Slave Next Door (11 page)

farmworkers, but with only two wage and hours inspectors for the entire

Southwest Florida region—which includes tens of thousands of farm-

workers, as well as other types of laborers—there is little hope of help

there either.7 For years, the local inspector for that section of Florida

generally spoke only English—in the midst of workers who did not—and

spent more time in the grower’s office than in the fields, where he might

witness firsthand the treatment of the pickers. With the law on their side,

the crew leaders and the growers hold all the cards.

With conditions so dismal, and the pay so low, why would anyone

come to Immokalee to work? Or to nearby towns like Lake Placid,

Wimauma, or LaBelle? There is simply no real choice: wherever a

worker goes to pick America’s crops, he meets similar conditions. With

the trend toward consolidation and expansion of agribusinesses, it has

become increasingly difficult to find work on the old-style family-owned

farms of twenty-five years ago. Instead, the small farms are being gob-

bled up by huge companies. Competing with each other and with for-

eign suppliers, these megagrowers are themselves being caught in a

cost/price squeeze. On the one hand, they face constantly rising costs of

gasoline, pesticides, fertilizer, and a couple dozen other items necessary

for production. On the other hand, the buyers—fast-food giants such as

MacDonald’s, Subway, Taco Bell, and Burger King, and market corpo-

rations like Shop Rite, Wal-Mart, and Costco—are dictating the prices

they are willing to pay for tomatoes and other crops. The buyers have

turned their corporate backs on the small growers who supplied them

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faithfully for years. In the words of one worker advocate, the buyers

“each have a purchasing company, looking to buy high volume at the

lowest possible price. They are price
setters,
not price
takers.
”8 Rather

than purchase from several smaller growers, as in the past, these

megabuyers have decided to work with the largest suppliers, who can

provide ready, uniform, year-round supplies of product. Only the huge

agribusinesses, such as Gargiulo, Pacific, Nobles Collier, and the Six L’s,

can meet the demanding production requirements while weathering the

rising costs and the squeeze on their profit margin. Size counts: even

with the cost/price pressure they manage to make a tremendous amount

of money, and they are growing exponentially.

As large as these agribusinesses are, they pale in the shadow of the

companies that supply their needs—giants such as Exxon, John Deere,

and Monsanto. Against these multinational corporations the growers

have no bargaining power. So, with nothing to say about their escalat-

ing costs or the buyers’ shrinking prices, the only way they can hold on

to profits is by cutting labor costs. Their aim is to keep at gutter level the

amount they pay—and for decades have paid—their workers, and they

do. As a 2004 Oxfam America report put it, “Squeezed by the buyers of

their produce, growers pass on the costs and risks imposed on them to

those on the lowest rung of the supply chain: the farmworkers they

employ.”9 And because these privately held Florida-based grower cor-

porations are constantly expanding, a worker can move to North

Carolina, Delaware, California, or even Puerto Rico and still be work-

ing in the same grower’s fields—for the same pay, and under the same

conditions. There is no refuge. While the large grower corporations

compete, they have also banded together to control the labor market by

forming the Florida Tomato Committee. The committee and the Florida

Fruit and Vegetable Association are powerful lobbies with the state gov-

ernment; this is not surprising, since some of the large growers are them-

selves members of the Florida legislature.

This situation is not new. In her excellent history of Atlantic Coast

farmworkers, Cindy Hahamovitch writes of Florida in the 1930s:

“While the rest of growers’ expenses rose over the course of the

decade—the cost of seed, fertilizer, and equipment all went up—farm

wages remained stagnant or fell, depending on the crop. . . . As a vet-

eran of harvests in thirty-three states put it, ‘Florida is the sorriest wages

in the United States.’”10 In those days, the workers were mostly African

American and Bahamian; today they are most likely to be Latino.

Otherwise little has changed, with one ugly exception.

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S L AV E RY I N T H E F I E L D S

As bad as most pickers have it, there is a rung on the ladder that is lower

still—the
enslaved
farmworker. Antonio Martinez came from a family of

five younger siblings, in Hidalgo, Mexico. His parents were sickly, and

Antonio was unable to make a sufficient living to support them all. He

met with a contractor—a
coyote
—who promised that he would smuggle

Antonio into the United States and find him construction work in

California for a fee of 16,000 pesos—about $1,700 American. Antonio

told the man that he didn’t have that much money, but the
coyote
assured

him that he could pay it off once he started to work. Two weeks later, he

was on a bus along with forty others, heading north toward the border.

When the bus arrived at a sparse border camp in the Sonora desert,

the workers were separated and given to other
coyotes.
The man in

charge of Antonio’s group was called Chino. He led them through the

desert for three days, despite having water and supplies for only one day,

crossing the border to a whistle-stop called Tres Puntas. From there they

were driven to a house in Tucson, where Chino demanded additional

money from them or their families, on pain of violence. Some of the

others complied, but Antonio had no money to give. At this point, with-

out money or papers, under violent threat, he realized he was trapped.

Antonio was told that instead of going to a construction site in

California he would be put to work in the tomato fields of South Central

Florida, at the pay rate of $150 per day. The promised amount went far

toward allaying his misgivings. Chino then handed him over to a van

driver, or
raitero,
called “el Chacal”—the jackal. Antonio was crowded

into the back of the van along with seventeen other Mexican workers.

On the long drive to Florida, the van stopped only for gasoline; the

migrants in the back were told to urinate in a bottle when the need

arose. Twice on their journey police stopped the van; on neither occa-

sion did the officer question the presence of eighteen Mexicans packed

like cargo in the back.

When el Chacal arrived in Florida, he drove to the camp of two labor

contractors, Abel and Basilio Cuello. Here, Antonio overheard el Chacal

negotiating with the Cuello brothers for the sale of the workers. El

Chacal was demanding $500 apiece, whereas the Cuellos were willing

to pay only $350. At this point, Antonio realized, “We were being sold

like animals.”11

Antonio’s life was tightly controlled. The door of the shack in which

he and the other workers slept was locked at night and was unlocked in

the morning by Abel Cuello only when it was time to go to the fields.

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Cuello never left them alone; he stayed with them as they picked and

threatened violence and death should they attempt to escape. The prom-

ised pay was whittled away to practically nothing as Cuello deducted for

rent, food, water, even the cost of transportation to and from the fields.

With the tiny amount left to them, the workers bought food or toiletries

when taken by the bosses on rare trips to a small local grocery store.

After four months in slavery, Antonio saw his chance. While he and a

few others were shopping, Cuello, on guard outside the market, dozed

off, and the workers ran to the highway and escaped. The subsequent

case against the Cuello trafficking operation was one of Florida’s first

contemporary cases of forced labor. Cuello was convicted and sen-

tenced to prison on slavery charges.

Antonio still works with the crops—but under his own volition, and

not with tomatoes. He also travels throughout the country, speaking

about the slavery in America’s fields and in the food we eat. He has

marched in several campaigns against corporate abuse and participated

in the ten-day hunger strike against Taco Bell. At one point, he taught a

training session to law enforcement officers and government officials in

Chiapas, Mexico, through the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). This

author spoke with Antonio while he was participating in a late-2007

workers’ march against Burger King, and his motivation was clear.

Taking action against the offending corporations, he said, “is extremely

important; there is more and more consumer participation in the strug-

gle, and it makes the campaign that much stronger. The big companies

buy so much produce that they must take responsibility for the condi-

tions under which the people who harvest it are suffering. It infuriates

me that some of these corporations are still ignoring the plight of the

farmworkers.

“I just want you to know,” he states, “why I’m out here today. For

four and a half months, I was held in forced labor in the fields against

my will, and it seemed like an eternity for me. They were watching me

all the time, controlling all I did. I thought I was going to die. Thanks to

God, I was able to escape, and it allowed me to become more and more

aware. I’m out here learning more every day.”12

H I D D E N A M O N G T H E C R O P S

In the words of one human rights activist, “It is, of course, almost too

obvious to state that the deprivation of liberty typical of agricultural

slavery operations is the most extreme violation of human rights in the

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fields today.”13 Obvious though it might be, agricultural slavery is virtu-

ally unknown to most Americans. In a country where the plight of mil-

lions of migrant workers—suffering the nation’s lowest wages and worst

conditions—fails to hold the public’s attention, agricultural slavery finds

no place at all. Yet slavery on America’s farms is one of the three largest

forms of human trafficking in America today. Activist Laura Germino

states the case well: “American consumers don’t want to have slavery

woven into the fabric of their daily lives; but, unknown to most, it

already is. They drink orange juice in the morning, they eat tomatoes

with their burger for lunch.”14

Slavery in the fields is especially common in the southeastern United

States; one DOJ official referred to this part of Florida as “ground zero

for modern slavery.”15 Enslavement usually takes the form of debt

bondage. The trafficked worker is an easy target—socially discon-

nected, recently homeless, and without resources. He is literally sold by

the
coyote
to the crew leader, or contractor, who then puts the purchase

price—or whatever price the crew leader decides—back on the head of

the worker. He is told that he must work to pay off his debt, which is

often quoted in the thousands of dollars; but in most cases, no matter

how hard he works, the debt just increases. Kept isolated with other

trafficked workers—often under armed guard or open threats of vio-

lence—he is forced to work when, where, and for however long the crew

leader decides. In some instances, whatever necessities he requires—

food, clothing, medicines—are purchased from the crew leader’s own

store and deducted from his wages or added to his debt. As time passes,

the debt grows, and the worker sees no hope of liberation. Lucas Benitez

describes the process of enslavement: “Debt begins when the
coyote

turns you over to the crew leader. So many of our
companeros
have suf-

fered in this way and say being sold . . . feels worse than being an

animal. . . . You get sold for $500, but next day the debt is $1,000. Then

they add on rent and food, and your debt increases. . . . If you have a

slow day in the fields, the crew leader will say, ‘You owe us more now;

you didn’t work well.’ You never see the check stubs, so you have no idea

where you stand with your debt.” And workers can stay indebted, and

enslaved, for years. A single trafficking operation can keep hundreds of

people in bondage; as Benitez points out, “The more workers enslaved,

the greater the profits.”16 By convincing the worker that he is responsi-

ble and might someday pay off this debt, the slaveholder diverts his

attention from the real situation: he is a slave and if he tries to leave he

will be hurt.