along two or three of his children when he sought help, holding their hands and caressing their hair, actions that proved to be an effective way to gain entry to jobs and a place to park.

“He sat in my office with his children and they were so cute and well-behaved,” said the church secretary at University Seventh-day Adventist Church. “He said he had fallen on some hard times and really needed work. I said to myself, ‘I really have to try and help these poor children.’ I felt so bad for them.”

Deacon William Baker Sr. gave Garcia a $6-an-hour handyman job at the church in mid-August. His son, William Jr., visited Garcia twice at the South Broadway alley.

“He wouldn’t let me go inside the camper, but he wanted to show me the guns,” the younger Baker said. A woman inside the camper passed handguns and rifles out the window.

The Los Angeles Police Department detective who handled the case, Delia Perez, said the case was “particularly tragic because of the extended period of time the victims were held.”

“The suspects were truly opportunists,” Perez said.

Opportunists abound in the netherworld of illegal aliens. Immigration experts were at a loss to find any incident comparable in its horror to the camper case, but all were ready with lesser tales of evil to demonstrate the vulnerability of undocumented workers.

“When you don’t have a penny in your pocket and you meet someone with a job offer, you can’t afford to say no,” said Haydee Sanchez, a counselor at El Rescate, a nonprofit social service agency that helps Central American immigrants.

Added Chavez of UC Irvine: “What happens is that cases like this shock our sensibilities, but they force us to face up to the fact that these people . . . are vulnerable and easily abused.”

Immigration and Naturalization Service officials said abuse of illegal aliens is common, especially in the labor underground. Statistics to document the extent of the problem, however, are hard to come by--in large part because victims, fearing deportation, do not inform authorities.

The INS said Garcia’s alleged victims would not be deported because they are witnesses in the camper case. When the criminal matter is closed, INS spokeswoman Virginia Kice said, “these women could be subject to deportation and should explore legal avenues if they want to stay in this country.”

Times staff writer Franki Ransom contributed to this story.