CHICUREO, chile — Felicita Pinto arrived early at the gates of the luxurious community where she labors as a maid, but the minibus to her employer’s home was late.
So she decided to walk six blocks to work, on streets lined with broad lawns and imposing homes.
Security guards quickly chased her down and forced the 57-year-old widow back to the gate. Pinto’s employer protested, as he had before, against the community bylaws that forbid servants to move at will.
Pinto’s simple stroll helped set off national soul-searching over discrimination and mistreatment of domestic workers across Chile, where leaders ache to be accepted as representing an enlightened, developed nation. Local news media heard of the case, and outrage followed when another homeowner in the El Algarrobal II development sought to justify the restrictions.
“Can you imagine what it would be like here if all the maids were walking outside, all the workers walking in the street and their children on bicycles?” neighbor Ines Perez told a local television channel.
Her comments prompted such a wave of insults and threats that Perez was forced to close her Facebook page.
Discrimination toward domestic workers is among the more-entrenched social ills in Latin America and beyond. In luxury complexes just south of Peru’s capital, maids can’t swim in the ocean until their employers have left the water. In Mexico City, some luxury restaurants prohibit maids from sitting down to eat, and some high-rises force workers to take the service elevators.
In today’s Chile, however, human-rights activists are challenging low pay, long hours and discrimination that afflict domestic workers. And so Pinto’s decision to skip the bus has lit debate on social networks and has filled newspaper pages and radio and TV broadcasts with commentary. Thousands signed on to an Internet campaign against the subdivision’s protocols, and about 20 people demonstrated in front of the gates Saturday, some dressed as zombies in maid uniforms.
Pinto said the rules are humiliating.
“I feel just as if I was a prisoner, a delinquent, a thief,” Pinto said, describing several encounters with the guards.
Edith Alonso, a maid in a nearby gated community, was among those protesting Saturday. She said she has a good position now, but with a previous employer, “I suffered hunger; they counted every piece of fruit and bread, they made special food for themselves and forgot about the maid.”
The administration of El Algarrobal II did not respond to requests from The Associated Press for comment, but in an e-mail to Pinto’s employer, British shipping executive Bruce Taylor, it argued that maids, nannies, waiters, gardeners, construction workers and pool cleaners must ride the minibus to keep them from “committing robberies or providing information relevant to the privacy of other neighbors on their way to the house where they say they work.”
