Tomatoland (15 page)

They realized that the gang leaders’ attempts to eliminate vans stopping in areas controlled by the Ramos family was a signal that slavery was involved. But the police weren’t eager to pursue an investigation of that complexity. Instead, they rounded up Ramos, his brother, and his cousin and charged them with misdemeanor assault. The crew leaders were sentenced to one year of probation and were required to pay Martinez for the replacement of his vans’ windows.

But Germino and her associates were not ready to give up. Unfortunately, workers around Lake Placid refused to talk to the coalition out of fear. So coalition member
Romeo Ramirez volunteered to go undercover as a Ramos crew member. Short, even by the standards of his ethnic group, and only nineteen years old at the time, Ramirez knew that he would be killed if his cover was blown. “You have to come in as being very humble, innocent about life, and be with these people, be one of them,” he said. “You do it
indigena
style. I pretended to know nothing.”

Ramirez was housed in a former tavern just across the highway from El Mercadito. He described it as one of the most miserable places he had ever occupied, which for a veteran migrant tomato picker, is saying something. Cockroaches skittered everywhere. The mattresses reeked. The bathroom was worse than the filthiest outhouse. Even though he maintained a low profile and made no overt inquiries, it wasn’t long before other crew members began to confide in the quiet new recruit. Many of them, he was told, were being held captive and were receiving no pay. Three workers were particularly desperate. They feared Ramos wanted them killed and told Ramirez they could no longer endure the suffering. He said that he knew of a way they could escape, but it would carry considerable risk. They were willing to accept that, and Ramirez called his colleagues in Immokalee. A plan was devised.

Benitez drove into Lake Placid just before dark on the appointed evening. He pulled over to the shoulder in front of the former tavern where the men were housed, got out of his car, raised the hood, and
pretended to fiddle with the engine. Meanwhile, the balcony of a motel about a hundred yards away afforded Germino and her husband,
Greg Asbed, also a coalition member, a clear view of what was transpiring beside the highway. Seeing no other traffic and no suspicious parked vehicles, they signaled. At first, the three workers walked casually toward Benitez’s car, but halfway there they panicked and broke into a run, jumping into the backseat and lying on the floorboards. Benitez slammed down the hood, got behind the wheel, and tromped on the accelerator.

Ramiro Ramos, his brother
Juan Ramos, and his cousin
Jose Luis Ramos were subsequently tried on numerous counts of conspiring to hold people in
involuntary servitude, using a firearm during the commission of a violent act, and harboring illegal aliens for the purpose of financial gain. Ramiro and Juan received twelve-year federal sentences; Jose got ten.

Because of the crucial role played by victims and witnesses in the Flores case, congressional legislators inserted a clause in the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act allowing victims of slavery who cooperate with law enforcement officials to receive
T-1 visas, documents that allow them to stay and work in the country for four years and can lead to permanent residency. In the Navarrete case, Lucas Domingo and his fellow slaves agreed to testify against the family that had brutalized them in return for T-1 visas, even though they feared for their lives, especially if the brothers were acquitted.

Early on,
Jose Navarrete broke down
and pleaded guilty to five of the less serious charges involving harboring aliens. A court date for the five remaining Navarretes was set for September 2008. But a day before the trial was to begin, all five pleaded guilty. “In federal court, if you go to trial and lose, the sentences are extremely severe,” defense attorney
Joseph Viacava said. “We were happy to negotiate a resolution that caps our clients’ liability and puts him in a favorable position come sentencing.”

That day arrived
in late December, just over a year from the early morning when Domingo had broken through the ventilation shaft in the produce truck. Some former slaves have described the experience of being freed as coming “out of the darkness and into the light,” or “from death back to life.” Testifying at the sentencing hearing, Domingo told Judge
John E. Steele, “Bosses should not beat up people who work for them.” As Domingo spoke,
Geovanni Navarrete shook his head and curled his lip in a contemptuous smile. It was soon wiped away. Cesar and Geovanni Navarrete received jail sentences of twelve years. Ismael, who pleaded guilty to lesser offenses, was jailed for three years and ten months. The family matriarch, Villhina, was deported to Mexico. Court documents revealed that over the years the Navarretes had deprived their workers of nearly $240,000 in wages.

Some crew members were deprived of something more important than money. Medel, who is in his late forties and goes by the name
Don Pacito due to his short stature and regal facial features, was not able to get his life back together. When I spoke to him two years after the verdict, he was homeless, living in a makeshift camp in the woods outside Immokalee. He had been mugged and robbed three times. The drinking problem that had been encouraged by the Navarretes had gotten worse, if anything. He lived in constant fear because friends and relatives of his captors were still around town, many of them running work crews. He rarely walked anywhere alone. It was tough to pick up jobs because many crew leaders refused to hire a known snitch. He was afraid to work in fields in which Navarretes’ friends might also be working, so even if he was offered a job, he often refused to take it. When we spoke, he was hopeful that he would soon get enough money together to afford space in one of Immokalee’s shabby trailers.

When the verdicts were handed down, there were no howls of outrage from growers. On the contrary, a few weeks after the Navarretes pleaded guilty, the
Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, a trade
group,
awarded a farmer
named
Frank Johns its Distinguished Service Award, even though Johns’s company operated a farm where slaves freed in an earlier case had been forced to work. Two of the corporations on whose land the Navarrete crew worked, Six L’s and
Pacific Tomato Growers, did not comment. The only official word from the industry came from
Reggie Brown, executive vice president of the
Florida Tomato Growers Exchange. “We abhor slavery and do everything we can to prevent it,” he said. “We want to make sure that we always foster a work environment free from hazard, intimidation, harassment, and violence.” Growers, he said, cooperated fully with law-enforcement officers in the Navarrete case.
Charlie Crist, then governor of the state, refused to meet with the coalition to discuss issues related to slavery and labor abuse.
Terence McElroy of the
Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services inadvertently showed the lack of respect that Tallahassee politicians and bureaucrats have for the people who toil in one of the state’s most valuable industries when he downplayed the Navarrete verdict by saying, “Any instance is too many, and any legitimate grower certainly does not engage in that activity, but you’re talking about maybe one case a year.”

Maybe he should have talked to attorney Molloy or Detective Frost, neither of whom had time to savor victory in what had been one of the most brutal, vicious slavery cases yet prosecuted. Both were too busy trying to put together enough evidence in two other human trafficking cases as McElroy spoke. A few months later, when I visited Frost in his Naples office and asked him if he thought there were other workers being held in conditions similar to the Navarrete crew, he pointed due east, toward the fields of Immokalee, and said, “It’s happening out there right now.”

Viacava, the Navarretes’ defense attorney
, offered what is perhaps the most salient last word on the case, saying that it exemplified the hypocrisy of the U.S. legal system. The original version of the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act included language
that would have made it possible to jail those who profit by “knowing or having reason to know” that workers under their ultimate control were enslaved. That would have included the executives of the large tomato companies.
According to testimony
by the coalition’s Benitez at a hearing of the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, just as it seemed like the bill would pass easily with that language, Senator
Orrin Hatch (R-UT) insisted that the clause be removed from the act. “We have a migrant worker being prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law with all the government’s resources while these multimillion-dollar corporations stay off in the distance,” Viacava said. “If the corporations are going to employ these illegal migrant workers, they should be equally responsible. If you want to truly cure these ills, go after them. But I don’t think that’s going to happen—my clients don’t have the ability to make huge campaign contributions.”

As for
Lucas Mariano Domingo, after his day in court, he took his new visa and went back into the same fields where he had once been a slave, still hoping to make enough money to send home to his ailing parent.

AN UNFAIR FIGHT

W
ith four thousand
members, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers occupies a prosperous-looking, coral-colored, one-story building that provides meeting and office space. It is also home to a radio station that the coalition runs and a small general store stocked with the basics of a Hispanic kitchen priced low to dissuade other shopkeepers in town from gouging customers.
I met Geraldo Reyes
there one afternoon. He had agreed to guide me on a walking tour of the migrants’ side of Immokalee, a part of town few outsiders see.

Reyes is a tall, lanky Mexican in his early thirties. His normal demeanor is sleepy eyed and serious, but it can lighten instantly when he breaks into his infectious gap-toothed smile. He came to the United States about fifteen years ago and rented mattress space in a trailer. One of his roommates told a harrowing tale of being held as a slave and how a group called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers had helped set him free. Intrigued, Reyes started attending weekly discussion group meetings organized by the coalition and eventually began working for the group almost full time, although he still puts in a stint as a watermelon picker in North Florida and Georgia each summer.

As we set out along a sandy path, he told me that it was wrong to view slavery in Florida’s fields as a series of isolated cases. Rather, he explained, slavery is an inherent part of an economic system built on the ruthless exploitation of its workers. In this grim continuum, there is not much difference between an actual slave and a man who, say, has put his family’s property in Mexico up as collateral for a loan from an unscrupulous crew boss to get across the border to Florida and who must work indefinitely just to pay off that loan. A tiny step beyond that along the continuum is the worker who may not be indebted to his boss but has to pay him inflated rates for lodging, transportation, and food.
Mary Bauer, who represents migrant agricultural workers at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said, “There are these really terrible, dramatic slavery examples, and then there are less dramatic, but still incredible oppressive circumstances that, in effect, amount to forced labor that are extremely common and, in fact, close to the norm.”

Federal
labor laws helped create and continue to support this abusive economy by specifically denying farmhands rights that virtually all other American workers take for granted. As part of
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era
New Deal, the
National Labor Relations Act granted workers the right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining without fear of being fired. In early drafts, the legislation covered everybody, but the final version exempted domestic help and farmworkers from the basic protections provided by the act. In the wording of the bill, the definition of “
employee” did not include “any individual employed as an agricultural laborer.” The official reason given was that, in those days, farmers kept at most only one or two hired men and that households had only a few domestic servants, so unions and collective bargaining were not an issue. But in the 1930s, most domestics and farmworkers in this country were African American, and Roosevelt needed the support of southern Democratic legislators to get his New Deal legislation through Congress.
Legalized discrimination against farmworkers is not limited to the Labor Relations Act. The people who plant and harvest our food
are also exempt from laws mandating benefits, and they receive no guaranteed overtime, even if they put in more than eight hours in a day or forty hours over a week. Children as young as twelve years old are allowed to do farm work. In other industries, child labor laws set the minimum age at sixteen years.

The thirty thousand tomato harvesters who work in Florida are typically paid at least partially on an antiquated “
piece basis,” meaning they receive a set amount of money for every container of fruit they pick. Technically, the law says that what they are paid must equal at least the
minimum wage, which in Florida is $7.25 an hour. Under ideal conditions, a good, hardworking harvester should be able to pick the ten or so bushel-size buckets required to earn that amount in an hour. The problem is that conditions are rarely ideal, and a lot can go wrong. Farm laborers have to be on call every day of the week in case there’s work to be done. But if it rains, they can’t pick. If their crew gets to the worksite and the vines are covered in dew, they wait unpaid until the vines dry. The trip from town to the farm on the crew boss’s bus can take hours, and they receive no pay for travel time. If trucks are not available to transport the harvest to the packinghouse, the workers wait until the trucks are available. For an hour at the end of every workday, they sit around earning no money while the boss tallies the amount each member of his crew picked that day. And the system is plagued by fraud. Bauer of the
Southern Poverty Law Center said that her organization has prosecuted numerous cases where field bosses falsely recorded fewer hours on time sheets than a crew member actually worked.