Deaf Migrants’ Families Feel Duped by Officials

The Mexican family charged with smuggling 57 deaf countrymen into the United States to serve as trinket sellers apparently duped their nation’s consular officials in New York into assuring family members that their loved ones were leading healthy, profitable lives and did not want to come home, according to relatives here and Mexican officials in New York.

The unwitting calls home from the Mexican Consulate, along with a deluge of photographs and letters sent by the alleged smugglers, appeared to be part of an elaborate scheme allegedly carried out by the Paolettis, a Mexican family. Four family members were jailed and charged with trafficking in illegal immigrants and other offenses after New York City police rescued their workers from two small apartments in Queens last weekend.

“It was all a big lie,” said Pilar Rodriguez, referring to the many photographs of her daughter she received and the phone calls she got from the New York consulate in the year before 20-year-old Guadalupe Muniz Rodriguez was freed along with the other Mexicans. New York City police said the workers had been living in “virtual slavery.”

The Muniz case is among the more dramatic in what Mexican consular officials in New York confirmed were dozens of phone calls they made on behalf of the deaf and speech-impaired workers there during the past year. Muniz’s family had filed criminal kidnapping charges here against the Paolettis soon after she disappeared from their Mexico City home on May 9, 1996.

Her family said she first made contact with the Paolettis at the urging of a friend who suggested that she go north with the Paolettis for a better life. Family members believe that the friend, a former classmate, is a recruiter for the smuggling ring.

Although New York City officials assert that many of the people rescued in Queens had been kidnapped before they were smuggled across the U.S. border, social workers here have said it appears that many voluntarily went with the Paolettis. And the Mexican government continues to assert that all the workers prefer to remain in the United States even now.

In an interview Wednesday in the Muniz family’s home, a cramped hovel in this capital’s impoverished Iztacalco neighborhood, Muniz’s mother said she believes that her daughter was taken against her will. The family has spent more than a year investigating the Paolettis and seeking Mexican government assistance to get her back, she said.

Relating the first of several conversations she had with consular official Roman Ramirez in New York, Rodriguez said, “I told him that there was something wrong going on here. She didn’t have my permission to leave. She hadn’t told us she was leaving or that she wanted to leave.

“He answered, ‘I don’t see anything wrong going on here. Your daughter looks good. She is well- dressed and seems to be happy.’ He said that he had asked Lupe [Muniz] questions to see if they hit her or if she was forced to be with these people, and she said no. But I said there was something strange going on here. Something wrong.”

Joel Hernandez, Mexico’s deputy consul in New York, confirmed that several calls were made to Muniz’s family, and that they were among scores of telephone calls the consulate made for deaf Mexicans living in New York. Many of the calls, Hernandez said, were made in the presence of Adriana Paoletti-Lemus, who is among the four now charged in New York.

Muniz appeared at the consulate each time a call was made to her family. Sometimes she was with Paoletti, sometimes with an interpreter--and seemed well each time, Hernandez said.

He added that the federal prosecutor’s office in Mexico City failed to advise the consulate of the kidnapping charge (in Mexico, private citizens can bring criminal charges). On several occasions, he said, consular officials put Muniz, who can speak only in short phrases, on the phone to speak to her mother.

“Sometimes they would put Lupe on the phone,” Rodriguez confirmed, “and she would say just, ‘I’m fine. Fine. Just fine.’ I would tell her, ‘You should come home. We want you here with us.’ But, of course, she couldn’t hear me. We would get so angry after these calls.”

Hernandez said his office has no sign-language interpreter and took Paoletti--who is deaf and speech-impaired--and others at their word through the interpreters who accompanied them. “There’s no way we could know what else was involved here. I think we acted in very, very good faith,” Hernandez said.

He added that the consular staff of 35 handles 250 aid requests a day in a metropolitan area that includes more than 300,000 Mexicans and that the consulate lacks the means to independently investigate individual cases.

Asked whether he believes that the workers were being held in slavery, Hernandez said: “I wouldn’t use the word slavery. I can see the trafficking in handicapped people, which is clearly a crime. I can see people who took advantage of others and of their disabilities. But I also see the freedom of movement. One day, they were fed up and decided to go to the police. And no one stopped them.”

Four of the workers escaped early Saturday and conveyed to police that they were being forced to work for little or no pay, police said.

The family of one young man who left Mexico City with the Paolettis the same week Muniz disappeared last year told reporters this week that he did go willingly, although against his family’s wishes, after the Paolettis promised him high pay and a good life in the United States.

Added Feliciano Hernandez, father of Beatriz Hernandez, a 28-year-old deaf woman who went to Los Angeles with the Paolettis in April 1996: “He convinced her to go, this Senor Paoletti. Our daughter was convinced to go, along with her husband. They were told about these deaf-mute friends who had gone and how they were now earning a lot of money.”

Pilar Rodriguez, who has not heard from her daughter since last weekend’s rescue, said she had asked permission from the Paolettis to “visit a friend outside the city” shortly before she disappeared, but that permission was flatly refused.

Even more than the calls from the consulate, which Muniz’s family believes were coerced by the Paolettis, the family resents a series of photographs they received after their daughter disappeared.

Spread out on a cot in the four-room house here where 12 of Muniz’s family members live, the photos show Muniz in front of the Statue of Liberty, the World Trade Center, at a kitchen table bearing a birthday cake and beside Tweety Bird and Wile E. Coyote characters at a theme park. In each, Muniz appears well-dressed and carefully groomed. But in each, she looks progressively thinner. And the brief message scrawled on the back of each is not in her handwriting, the family said.

“It’s all just a show. It’s a myth to make us calmer,” said Felipe Muniz, her father, who works as a plumber.

In tears, her mother added: “I never believed the photos. It wasn’t a relief for me to see them. The relief for me would only be if I could be with her again. And I haven’t the means to be with her there.”