Slave Next Door (12 page)

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Agricultural slavery is a very hands-on form of bondage, often involv-

ing the use of weapons.17 Workers are clearly warned that any attempt

to run or to report their situation will result in injury or death, and the

bosses can—and often do—make good on their threats. In addition to

threatening or beating the worker, his captors tell him that any efforts

to escape will result in violence for his family back home. This is a par-

ticularly terrifying threat, and it quells the desire to run. Even if the

worker is outside the immediate physical control of the crew leader, he

can never be free to leave, or to speak out, as long as his family is under

threat. The workers know these are not idle threats; many slaveholders

have family or associates in Mexico, or other Central American coun-

tries, positioned to carry them out.

The workers are also trapped by isolation; they usually have no idea

where they are, have no knowledge of English, and wouldn’t begin to

know what to do, where to go, or whom to trust should they escape.

While some of the houses and trailers in which they are kept are in the

fields or swamps far from civilization, a surprising number of slave

dwellings have been on major roads. One was alongside a golf course

and another right in the middle of Immokalee. Yet the enslaved worker,

a veritable stranger in a strange land, is as isolated as if he were on

Mars.

There is one more subtle reason why enslaved workers don’t attempt

to escape. They feel honor-bound to pay their debt. Dishonesty feeds on

honesty. The very rules of trust and integrity that most of these poor

farmworkers use to guide their dealings with each other are a key tool

used to enslave them. From small rural communities, where a man’s rep-

utation may be all he has, the workers carry a very strong sense that

debts
must
be repaid, that a person who does not pay his debts is the

lowest of the low. The slaveholder uses this sense of honor against the

workers as an alternative to violence. He will string them along by

appealing to their sense of “fair play.” They are trapped in a situation

where they believe that while trying to run away will accomplish noth-

ing, trust
might
pay off. If this is how it is here, they reason, if working

to pay off a debt is how things are done in America, what choice is there

but to remain and toil? With no idea that conditions can be different,

what is there to escape to?

The chain of slavery in the fields has several links. It begins with the

coyote,
who, rather than simply deliver the worker to the crew leader,

sells him outright. The crew leader then becomes the slaveholder, keep-

ing people against their will, refusing them payment, and using violence

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as his primary tool. He may act alone, or with his family, or as part of a

syndicate. Handled efficiently, the possibilities for rich profits are end-

less. These are the primary criminals, with the greatest guilt, but the

responsibility climbs right up the product chain.

Big growers tend to deny all knowledge of the labor conditions in

their fields, leaving it to the subcontracted crew leaders. Yet a big grower

is likely to know about the trafficking cases in his own backyard, and he

deals directly with the crew leaders, some of whom make their way into

the news and the courts. It seems that the grower disassociates himself

from the men in the field only when it suits him to do so. In denying the

workers’ efforts to organize, the grower will claim that he maintains

direct daily communication with his laborers and that this closeness

precludes any need for a union. The degree to which a grower is willing

to acknowledge the conditions in his fields seems to be a matter of per-

sonal convenience and economy.18

But the responsibility continues up the product chain, up to the

megacorporations that buy the crops from the growers. In fact, an

argument can be made that the buyers are accountable both by con-

tributing to the harsh conditions that have given rise to trafficking and

by refusing to take responsibility. By pushing down the prices at which

they buy up the crops, the fast-food and supermarket chains have cre-

ated an environment where the only predictable savings the grower—

and by association, the
coyote
and the contractor—can realize are from

squeezing workers or, in the worst cases, enslaving them.

According to Lucas Benitez, until recently the growers and buyers

have been able to ignore the situation because the subcontracting crew

leaders have done the actual enslaving.19 Nonetheless, as one activist

puts it, “What kind of work atmosphere is it when, after the first five

[slavery] cases are uncovered, you can still claim you don’t know what’s

going on? The silence from both the growers and the buyers was deaf-

ening. Nobody stood up and said, ‘Oh, my God, this is just awful! We

have to do something about this!’ None of the buyers came forward and

said, ‘Why, we were buying from this very farm!’ You have to ask why

they didn’t know, and once it was brought to their attention, why there

was no outcry.”20

As more cases of slavery in the production of the food we eat came to

light, consumers remained in the dark. The consumers are the last link

in the product chain, and what Americans eat sometimes comes from

the hands of slaves. So where is the consumer demand for clean food?

And what is being done to end slavery in our fields?

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E A R LY A N T I S L AV E RY E F F O R T S

Throughout the country are NGOs that actively root out cases of agricul-

tural trafficking. One that has taken aggressive and effective action against

slavery in the southern fields is the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW).

Founded in the early 1990s, the CIW is a worker-based organization

devoted to improving the lives of farm laborers. Many of its members

brought from their native Mexico, Guatemala, and Haiti experience in

labor organizing, which they put to use through programs—in their

words—of popular education, leadership development, and powerful

protest actions.21 Confronted with the horrific conditions in Immokalee,

they set about uniting the workers—most of whom had little in common

except the inhumane conditions under which they lived and worked. The

CIW set out to combat known labor violations: the subpoverty wages;

impossibly long hours; denial of health benefits, pension, meal and break

time, sick days, and holidays; injury from the hard labor; danger from

exposure to pesticides; slum-level, high-priced housing; and blacklisting of

any workers who dared to complain or attempt to organize. And in the

course of their efforts, they discovered slavery in their midst.22

In hindsight, it was not a great leap; as CIW member Laura Germino

says, “Slave operations don’t occur in a vacuum. It’s at the end of a spec-

trum of labor violations.”23 The same conditions that give rise to the

abuse of migrant workers with at least the freedom to leave, taken a step

further, make slavery possible. When the philosophy is “The less you

pay, the more you make,” the ultimate objective is to pay nothing. And

what better way to achieve this goal than to enslave the workforce?

The coalition didn’t set out to free enslaved workers; in fact, in the

beginning, they weren’t aware, any more than the rest of us, that there

was such a thing as human trafficking in the fields. As foreign, vague,

and misunderstood as trafficking is to Americans today, fifteen years

ago it was virtually unknown. Poor labor conditions, yes; low wages, of

course; but slavery in America? Never.

Then came the word that Miguel Flores had enslaved scores of work-

ers in South Carolina. Working with his partner, Sebastian Gomez,

Flores recruited his victims—mostly indigenous Mexicans and

Guatemalans—both in Latin America and in the United States. They

were forced by gun thugs to work ten to twelve hours daily, often for no

pay except what went toward bare subsistence. The few who attempted

to escape or defy their captors were beaten; at least one was shot.24 By

the time the CIW heard of Miguel Flores, his slavery ring had been oper-

ating for years.

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“The Boss Shot a Worker”

Often the awareness that one is enslaved comes abruptly. One day, a

newly arrived worker in Miguel Flores’s South Carolina labor camp

inadvertently “tested the boundaries” when he took a leisurely stroll

along a cornfield that bordered the compound. Within minutes, a pickup

truck roared up, and Sebastian Gomez ordered him inside at gunpoint

and drove him back to the camp. The message was unmistakable: you

cannot leave.

Sometimes the awareness of slavery comes gradually, as it did when

the newly formed CIW first learned of Miguel Flores’s activities. A few

CIW members were on an outreach trip in South Carolina in July 1992

when six laborers approached them. One of the workers, a small Mayan

woman named Julia Gabriel, told a CIW member that they hadn’t been

paid for their work at the last camp. Ah, thought the member, a non-

payment of wages issue.

“Why didn’t you get paid?” he asked.

“Because we had to leave the camp in the middle of the night.”

“Why did you have to leave?”

“Because the boss shot a worker who owed him money and was

trying to leave to find work elsewhere.”

Gabriel revealed the name of the boss, Miguel Flores, and told the

CIW members that the compound was called “Red Camp” and lay three

hours to the north, in the little dirt-poor town of Manning. Red Camp

consisted of three barracks and was situated among fields and woods at

the end of an unlit dirt road; it was the largest of many Flores encamp-

ments in that part of the state.

“That’s all we had to go on,” says Germino. She and her two col-

leagues drove to Manning, and since it was Sunday, they assumed that

the workers would be at the town’s one laundromat. They were, under

the watchful eyes of guards and informants. The CIW members asked

for Miguel Flores and were greeted with an ominous “Who wants to

know?” Flores’s wife was there, and—at the request of the CIW people—

agreed to give the six workers their back pay, so as to avoid a public

scene. Then, curiously, she volunteered the information that Sebastian

Gomez, who had recently been arrested for fatally shooting a worker,

was out of jail, since the police had been unable to find the man’s body.

“Another piece of the puzzle came together; we learned that Miguel

Flores’s partner was Sebastian Gomez, and we had heard before we even

left Florida . . . that Gomez and his people had shot a man up in the

Carolinas who’d wanted to work elsewhere. . . . So you see, something

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vague that you can’t really act on becomes clear once additional infor-

mation comes in.”25 Adds Greg Asbed, a CIW member, “It’s like when

you have radio static, and suddenly you’re tuned to the right station.”26

The CIW members returned to Immokalee and spoke with DOJ

agents to try to push the case. Over the next year, the CIW interviewed

several witnesses to Flores’s atrocities—including some of the original

six escaped workers whom they’d met in South Carolina—and gave

their names and statements to the DOJ. Nothing was done.

At one point, sheriff’s deputies from Hendry County, Florida, con-

tacted the CIW to discuss Flores’s activities in and around LaBelle,

a small agricultural town twenty-five miles from Immokalee, where

the contractor had maintained a strong and growing presence for years.

The bodies of Hispanic men had been turning up in the nearby

Caloosahatchee River, and the deputies suspected that Miguel Flores

was behind it, but no evidence was ever found to connect Flores to the

killings. However, one deputy later commented that once Flores was in

jail the killings miraculously stopped.27

It gradually became apparent that Flores had camps in a number of

locations in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, holding a captive

workforce that numbered between four hundred and five hundred. As

months passed, the CIW continued to grow the number of leads,

escapees, and witnesses, and still the DOJ dragged its heels. In late

1993, the case was reassigned to another DOJ prosecutor, but human

trafficking was apparently on neither his nor the FBI’s radar. It seems

the feds just didn’t know what to do with it, and consequently the case

didn’t progress for a year. Time and again the CIW would contact the