Tomatoland (13 page)

From the outset, it became apparent that Navarrete’s promises were too good to be true. Domingo’s twenty-dollar-a-week rent wasn’t for a room with the family in the neat house but for shared space with three other workers in the back of a box truck out in the junk-strewn yard. It had neither running water nor a toilet, so Domingo and his “room” mates had to urinate and defecate in one corner. It turned out that there were about a dozen other men living behind the Navarrete residence, some in trucks like the one Domingo now called home, others in old vans, and yet others in a crude shack. Navarrete’s mother’s promise to provide food turned out to be two meager meals a day—eggs, beans, tortillas, rice, and rarely some sort of meat—only six days a week.
“The food was terrible,”
said
Jose Hilario Medel, a two-year veteran of the Navarrete crew whom I was able to interview. He made a gagging sound. “Some days you’d maybe get four tortillas—nothing else. Often the food would run out before everyone got his share.”

But Navarrete was generous in one way: He was always eager to extend loans for his crew to buy all the beer, wine, and liquor they
wanted, no worries. And pretty soon Domingo, like other members of the crew, found that he had become addicted to the alcohol that flowed so freely at 209 South Seventh. Everything, it seemed, had a price that Navarrete jotted down in a notebook, even activities related to basic hygiene. At the end of hot days of fieldwork, Domingo came home covered in perspiration and pesticides and had to pay five dollars to stand naked in the yard and spray himself off with cold water from a garden hose. His debts soon reached $300.

Still, he was making a dollar a bucket, and by his calculations, after nearly a month of ten-and-a-half-hour shifts, six days a week, he had picked many times three hundred buckets. But when Domingo, skinny and less than five and a half feet tall, brought the subject up, Navarrete said it didn’t matter. Domingo was still in debt as far as Navarrete was concerned, and if he tried to leave, he would be caught and soundly beaten. Any crew leader who dared to hire him would get the same treatment. Every week, Navarrete made Domingo hand back his paycheck. After deducting a hefty check-cashing fee and subtracting for rent, food, showers, bottled water, and liquor, he’d hand Domingo arbitrary amounts, twenty dollars one week, fifty dollars the next. Taking a day off was not an option. If Domingo or any of the others in the crew became ill or too exhausted to go to the fields, they were kicked in the head, beaten with fists, slashed with knives or broken bottles, and shoved into trucks to be hauled to the worksites. Some were manacled in chains. According to Medel, one day a crew member couldn’t take it anymore and ran away from a field. One of the Navarretes got in his truck to chase him down. When the truck returned, Medel said that the man’s face was so bloody and swollen that he was unrecognizable. He could not walk. “This is what happens when you try to get away,” the boss said.

The spare legal language of the
indictment that eventually came down against Navarrete and five other members of his extended family reveals the brutal conditions Domingo and the other enslaved laborers endured over a period of nearly three years:

• On or about May 2005, defendant Cesar Navarrete stopped paying his workers then told LMD and other workers that if they went to work for anyone else he would find them, beat them and their new employer.
  
• On an unknown date at the Navarrete property, defendant Cesar Navarrete grabbed AL and locked him in the back of a yellow truck for approximately four hours because AL wanted to leave his employment.
  
• On an unknown date approximately a month after AL was locked in the truck, defendant Cesar Navarrete hit AL because he wanted to leave his employment.
  
• In or about 2006 in South Carolina, defendant Cesar Navarrete slapped and kicked LSL because he did not want to work and then locked him in a truck for six hours.
  
• In or about June 2007, in DeSoto County, Florida, on a morning when LMD did not want to work, defendants Cesar Navarrete and Geovanni Navarrete picked up LMD and threw him in the back of a truck, beat LMD in the body, head, and mouth causing him injury and pain.
  
• In or about July or August 2007 in Walterboro, South Carolina, defendant Geovanni Navarrete and others known to the grand jury chained PSG’s feet together and to a pole to prevent him from leaving their employment.
  
• In or about September 2007 in North Carolina, defendant Geovanni Navarrete struck APS near his eye causing serious injury to his eye.
  
• Between on or about June 11, 2007, through November 2007, defendant Cesar Navarrete beat LSL almost daily.
  
• In or about September 2007, in North Carolina, defendant Cesar Navarrete kicked JVD in the ribs to make him go to work.
  
• In or about September 2007 in North or South Carolina defendant Cesar Navarrete ordered the beating of DC by others known to the grand jury because he was drunk and did not want to work.
  
• In or about mid to late November 2007, in Collier County, Florida, defendant Geovanni Navarrete and others dragged ATR out of the shack on the Navarrete property where he was sleeping at night time and severely beat him causing injury to his body and head.
  
• In or about November 2007, defendant Cesar Navarrete and others known to the grand jury, hit and kicked RRC because he left the Navarrete property without permission and went to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers office.
  
• On or about November 19, 2007, in Collier County, Florida, defendants Cesar Navarrete and Geovanni Navarrete, and others known to the grand jury beat LMD then locked him, JHM, JVD, and two other workers in the back of a box truck to prevent them from leaving and to ensure they would be available for work the following morning.
  

That last incident proved to be the beginning of the end for the Navarrete clan. Lying in the back of that truck, unable to sleep during the night due to a severe contusion on his forehead, Domingo noticed a shaft of light glimmering through a gap between the roof and the sides of the truck just as dawn broke. Jumping up and down until he was able to grab hold of the edge and punch his way through, he struggled out onto the truck’s roof. Another confined worker,
Jose Vasquez, followed him, and together they crept down and found a ladder to help the others escape. For the first time in two and a half years, Domingo was free.

They approached the first person they encountered on the streets, who happened to be a local pusher with several run-ins with the authorities. On the escapees’ behalf, he called the police. The first officer to arrive was a member of the drug detail. Fortunately, he had attended training sessions put on by a grassroots workers’ group called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and recognized all the signs of a slavery case in Domingo’s story.
He alerted his colleague Charlie Frost
, who specialized in
human trafficking cases for the
Collier County Sheriff’s Office. On November 21, 2007, Domingo and his fellow escapees told their harrowing story to the deputy sheriffs, who wasted little time. Armed with search warrants, they raided the Navarrete residence at five o’clock on the morning of November 29, freeing a dozen more workers. On December 5, three of the Navarrete brothers and their mother were indicted for the relatively minor charge of
“harboring illegal aliens.” Subsequently, they were charged with a “conspiracy to deprive the civil rights of undocumented foreign nationals from Mexico and Guatemala, namely, the right to be free from involuntary servitude as secured to them by the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.” Or, as Molloy put it in layman’s terms, “Slavery, plain and simple.”

Human trafficking, or slavery if you prefer, is a very difficult crime to solve. Government statistics suggest that
a total of about fifteen thousand
new human trafficking incidents take place in the United States each year (no one has a precise figure). Almost the same number of murders occur in the country annually. However, 65 percent of homicides are solved. For human trafficking, the rate is 1 percent. Two things account for this disparity. One is that law enforcement officials are reluctant to charge potential human traffickers unless the case is solid. Acquittal not only exposes witnesses and police sources to possible retaliation, but it sends a message to would-be traffickers that they can get away with this highly profitable crime. Second, in a slavery case involving undocumented workers, there are added hurdles. Without barred windows, whips, and chains, prosecutors often have to base their cases entirely on the testimony of the slaves themselves. In a strange country where they understand neither the language nor the law, workers are reluctant to come forward. In their homelands, cops are often thugs in uniform, so they have good reason to fear police. Without green cards, they face arrest and deportation. Stories abound of slaves making a mad dash for the border moments after being freed. Misguided charitable organizations have even stepped in
to help former slaves flee the country before they could give evidence. Traffickers also use
threats against victims’ families in their home countries to exercise control, according to Detective Frost. In one instance, when a slave ran away, members of his boss’s family went to the victim’s family in Mexico and informed them that if the escapee did not return to work, “We will kill you. Next time you talk to him, tell him that.” After his next call home, the worker returned to his boss. In another example, Frost was ready to proceed with a case when his witnesses began to waver on giving testimony. Worried about the ramifications for friends and family at home, they explained to him, “The traffickers are the law of our village. They have the guns. They make the laws.” Finally, many slaves don’t come forward because they believe that they are truly in debt. In their tight-knit societies, failure to pay debt is considered to be one of the most dishonorable acts a person can commit. “Slavery is unlike any other crime,” Molloy told me when we met in his large corner office in downtown Fort Myers. “Victims don’t report themselves. They hide from us in plain sight.”

With faux jungles full of parrots and monkeys, performing mermaids, and parks cashing in on every other conceivable theme, you’d think that the last thing Florida needed was yet another “attraction.” But in early 2010, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers founded the Florida
Modern-Day Slavery Museum. Housed in a box truck almost identical to the one in which Domingo and his fellow crew members were confined, the museum was meant to be a traveling exhibition to take the message to every corner of the state. That effort was so successful the museum embarked on a month-long road trip in the summer of 2010 up the eastern seaboard to Washington, DC, New York, and as far north as Boston.

I had my first tour of the museum one cool, cloudy day in February while it was still a work in progress. As three coalition members wrestled with an iron staircase destined to become the entrance, I hopped up into the cargo area of the truck. At the time it was stacked
high with empty cardboard tomato boxes. A plywood sorting table similar to what doubled as a bed for Domingo and his peers ran along one side. Even though a roll-up door at the back of the box was open, sweat began pouring down my face and back and dark stains spread out from my armpits. The heat was stifling. I started to feel light-headed and hopped back outside. If this was what it was like on a comfortably brisk, overcast winter day with the back door wide open, what would it have been like for the workers kept locked in there for hours at a time in the heat of summer?

The coalition was assembling the sort of exhibits that you’d expect to find in a museum dedicated to the
history of slavery in this country: chains to manacle disobedient slaves; a coarse-cloth blood-stained shirt worn by a picker who had been pummeled by an overseer in the fields for not working hard enough; wooden-butted pistols that would be drawn as threats, deployed in beatings, and used to shoot escapees. None of these were relics from the pre-emancipation 1800s. They all came from cases the coalition had helped bring to light in the previous decade or so.

Slavery and agriculture have had a close relationship in Florida
since European settlers first buried seeds in its sandy soil. But the institution really took root when Britain gained control of the region in 1763, and planters from the Carolina colonies moved into the St. John’s River area in the northeastern part of the state to raise crops of rice and indigo. By 1860, just before the start of the Civil War, 44 percent of Florida’s 140,000 residents were slaves. When that system abruptly ended in 1865, cooperative local sheriffs obligingly arrested gangs of African American men, typically on bogus vagrancy charges, and rented them out to landowners in “
convict lease programs,” a good deal for both the municipality collecting the fees and the farmers. “Before the war, we owned the negroes,” one planter famously said of the system in the late 1880s. “If a man owned a good nigger, he could afford to take care of him. But these convicts: we don’t own ’em. One dies, get another.”

After 1923, when Florida and Alabama became the last two states to ban the convict lease system, unscrupulous growers switched over to debt peonage. Workers racked up debts to their bosses through exorbitant charges for rent, food, beer, and cigarettes. When deductions from their wages were made at the end of each month, they found that they had fallen even further behind. Their souls might have been their own, but they owed their bodies to the company store. A landowner of that time told an interviewer for the 1960 CBS documentary
Harvest of Shame
, “We used to own our slaves, now we just rent them.” Today, fifty-one years after that film first aired, unscrupulous crew bosses find that time-tested
debt-peonage tactics still work just fine.

Situated on the banks of the
Caloosahatchee River, about a half hour’s drive north of Immokalee, LaBelle is a quaint little town with a handsome brick courthouse and modest, old-style southern homes that slumber in the deep shade of ancient, moss-draped live oaks. For several years in the 1990s, sheriff’s deputies working there noticed a disturbing trend. All too frequently, LaBelle’s
tranquility was shattered
by gunfights, some of which brazenly occurred in the main street in front of a bar owned by
Miguel Flores, a farmworker crew leader who operated in Florida and South Carolina. Often the combatants were Flores himself and men who had formerly been his lieutenants but had since fallen out. Bodies of unidentified Hispanic males were found floating in the river. Although there was never any evidence connecting Flores to the gunplay and corpses, police began to suspect that
Miguel A. Flores Harvesting, Inc., engaged in activities far more sinister than picking tomatoes. But there was no proof, and initial inquiries led to nothing. Officialdom lost interest in Flores.