U.S. Indicts Three in Slavery Case

A federal grand jury has indicted a 54-year-old Mexican woman and her two adult children on charges that the three enslaved and abused a live-in teen-age Mexican maid at the family’s San Diego residence, federal officials said Monday.

The indictment--charging the three with “involuntary servitude,” civil rights violations and harboring an undocumented foreign national--was handed down last week but unsealed Monday, following the arrest Friday of a suspect in Chicago, said William Braniff, U.S. attorney in San Diego.

The San Diego County district attorney’s office has already prosecuted all three defendants--Esperanza Vargas, 54, the mother; Claudia Arriaga Vargas, 24, the daughter, and Raul Arriaga Vargas, 20, the son--on slavery and other state charges in the case, which generated extensive publicity in San Diego. The mother and son were convicted on related felony counts; a judge dismissed charges against the daughter for lack of evidence.

But the Justice Department’s civil rights division, which is handling the federal prosecution, concluded that there were still “strong federal interests to be vindicated” in the case, notably the protection of U.S. residents from slavery, regardless of their citizenship, said Braniff in a statement. Federal slavery charges are brought several times a year nationwide, he said.

The state and federal charges do not duplicate prosecution under the “double-jeopardy” principle, Braniff stated, because both governments are separate “sovereigns” and may each proceed independently. However, defense attorneys may challenge such assertions.

In fact, state and federal prosecutions arising from a single case are not that uncommon. In instances of alleged police brutality, for example, individual officers nationwide have been charged both with local counts, such as assault, and with federal civil rights violations.

In the slavery case, the defendants face much more severe prospective penalties under federal law. If convicted on all three counts, each suspect could face up to 20 years in prison and fines of up to $750,000.

As a result of the state prosecution, Esperanza Vargas, the mother, who pleaded guilty to a single state count of slavery, could be sentenced to four years in state prison, which would be the harshest sanction imposed on a defendant in the case.

She is scheduled to be sentenced in Superior Court next month. Her son, who entered a guilty plea to assaulting the maid, was sentenced in May to an eight-month jail term. Both are now in federal custody in San Diego.

The daughter, Claudia Arriaga Vargas, was released from County Jail in February after a Municipal Court judge dropped all charges against her, citing a paucity of evidence. She was arrested Friday in Chicago, the U.S. attorney’s office said.

The former maid, Juana Hernandez Ortiz, 19, testified in the state case that she was held as a forced laborer in the Vargas family home for more than a year, was never paid a salary and and was subject to beatings, threats and other forms of intimidation. Among other threats, Hernandez said family members told her there would be reprisals against her relatives in Mexico if she attempted to flee.

The Vargas family helped arrange for the former servant’s illegal entry into the United States from Tijuana in the fall of 1989, Hernandez testified.

In the state case, defense attorneys argued that the charges were exaggerated and that the arrangement--the maid was provided room and board but no regular salary--was not that unusual among Mexican families and their maids.

The servant’s ordeal ended last Jan. 10, authorities said, when San Diego police, acting on an anonymous tip, raided the Vargas family home on Cerrisa Court in south San Diego and arrested the mother and her two children.