Child's death in Paraguay spotlights child labor problem.
| Autor | Gaudin, Andres |
The brutal death by clubbing of a 14-year-old girl known only as Carolina, whose parents had given away as a servant in exchange for room and board, has moved Paraguayan hearts and unleashed a campaign by social organizations to eradicate the practice of unpaid domestic labor condoned under the practice of criadazgo (NotiSur, Aug. 2, 2013, and Aug. 7, 2015).
The incident, which took place on Jan. 23 in a middle-class home in Coronel Oviedo, the capital of the southern department of Caaguazu, is a repetition of something that occurs periodically and generally remains an item in the rumor mill. Once in a great while, however, such an event becomes widely known to the general public and reaches the legal system. This time, it's known that the perpetrator is a military man and that he has been detained, but nothing more is known about him--neither his name nor his rank nor the branch of the military to which he might belong. What is known is that he hit Carolina with a tree branch to the point of disfiguring her and that he abandoned her while she bled. The Caaguazu legal system has called this an "involuntary homicide."
UNICEF urges gradual end of criadazgo
On Jan. 27, in reaction to the Caaguazu crime, the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) urged Paraguayan authorities to take action toward the "progressive eradication" of child labor, of which criadazgo is a painful manifestation. For years, UNICEF has made a similar request every June 12, the day established as World Day Against Child Labor in 2002.
According to UNICEF and the UN's International Labor Organization (ILO), criadazgo is a hidden form of slavery, a de facto institution accepted by Paraguayan society. Minors subjected to criadazgo, the agencies say, toil to exhaustion seven days a week. "They are children, who, if they are fortunate enough to be sent to school, are not able to do well because they are worn out physically and mentally," a UNICEF report notes.
According to a Jan. 27 wire filed by the Chinese news agency Xinhua, UNICEF issued a statement to the government of President Horacio Cartes saying, "under criadazgo, children between 5 and 17 years old are subjected to long workdays, which normally are the reason they stop going to school and therefore can't get the best occupations later, thus preventing them from escaping poverty. Many of them also fall into the hands of criminal networks dedicated to looking for boys, girls, and adolescents in the remotest...
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