I have a say in the decisions we make here. 'I now have the freedom to be a part of my children's lives. The cooperative's rules are simple: there is no boss, all issues are voted upon, and profits are split. Instead of constant verbal abuse and sleepless nights, they now spend their days stitching dresses, blouses, and uniforms for small local companies.Įach member works an eight-hour shift, and earns around $4 dollars an hour. Inside, Velasquez and a dozen other men and women - nearly all of whom are former victims of slave labor - produce sweat-free clothing in a non-threatening environment.

La Alameda clothing collective is situated on the noisy second floor of a century-old corner building in the working-class Parque Avellaneda neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Velasquez soon learned that they also make clothes there, and found that her sewing skills were in demand. After a year, though, the mistreatment became too much, and she fled with her husband and son.Įventually, she arrived at La Alameda, a community center that serves Argentina's burgeoning Bolivian community. With little money and no contacts in Argentina, she felt she had no choice but to stay and work at the sweatshop. 'My son would sit under the sewing table and cry, and my boss would yell at us all the time,' she says. For all her work, she made $25 dollars a month. She says she was rarely allowed outside, and had to sleep in a hallway alongside 20 other workers. She was dispatched to a hot, crowded factory and forced to sew 18 hours a day, seven days a week. Once in Buenos Aires, Velasquez soon realized the whole scenario was a scam. There was not a fake passport available for an infant boy, so Velasquez had to cut her son's hair and put him in a pink dress so he looked like the baby girl pictured on the passport. In Velasquez's case, she and her husband, with their one-year-old son, crossed the border into Argentina in 2006 using counterfeit documents provided to them by the smugglers. Most endure long and brutal journeys before being sent to work in clandestine clothing factories under oppressive conditions. She quickly became a victim trapped inside a vast network of workers who are lured from Bolivia to Argentina on empty promises. But just like so many other victims, I was lied to,' says Velasquez, 31. 'I was promised a sewing job in Argentina that would pay a dignified salary of $200 a month. It was a trip that would take her to the depths of the garment industry's slave labor trade only to emerge as a member of a cooperative credited with raising awareness about slave labor on two continents. She had no prospects in her hometown of La Paz, Bolivia, so when she was offered a bus ticket to Argentina and assured of steady work and a home there, she jumped at the chance. Buenos Aires - Maria Velasquez was in need of work.

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