Discussion 3 - Chapter One: Florida - Labor and Globalization

0 n April 20, 1997, at around 10 P.M., the Highlands County,

Florida, Sheriff's Office received a 911 call; something strange had

happened out in the migrant-worker ghetto near Highlands

Boulevard. The "neighborhood," a mishmash of rotting trailer homes

and plywood shacks, was hidden outside the town of Lake Placid, a mile

or two back from the main road. By day, the place was forbidding and

cheerless, silent, its forlorn dwellings perched awry, in seeming danger

of oozing into the swamp. By night, it was downright menacing, humid

and thick with mosquitoes.

When the sheriff's officers arrived, they found an empty van parked

beside a lonely, narrow lane. The doors were closed, the lights were still

on, and a few feet away, in the steamy hiss of night, a man lay facedown

in a pool of blood. He had been shot once in the back of the head,

c·xecution -style. Beyond his body stood a pay phone, mounted on a pole.

The 911 caller had offered a description of a truck the sheriff's offi-

rcrs recognized as belonging to a local labor contractor named Ramiro

Ramos. At 1:30 A.M . , officers were dispatched to Ramos's house.

It's unclear how much the officers knew about the relationship be-

4 NOBODIES

tween Ramos and his employees. Migrant farm workers-nearly all un-

documented Mexican and Central Americans, in this case-usually ar-

rive in this country with little comprehension of English or of American

culture. Since they frequently come with little money and few connec-

tions, the contractor, or crew boss, as he's often called, often provides

food, housing, and transportation to and from work. As a result, many

farmworkers labor under the near-total control of their employers.

Whether the sheriffs officers were or weren't clued in to the fraught im-

plications of this dynamic, they would undoubtedly have gained. insight

into Ramos's temperament if they'd known the nickname for hun used

by his crew of seven hundred orange pickers. They called him "El Dia-

blo."

At Ramos's house, police found a truck fitting the caller's description.

When a quick search of the vehicle yielded a .45-caliber bullet, police de -

cided to bring in Ramos, his son, and a cousin for questioning. Interro-

gated at the station house, Ramos admitted that the night ~efore, he had

gone driving around the dirt roads outside town, collectmg rent from

his workers and looking, he said, "for one of his people." But when the

police asked him if his search had any connection with the s~ooting, he

said he didn't know anything about it. According to the shenffs report,

Ramos at this point became "upset" and said he wished to leave. He and

his relatives were released.

The deputies went into the night, looking for migrant workers who

might be willing to offer additional testimony. Witness by witness, a story

began to take shape. The dead c·hoje1; or van driver, was a Guatemalan

named Ariosto Roblero. The van had belonged to a servicio de transporte,

a sort of informal bus company used by migrants. The van and its pas-

sengers had been heading from South Florida, where orange season was

ending, to North Carolina, where cucumber season was getting un~er

way. Everything seemed fine until they hit the migrant ghetto outstde

Lake Placid. Roblero had stopped to to make a pickup. And then, as t he

van waited, a car and a pickup truck raced up, screeched to a halt behind

and in front of it, and blocked it off. An unknown number of men

jumped out, yanked the chofer from his seat, and shot him. The other

driver and the terrified passengers scattered into the night.

FLORIDA 5

With each new detail, an increasingly disturbing picture of Ramos's

operation began to emerge. El Diablo, it seemed, had been lending money

to h1s workers, then overcharging them for substandard "barracks-

style" housing, gouging them with miscellaneous fees, and encouraging

th.em to shop at a high-priced grocery store, conveniently owned by his

wtfe. By the time El Diablo had deducted for this, that, and the other thing, workers said, they were barely breaking even.

Worse, they were trapped. El Diablo's labor camp was in a tiny, iso-

lated country town. He and his family, a network of cousins and in-laws,

many of whom also worked as labor contractors, patrolled the area in

their massive Ford F-250 pickup trucks, communicating with one an-

other through Nextel walkie-talkie phones. For foreigners unfamiliar

with the area, escape was almost unthinkable. But just to make matters

cry.s tal clear, El Diablo told his workers that anyone indebted caught trymg to run away would be killed.

The previous night's murder, the witnesses alleged, had taken place

when an indebted employee had left. The murder was meant to send a

signa l to local workers and to chafers thinking about aiding their depar- rure from El Diablo's territory.

If the case sounds like a slam dunk, what happened next was, unfor-

tunately, all too common in cases involving undocumented workers.

Afte r spilling most of the beans off the record, all the informand but one

declined to name Ramos or his accomplices as the perpetrators, or even 10

offer their own names. One of the passengers in the murder victim's

V; 111 told detectives that he couldn't remember a single thing about the 1 11rident. He managed not to see the color, the model, or the make of ei-

liHT assailant's vehicle, nor did he see who shot whom, or whether, in

l.ir t •. anyone had even been shot. He only said that he was leaving for fl lcxJco the next day, never to return .

1\ no~her witness acknowledged seeing the murder but, according to liw shen ffs report, refused to name the shooter, stating his belief that "if

1 11

told, he would be killed by the Ramos family." The Ramoses knew

'' lwre his family lived in Mexico, he said; if they didn't kill him person-

ill y, they would kill one of his relatives. He, too, was leaving town and 11 111ddn't tell where he could be reached.

6 NOBODIES

The sheriffs office was stumped. There wasn't much they could do

without firmer testimony. However, they contacted federal authorities,

and a few weeks later, at dawn on May 1, 1997, local law enforcement

agents, backed by the Border Patrol and the U.S. Department of Labor,

returned to Ramiro Ramos's house armed with a search warrant. The

house and office yielded an arsenal of weapons not generally consid-

ered essential to labor management, including a Savage 7-millimeter

rifle, a Marlin .22 rifle, an AK-47, a semiautomatic rifle, a Browning

9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, and a Remington 700 7-millimeter

Magnum rifle. The agents arrested Ramos and charged him with immi-

gration violations. One would think, perhaps, that authorities would have enough evi-

dence to halt a clearly and alarmingly exploitive situation. Here were

seven hundred workers on U.S. soil working under threat of death, for

low pay or possibly no money at all. Five days later, Ramos was released on $20,000 bail. The labor

charges were dropped. Weapons charges were never brought. Business

went on as usual. And the murder of Ariosto Roblero remains, to this

day, "unsolved."

T he collective image of the South Florida interi~r is usually conj~red by a single word: swamp. Beyond a smattenng of self-descnbed

"crackers" and a few thousand American Indians sweating it out on

sleepy reservations, the area has traditionally been reluctantly popu-

lated. The reasons for this are easy enough to understand: the landscape

is unremittingly flat; summer temperatures are stultifying. Even in win-

ter, the air hangs heavy, dank, and still--except, of course, during the

frequent thunderstorms and devastating hurricanes for which the area

is known. "I've got swampland in Florida I'd like to sell you" has long been a

way of teasing a person for being gullible. The joke refers to the Florida

land boom of the 1920s, which began when the increasing popularity of

bona fide boomtowns like Miami and Palm Beach caused parcels else-

where in the state to be gobbled up, usually sight unseen, by speculation-

FLORIDA 7

crazed northerners. Tracts billed as "oceanfront" were often situated

dozens of miles away from open water or roads and chopped into ridicu-

lous proportions, most famously by a Mr. Charles Ponzi, to as many as

twenty-three lots per acre. The fact that few buyers had ever dreamt of

actually moving to the "Riviera of America" didn't deter Florida land

prices from rising as much as 1,000 percent annually-that is, until the

fall of 1926, when the famous Miami hurricane battered the area, crash-

ing the market and causing the overpriced deeds to become as worthless

as the muck they represented.

In the last eighty years or so, the area has been tamed, drained,

canaled, paved, built upon, planted over, covered with ethylene plastic,

injected with pesticides and fertilizers, and thereby induced into yield-

ing a more predictably handsome return on investment. The steamy

lowlands have become an outdoor food factory, a hydroponic stew of

gook and chemicals capable of producing year-round. Florida now

churns out more fruits and vegetables than any state but California,

reaping an average of about $7 billion per year.

Almost anything can be grown on Florida's 44,000 farms: some 280

different crops, including tobacco, potatoes, peanuts, escarole, pecans,

okra, peppers, cucumbers, snap peas, radishes, sweet corn, and even nor-

mally cold-weather-loving blueberries. But the principal commodities

are juice oranges (1.2 billion gallons from 103 million trees), tomatoes

( 1.5 billion pounds a year), and sugarcane (about a half billion dollars a year).

Some forty miles inland from Fort Myers Beach and Sanibel Island

1s the town oflmmokalee. A few towns down from Lake Placid, it sits

.tt the bottom of a cluster of remote agricultural outposts dotting the

South Florida interior. Three stoplights long, Immokalee (which

1 hymes with broccoli and means "my home" in Seminole) is bordered on

dtc south by the Big Cypress Swamp and surrounded on all other sides

l.y ci trus groves and tomato fields. Outside town, there are pretty-

1'1tough sights to be seen: stands of cypress, southern pine draped with

" 1•an ish moss, canals lined with cattails, and wading pink flamingoes.

ln~ide the town limits, however, the place looks more like a work camp

111 (tctory than an American community.

8 NOBODIES

Municipal authorities in Immokalee bother little with public ser-

vices; for several days when I was there in 2002 , a visitor turning onto

Main Street would pass a decapitated black dog, left to rot on the median

strip across frotn a new-looking Walgreens. In 2001, a county sheriffs

deputy was sentenced to fourteen years in prison for dealing crack and

shaking down local drug dealers. The town's official population is about twenty thousand, but during

the growing season, between Novetnber and May, it increases to nearly

twice that. The year-to-year population reflects the current wave of tni-

grants and the detritus of previous ones: forty years ago, the town con-

sisted largely of poor vvhites, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans. In

the 1980s, Haitians arrived . A little later, the Mexicans and Guatemalans

trickled in. Today, sotne Haitians, whites, and African Americans re-

n1ain, but the bulk of the population consists of Mexican and Central

American migrants. The arduousness of farm labor has been well docun1ented. The aver-

age migrant has a life expectancy of just forty-nine years. Twenty thou-

sand farm workers require tnedical treatment for acute pesticide poisoning

each year; at least that tnany n1ore cases go unreported. Nationally, 50 per-

cent of migrants up from 12 percent in 1990 are without legal work

papers. Their median annual income is sotnewhere around $7,500.

Florida farm workers have it even worse. No one knows for sure how

1n .any there are. The tnost reliable guess is about three hundred thou-

sand. An estitnated 80 percent of thetn have no work papers, and at last

count, in 1998, their average yearly pay was an estin1ated $6,574. Ad-

justed for inflation, these incotne levels have fallen by as much as 60 per--

cent in the last twenty years. According to the Florida Tomato Committee, during the 2005-2006

growing season, Florida farmers were paid $10.27 per twenty-five-

pound box of totnatoes . The tnigrants who pick the tomatoes, however,

are paid an average of 45 cents per bucket, a rate that has remained un-

changed for thirty years. To earn $50 in a day, an Immokalee picker tnust harvest two tons of

totnatoes, or 125 buckets. Each bucket weighs about thirty-two pounds.

Once a worker has picked enough tom atoes to fill it about fifty, de-

FLORID A 9

pending on the size he must then hoist the bucket onto his shoulder

and walk/run across soft, spongy, lumpy soil to the dumpeado1; an over-

seer who checks each bucket for ripeness. The worker then raises his

bucket, dun1ps its contents into a central bin, and runs back to the

ton1ato plant, anywhere from a few yards to a hundred yards away.

Orange and grapefruit picking pay slightly better, but the hours are

longer. To get to the fruit, pickers must clitnb twelve- to eighteen-foot-

high ladders, shakily propped on soggy soil against shifty boughs, then reach deep into thorny branches, thrusting both hands among pesticide-

coated leaves before twisting the fruit from its stetn and rapidly stuffing

it into a shoulder ... slung moral} or pick sack. A full sack weighs about a hundred pounds; it takes ten sacks about two thousand oranges to

fill a bano) a bin the size of a large wading pool. Each bin earns the vvorker afic:ha, or token, redeen1.able for about seven dollars. An average

worker in a typical field under decent conditions can fill six, seven,

rnaybe eight bins a day. After a rain, though, or in an aging field with

overgrown trees, the same picker might work an entire day and fill only three bins.

Most Atnericans have by now heard about the dangers of illegal mi-

gration. For starters, there are the perils of crossing the border, which in- rl ude running out of food and water and dying in the desert heat.

Between 1995 and 2004, tnore than 3,000 Mexicans died while trying to

<' llter the United States. According to the U.S. Border Patrol, the death r: tte is rising; in a recent twelve-month period, a record 460 migrants

t I icd crossing the border.

Moreover, gangs and police on the Mexican side of the border prey

' Hl tnigrants, knowing that they are seldom armed and frequently carry-

tng cash . (The terrn used by coyotes, the notorious professionals who

)', ttid e or smuggle tnigrants across the border, to describe their clients is

f'ollos chickens, vulnerable and ripe for plucking.) On the Atnerican

·· ~< lc of the border, migrants lucky enough to survive the crossing face

.I I'll led Border Patrol guards, canines, choppers, and, tnost recently, self-

.,, vied vigilante groups like the Arizona-based Minuteman Project,

wlti ch, since April2005, has chartered at least twenty chapters across th e 1t1ttntry.

10 NOBODIES

Although farm work has never been a lark, it's possible to find fairly

recent accounts of farm workers who were happy with their profession.

In Daniel Rothenberg's With These Hands, published in 2000, numerous

farm workers in the United States recount their experiences. One, a for-

mer Vietnam veteran named Gino Mancini, recalled:

If somebody asks me what I do for a living, I say, ''I'm a fruit tramp."

To me, fruit tramp is not an insult. I'm proud of what I do. I pick

fruit. I migrate. Once, I cut out an article that listed two hundred

and fifty jobs, from the most prestigious to the least prestigious. The

last job, number two hundred and fifty, was migrant worker. Bot-

tom of the list. It actually made me feel good. I chose this lifestyle

and I like it. Look at what a lot of other people do--advertising and

shit like that. What does that do for the world? At least I'm helping

to feed somebody. I mean, it might not be much, but I'm not destroy-

ing anything. A lot of stuffl see just seems mindless to me. Just think

of the jobs people have-"I'm a public relations officer"; ''I'm a con-

sultant"-What do they really do? Mostly nothing.

I do physical labor. It's honest. I'm not especially proud, but I

work hard. I make an honest living. I don't know what farm work is

about to everybody else, but to me it's good hard work. You know,

we're all different. Everybody's an individual. . · · I couldn't handle a year-round job with maybe three weeks' va-

cation a year. I like to move around, to live day to day. That's the way

I've always lived. That's the only way I know. To me, farmwork is

about freedom.

A farmworker named Henry Dover mused:

Farmwork is kind of beautiful. It's peaceful. In the city, there's a

whole lot of killing and shooting going on. Out here, you can

breathe nice clean air. You can hear the birds. You can look up and

see the sky. You're not cramped. Whenever I look up at the sky, I'll

be thinking about God. That's what makes me happy, just seeing th

FLORIDA

plants, seeing how they change color, seeing the flowers. You can see

all of God's nature out there.

11

Today's fannworkers are almost entirely foreign-born. For the vast

majority of them, farm work isn't a lifestyle choice or a preference. It's a

matter of survival. Due to overpopulation, and declining commodity

prices, largely brought on by free-trade agreements and First World

subsidies to farmers, they can no longer afford to live on their own land in their own countries.

The migrants streaming to South Florida these days from the high-

lands ~f s_outhern Mexico and Guatemala speak dozens of Mayan or ~>ther mdtgenous languages, such as Quiche, Zapotecan, Mam, Kan- robal, Tzotzil, Nahuatl, and Mixtec. For many of them, even Spanish-

never mind English-is a foreign language, and communication among

g roups can be difficult.

In the postpastoral fields of modern, industrialized agriculture

~ u ch quaint notions as worker solidarity are unrealistic. As a forme; Immokalee tomato picker named Francisca Cortes told me, every

111o rning is like a free-for-all: when the bus pulls off the highway and

Ii ll o th e day's tomato field, workers scramble and elbow one another out

" ' 1 he way in a dog-eat-dog race for the most advantageous positions in

rllr field. A row that faces the sun more directly will have riper fruit, 111nk mg for easier, faster picking than a row in the shade. A row closer to

llw ro ll ection bin cuts the length of the heavy slog back and forth with a fril l bu cket. Each gradient of productivity is worth another quarter, an-

Ht hn dollar. Under these circumstances, Francisca said with a shrug

11'~ ru st a bunch of men and some women. You're with strangers. Yo~ loon' r k now them. You're not there to say 'What's your name? How are

•ud I low long have you been here?' There just isn't any time for that."

"' "" '' Y parts of the Southeast, like the migrant ghetto where Ariosto l oo lolno was murdered, agricultural workers are quartered in trailer 111 1"' 111il es from town; Immokalee's "pickers," as citrus and tomato

12 NOBOD I ES

workers are often called, live in plain sight, densely concentrated be-

tween First and Ninth streets, close to the South Third Street pickup

spot. Those who don't live there are forced either to walk a great dis-

tance twice a day or to pay extra for a ride to work. As a result, rents near

the parking lot are high. The town's largest landlord, a family named

Blocker, owns several hundred old shacks and mobile homes, many

rusting and mildew-stained, which can rent for upward of two hundred

dollars a week, a square-footage rate approaching Manhattan's. (Heat

and phone service are not provided.) It isn't unusual for twelve workers

to share a trailer. Between four-thirty and five o'clock every morning, a convoy of

crudely painted red and blue school buses arrives at a parking lot on

South Third Street, a block from Main Street, to carry workers to the

fields . In the afternoon, the buses return and the sidewalks fill with

weary men in muddy white rubber boots. In the evening, some stay

home to wash their few items of clothing or cook dinner; others run er-

rands on bicycles with the handles turned up, wearing tucked-in West-

ern shirts, baseball caps or cowboy hats, and Reebok knockoffs . Those

with time left on their phone cards line up in parking lots and on street

corners before seemingly innumerable pay phones (a staple of migra nt

towns) to call Chiapas, Oaxaca, or Huehuetenango, the mountain towns

of home. About 40 percent of South Florida's laborers are new each season,

and they are often unsure of their rights (or the idea of rights in general).

Most of these migrants come from small towns, where everyone knows

one another. While farmwork back home pays little, they say, mistreat-

ment of workers is rare. As one immigrant from southern Mexico ex-

plained, "Back in my village, it was so small, we really didn't have

situations where a boss or a farmer didn't pay a worker. They had to

walk the same streets as the workers. If they didn't pay, word would get

out. It ended up being, you know, not like the law here, but the law of

cojones"--or balls. "If you didn't pay, you were going to get your cojones

cut off." It's hard to imagine immigrant farmworkers in the United States

FLOR I DA 13

cutting their bosses' balls off. In fact, in most circumstances it's difficult

to imagine them getting up the nerve to complain about anything.

There are many reasons why immigrant workers in the United

States are reluctant to discuss bad, dangerous, and abusive situations

with their employers, much less with bolillos, or whites. Fear of losing

their jobs and being labeled troublemakers is only one. Another reason,

of course, is that immigrant workers live in constant fear of being seized

by Ia Migra-the Immigration and Naturalization Service-and de- ported. Unscrupulous labor contractors use this implicit threat of expo-

sure to keep workers in line. Workers often borrow money to travel

north from loan sharks back home at interest rates as high as 25 percent

per month. If they are deported, the loan is foreclosed. Frequently,

homes are put up as collateral, so deportation can be a financial calamity

for an entire family.

All of this helps explain why South Florida has rapidly become one

of the most exploitive labor environments in the country, earning the

designation by a former prosecutor with the Justice Department of

"ground zero for modern slavery."

Nothing drives horne the rea lity of migrant farmwork in South

Florida as well as som ething told to me by Michael Baron, an agent with

the U.S. Border Patrol who knows the area well. "You know," he said,

"these workers are so vulnerable. They're housed miles from civiliza-

tion, with no telephones or cars. Whatever they're told they're gonna do,

they're gonna do. They're controllable. There's no escape. If you does-

cape, what are you gonna do? Run seventeen m il es to the nearest town?

When you don't even know where it is? And, if you have a brother or a

cousin in the group, are you gonna leave them behind? You gonna es-

cape with seventeen people? You're gonna make tracks like a herd of

elephants. They'll find you. And heaven help you when they do."

Adan Garda Orozco is a stocky man, about five feet two, with ruddy, copper-brown skin, a mustache, and the broad features and round, soft eyes of Central American indigenous people. His hair is lightly

14 NOBODIES

gelled and buzz cut down the sides, and when I met him, he wore what

appeared to be snakeskin cowboy boots, and looked much younger than

his thirty-eight years. (I have changed his name, as well as the names of

his family and friends.) Garda Orozco gets along in Spanish, but his first language is Mixe, a

Mayan language spoken by the Mixe Indians of southern Mexico. Ini-

tially, he appears to be studiously reserved. When he loosens up, how-

ever, he's a pretty funny guy. When asked, for instance, if he had ever

owned any land, he almost laughed. "I don't even own the dirt under my

fingernails!" He paused, bemused. "Who in the world has land?"

Garda Orozco lived with his wife, Concepcion, and their six chil-

dren in a one-room house on the Yucatan Peninsula. The town is small,

like most in the area-about ten or fifteen blocks square, home to per-

haps five hundred people-and surrounded by cleared pastureland. It's

fair to describe it as sleepy, the kind of place where kids bathe one an-

other outside the house in rainwater buckets and hairy black pigs

saunter down the street with billy goat escorts. Inland from the beaches and the verdant coastal plain, the Yucatan

forms a low, flat plateau with shallow soils and hardscrabble limestone

outcroppings. Most of the terrain is chopped into small, rocky fincas or

ranchos, which raise a little bit-but never a lot--of corn, beans, cattle,

oranges, mangos, bananas, and coconuts. Like many poor areas of the world, the Yucatan is a place where

most people seem to spend their time waiting. They wait in hamlets

with plaintive names like Centenario or Justicia Social, and towns near

crumbling temples with names recalling the area's Mayan past, like

Xbonil, Xpujil, Hecelchakan, and Dzibilchaltun. They wait in houses

without windows. They wait in yards of dirt, meticulously swept, be-

neath trees without leaves and trees abloom with fiery orange flowers.

They wait by the road, on bikes, for cars, for taxis, and of course, they

wait for jobs. Garda Orozco began to work when he was nine years old as a farm-

hand, performing such tasks as clearing brush for local ranchers or har-

vesting sugarcane. When work was available, it paid about five or six

dollars a day. However, as he explained, "Not to criticize my country,

FLORIDA 15

but where I come from, there aren't any jobs. And when there are, you

work two, three days sometimes. Maybe sometimes fifteen or twenty.

But other times there's none, and you have to go around looking for it,

wherever it is. You don't want to leave your hometown, but if there's a

chance there may be work somewhere else, well, you have to leave. But

you end up coming out the same anyway. Because even if you earn a lit-

tle more in the city, or in whatever town you go to, you have to pay for

rent, you have to pay for food. You can't get by, and once again, you end

up going home with nothing."

Garda Orozco felt increasingly unable to provide for his growing

family. "People use the term 'provide for' just to refer to a plate of beans

and salsa and some tortillas," he said. But it wasn't nearly enough. "I

think for a family you've got to have milk. Right?" Besides, he said, one

of his kids was sick, and the medicine was costing a fortune.

Garda Orozco's house is a mishmash of salvaged boards slapped and

lashed together, with wide, irregular gaps and a corrugated roof. The

yard is a beleaguered mess of tattered banana trees, an orange tree, and

a junk pile, which serves as bathroom and outhouse.

When I visited them, Adan and Concepcion told me they wage a

continual battle to make improvements, but bricks were expensive, and

it was hard to make headway. What bothered them the most were the

pools of water that surrounded the house, six inches deep during the

ramy season.

Inside the house I found two beds, a tangle of hammocks, five white

plastic chairs, an enormous boom box with a bright neon digital display,

and six--or maybe it was eight-kids, dusty, barefoot, sprawled, po-

litely trying not to giggle: Nestor, the oldest at fifteen, then Alejandro,

Enrique, Gabriela, Cruz, and Yesenia, an adorable girl of three too shy

to say hi. Two of the older boys were plopped on the floor, playing soc-

cer on a PlayStation. The current match pitted the United States against

Germa ny. As the boys competed, madly clicking and twitching their re-

mote controls, teasing each other, Concepcion whispered to me that one

of their neighbors had actually had the gall to try to charge kids to use

their PlayStation. Did I want any tacos?

The door to the house remained open. Sunlight streamed in. I no-

16 NOBODIES

ticed a large hen carefully set atop one of the beds. Was it usual for the

chickens to share the family beds? I asked. One of the kids explained

that the hen had nearly expired while laying an egg earlier that day.

Hours later, her breast was still heaving violently with each breath, as if

she was struggling to get enough oxygen. Every few seconds she jerked

her neck around as if expecting a rear attack, her beak frozen open in

what looked like a surreal grimace of terror. The game ended, and Enrique rose and strutted, boasting with mock

grandeur, "I am the champion." The boys then unplugged a cord from

the back of the TV and took turns shocking each other with it, alter-

nately laughing and howling. One of the howlers was Alejandro, the sick one. He suffered from

leukemia. As a result of the chemotherapy he was receiving, he'd lost

most of his hair and so wore a kerchief over his head. He also had a ten-

inch scar running up his belly. Oddly, he looked vigorous and healthy.

But Concepcion told me anxiously that Ale's cancer sucked up all the

family's money. Every six months or so the two of them had to trek to

Merida, three-plus hours away, for a new round of treatment. She

wasn't sure it was even worth it. Of the twenty kids from all over south-

ern Mexico who originally enrolled in the hospital's special program,

only three were still alive. "When we're in Merida," she said, shaking

her head, "we're begging food and medicine. The government doesn't

help." She seemed resigned, as though the cancer was more of a hassle

than a tragedy.

Given the sporadic, itineran~ possi~ilities before him, G.arda Or~zco decided to leave his home m Mex1co to look for work m the Umted States. In February 2001 he set out with two friends whose circum-

stances were equally meager. One of them, eighteen-year-old Rafael

Solis Hernandez, lived in his mother's house with his wife and baby.

The other, Mario Sanchez, like Garda Orozco a father to six children,

lived in a house built of cardboard. At forty-three, he had difficulty re-

calling his birthday. Shrugging at the very idea, he said, "It's never been

celebrated, so I don't even concern myself with it."

FLORIDA 17

To travel north, Garda Orozco borrowed 2,500 pesos (about $250)

from a man he worked for sometimes and Hernandez borrowed money

from his mother. Sanchez brought what money remained from a crop of

peppers he'd managed to grow the year before.

Concepcion understood why her husband had to leave, but now, as a

result, she seemed to spend half her time worrying about him. Concep-

cion, who stands about five feet tall, speaks with a verbal tic that seems

to pop up in one form or another in every language I've ever heard,

punctuating nearly every phrase with "I tell you" or "I tell him."

"I tell him," she told me, "I say, 'You better be careful up there,' I tell

him. I say, 'We just want to see you,' I tell him. 'We need the money for

the baby,' I tell him. I feel bad. He's up there all alone, without his fam-

ily. I tell him, I tell him, 'What are we going to do? You have to be care-

ful.' I tell him, 'You better watch it!'

"I tell him," she said," 'You better be careful, because you're the only

hope we have,' I tell him. 'It's already a hard life here. It's a hard life we

have here. I'm all alone with the kids,' I tell him. I tell you. I tell him, 'It's

awful that you're in this position.' "

Garda Orozco, Sanchez, and Hernandez crossed the border with a large group in early March 2001, in the care of a coyote, or smuggler. Like half of all illegal migrants entering the United States, they found

themselves in Arizona. Their money had run out. The coyote introduced

them to a man they nicknamed El Chaparro (Shorty). El Chaparro was

a raftem, a driver who finds workers and gives them a ride, or rafte, to

waiting jobs. He gave them-along with a group of about thirty oth-

ers-permission to sleep in an abandoned trailer home. After about a

week, he came back and offered to drive them to Florida, where there

would be work picking oranges. Garda Orozco and his friends had no

idea what or where Florida was, or what picking oranges was like. The

issue of wages was never raised, nor were the terms of the rafte. The men

said yes.

The three men, along with about a dozen and a half more, were

packed into El Chaparro's rickety van and a sedan, and off they went.

18 NOBODIES

The trip lasted three days. El Chaparro stopped once for an hour or two

to sleep, but passengers were forbidden to get out, even to relieve them-

selves. For that purpose, a jug was passed around. When asked whether

they ate during this time, Garda Orozco shrugged and answered, "We

didn't have money."

On March 13, more than three weeks after leaving home, the men

reached their destination: Lake Placid, Florida. The van and car stopped

in front of a Mexican grocery store. The passengers were ordered to stay

put while El Chaparro got out and talked to two labor contractors.

One of them was Ramiro Ramos-the man known as El Diablo.

The other was his brother, Juan, aka Nino.

Both brothers are short and solidly built, but they couldn't have had

more different demeanors. Ramiro's goes a long way toward explaining

his nickname. He has close-cropped, graying hair, an impassive manner,

and bloodshot eyes. Nino, with his blowsy, windswept hair and perpet-

ual smirk, looks like a good-times kind of guy. (As an acquaintance later

aptly put it, "Juan always looks like he's coming from a party!")

The Ramoses were born in Guanajuato, Mexico. They had come to

the United States as orange pickers in the early eighties. By the end of

the decade, they had worked their way up the ladder to become contrac-

tors. Ramiro had married a Mexican American named Alicia Barajas,

whose family ran several labor-contracting operations. According to

Michael Baron of the Border Patrol, "You have to be careful with the

Barajases. Their name comes up a lot in law enforcement."

Together with their cousins and in-laws, Ramiro and Juan Ramos

employed thousands of migrant workers, from South Florida to North

Carolina. Records from one of their companies, R & A Harvesting, indi-

cate that between 2000 and 2002 Ramiro and Juan alone employed sev-

eral hundred workers.

Garda Orozco recalls that when he and his friends first met the new

bosses, "Senor Nino asked if we had someone to pay El Chaparro for our

ride." Nino smugly shoved a phone in his face, knowing, of course, that

the new arrivals had no one to call. Then Nino said, "Well, okay, we'll

pay for you." The workers saw him write out a check to El Chaparro.

FLORIDA 19

They had no idea how much the check was for, but the Ramoses told

them that they had shelled out a thousand dollars for each of them.

There was no contract. Nino simply warned the new recruits,

"You're gonna have to pay us back. And the work is very hard. Ifl pay

for you, and you leave, we're gonna beat the fuck out of you." According

to Garda Orozco, "He didn't say it like he was joking." From that point

on, seeking another job was clearly not an option. As Garda Orozco ex-

plained, "I couldn't have gone elsewhere. I owed the money to them. If

I refused, what was I going to do?"

El Diablo took the new arrivals to their lodgings, a former bar

known as La Piiiita, which had been converted into a filthy, crowded

barracks where workers slept six to a room, on stained bare mattresses

on the floor. While passing a neighboring room with an open door,

Hernandez, a soccer fan, spied a small television set in one room and

asked if he could arrange to have a set for his room as well. El Diablo's

answer pulled him up short: "If you keep up with this kind of attitude,

I'll pump you full oflead."

Garda Orozco, Hernandez, and Sanchez spent the next month pick-

ing oranges eight to twelve hours a day, six and sometimes seven days a

week. Every Friday after work, Nino or El Diablo would pull up to the

groves or in front of La Guadalupana (owned by El Diablo's wife) in a

pickup truck, holding a checkbook and a large sack of money. After

writing each worker a check, the brothers took back the check, charged

the workers a check-cashing fee, and garnished for rent, food, work

equipment, the ride from Arizona, and daily transportation to and from

the fields.

After one seven-day pay period, Garcia Orozco said, the brothers de-

ducted forty dollars for meals, thirty for rent, and another thirty for the

pick sack. He was left with sixty-seven dollars. More or less was de-

ducted, Garda Orozco said, depending on the bosses' whim. A worker

might net fifty dollars-or twenty. It didn't really matter. Whatever re-

mained was usually spent on food at La Guadalupana, the company

store.

The three friends lived in absolute fear. Rumors of the bosses' vio-

20 NOBOD I ES

lence abounded. In one story making the rounds, some workers were lis-

tening to a boom box. El Diablo appeared, demanding, "What the fuck

are you playing this music so loud for?" Then he threw the boom box on

the floor, smashing it to pieces. When one of the workers became angry

and said, "Hey, that's mine! I paid for it," Ramos pulled a gun on him.

Then there was the murder of the Guatemalan van driver. And the

kneecapping incident. In this story (a lso documented in a police report),

one of the Barajas cousins and some accomplices were allegedly driving

a van when they passed a farmworker walking along the road. The

cousin decided the worker was probably trying to escape, forced him

into their van, broke his knees with a hammer, and threw him out of the

moving vehicle. Garda Orozco, Hernandez, and Sanchez began to realize that they

were under constant surveillance. One day, when Hernandez and an-

other worker walked down the road and tried to telephone their wives

from a nearby Kash n' Karry convenience store, El Diablo pulled up be-

hind them, asked whom they were calling, and pointedly offered them a

ride home. When the Ramos brothers weren't around, workers were

watched by relatives and supervisors who lived in the barracks and who

carried cell phones and patrolled the surrounding area. Garda Orozco

recalled being told by one supervisor, "If you want to leave, go ahead.

But I'll call the bosses, and they'll feed you to the alligators." The super-

visors pointed to a lake behind the barracks and said, "They haven't

eaten for a while." Ironically, if Garda Orozco and his friends had only known their

rights, or known how things work in the United States, they could have

left any time they'd wanted and been free in a few moments. La Pifiita

was only a few yards away from Highway 27, which runs through the

citrus belt west of Lake Okeechobee. Perhaps three or four hundred

yards away was a Ramada Inn. And just behind the barracks was a well -

tended, gated retiree community. At any time, the Ramoses' emp loyees

could have run to the hotel and asked for the police. But then, if they

were the kind of guys remotely likely to do such a thing, they never

would have been "hired" for the job in the first place.

As Garda Orozco described it, "When you're there, you feel like the

FLORIDA 21

world is ending. You feel absolutely horrible. Friday comes, and Satur-

day, and you keep working, and you're really tired, and they come and

say, "We're going to take out this, and this." He thought of his kids back

home, and how little money was getting to them. How long would it

take to repay his loans? What would his wife and family do in the mean-

time?

For Garda Orozco and his friends, life in the United States wasn't

quite what they had expected. As Sanchez later recalled, "All of a sud-

den, you realize you're completely in their pockets."

S:avery c~ses typically ta~e years to investigate a~d pros.ecute, present-tog a wtde array of speCial challenges few pubhc offictals are trained to handle. Experienced Border Patrol agents such as Baron say that one

enormous obstacle he and others face is migrant workers' mistrust of of-

ficials, white people, and strangers. "Workers see us and automatically

think we're here to deport them," he said. "They don't give us the time

of day."

From a prosecutor's point of view, a primary difficulty with modern

slavery cases is the absence of traditional restraints like chains and

locked doors. What must be elicited and proven in court is much more

nebulous and abstract-the notion of coercion. As Leon Rodriguez, a

former trial lawyer with the Civil Rights Division, Criminal Section, of

the Department ofJustice, explained, "You have a chain of incidents that

add up to a crime, usually not just a single incident. So you're investigat-

ing the entire atmosphere in which your victims live and work." It

doesn't help a prosecutor for workers to merely say they were scared to

leave a camp; to obtain a conviction, prosecutors need to prove that

someone issued direct threats of harm. In such cases, the evidence very

often boils down to one person's word against another's.

Other prosecutors I spoke to cited an additional hurdle: migrant

workers traveling from state to state without telephones are difficult to

reach, much less schedule for depositions and trials. They often can't af-

ford to miss the workdays it takes to prepare and testify for a trial. Their

lives are often so contingent (the car breaks down, the weather changes,

22 NOBOD I ES

the harvest is delayed, someone gets deported, the girl gets pregnant, the

baby gets sick, the guy who was going to give them a ride to a deposition

decides to move to Texas) that even when workers are wiJl ing and eager

to testify, they often can't control their destinies from day to day. As Ro-

driguez noted, "I worked as a prosecutor in Brooklyn before I went to

DOJ, so I had some experience with poor and displaced communities,

but these workers are completely beyond that. They don't have ad-

dresses the same way the people you know do, They're migrants, they're

undocumented. They have no presence in the system at all."

Still another attorney with the Justice Department told me that un-

fair as it may sound, prosecutors can only pursue those slavery opera-

tions that seem like surefire wins. "It doesn't necessarily send a good

message if you lose your case," she explained. "What does that tell the

community? It tells them that they can get away with it." With limited

resources and myriad issues and constituencies competing for federal tax

dollars, she said, federal officials simply can't afford to look foolish by

losing. The technical issues of a case, the solidity of proof, and the

amount of evidence become higher priorities than the simpler issue of

how egregious a slavery operation may be.

Many farmworkers and advocates praised the Justice Deptartment

for wholeheartedly committing to fight modern-day slavery, but lamented

that FBI agents-the investigative arm of the DOJ-remained ata-

vistically oriented toward combating more traditional forms of crime,

such as bank robbery, drug dealing, and Mafia activity. The fact that fed -

eral legislation had been passed and forced labor had become a nation-

ally prominent issue didn't necessari ly translate into the personnel,

expertise, and insight necessary to penetrate the shadowy world oflabor

exploitation .

One NGO worker explained that sometimes agents didn't seem to

realize that migrant workers keep extremely long work hours, requi r-

ing agents to make themselves available during evenings and weekends.

He gave an example of giving a witness's address to an FBI agent, and

the agent's response:

"Does he return at five in the afternoon?"

"No, you have to wait for him till seven at night."

FLORIDA 23

"Okay, we'll go there on Tuesday at five."

And so, the NGO staffer concluded, "they arrive on Tuesday at five

at the person's home, ask for him, he's not there-and they leave."

Another person with experience in slavery investigations (I am not

naming them for obvious reasons) pointed out that some agents could

stand a bit more sensitivity to migrant culture. He said, "The first thing

some agents do is come in and tower over you ." He imitated a diminu-

tive slavery victim recoiling in the shadow of a huge imaginary FBI

agent. There was no way such a victim was likely to relax, open up, and

testify with confidence. The best agents, he said, come in, sit down, and

explain slowly and calmly, " 'I'm here to talk with you about what hap-

pened in such-and-such a camp with your boss, whose name is so-and-

so. We want to investigate this, and help you, so that this kind of thing

ends.' " Their initial questions, he said, focus on the reason the workers

wanted to talk with them in the first place: the abuse. But other agents,

he said, merely asked questions from a form or a list, often including

questions about the victims' prior criminal activity. The result was that

frequently, witnesses felt defensive and reacted by clamming up.

Nearly all the farm worker advocates I spoke with told me that they

had met several committed, enthusiastic FBI agents who cared about

trafficking and were highly talented at working with immigrants. The

problem was a matter of institutional malfeasance: agents are rou-

tinely-and therefore thoughtlessly-reass igned. Every time an FBI

agent developed the abil ity to understand a slavery investigation, it

seemed, the agent was instantly transferred to another part of the coun-

try to work on an entirely different type of crime. Said one source, the

agency wastes its expertise as a matter of policy. "There's no institutional

memory, there's no accrual of knowledge.''

For these and other reasons, enforcement authorities have become

increasingly reliant upon advocacy groups already involved with migrant-

worker populations. These groups have the advantage of knowing the

language and customs of the farmworkers they serve. Usuall y, they

maintain residences in migrant communities and, most important, they

have the workers' trust.

One successful group is the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. The

24 NOBODIES

coalition has been instrumental in five of South Florida's six recent slav-

ery prosecutions, uncovering and investigating abusive employers, locat-

ing transient witnesses, and encouraging them to overcome their

hesitations about testifying against former captors.

In 2002 I went to visit them . At the time, CIW headquarters was a

dilapidated storefront on South Third Street, next to the pickup spot

where workers congregate each morning. Inside, the paint was peeling

off the walls and the carpet was ripped and threadbare. The principal

furnishings included a lumpy old couch, two desks, a few dozen metal

folding chairs, and a large papier-mache replica of the Statue of Liberty,

holding a tomato bucket. The walls were adorned with press in Spanish,

English, and Haitian Creole, photographs of protest marches, cartoons

depicting labor relations between bosses and workers, and a picture of

an X'ed-over Taco Bell chihuahua with the slogan YO NO QUIERO TACO

BELL!

On a typical day, workers drift by the coalition office to say hello,

sometimes wandering inside to buy tortillas, Jarritos soft drinks, and

mole-sauce mix at the coalition's co-op grocery store. In the worker-

hostile environment of Immokalee, the place serves as a comfortable

oasis, providing a relaxed atmosphere somewhere between a college so-

cial club and a Third World political-party branch office. But even

something as simple-seeming as the co-op store serves a more strategic

purpose: by maintaining the cheapest prices in town, the coalition auto -

matically fends off price gouging by other grocery stores.

The CIW was founded somewhat informally in the early 1990s and

has grown to some three thousand current members. Joining costs ten

dollars and, technically, entails little more than receiving a photo ID.

There are many groups dedicated to helping farmwo rkers, and as

many opinions about how best to do it. Some of these groups have offices

in Washington, D.C., devoted to lobbying politicians to make new and

better laws. Others try to organize farm workers or help them find legal

representation. Many are funded by churches. Still others focus on basic

needs such as health care. The cdalition's focus is on "educaci6n populm;"

or, crudely translated, education for common people. The term de-

scribes a method of education and organization first theorized by Brazil-

FLORIDA 25

ian educator Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed conceived it

as a means to bring complex political problems to the attention of im-

poverished, usually illiterate peasants. It spread throughout Latin

America and the Caribbean, where several of the coalition's members

absorbed it before bringing the technique to F lorida. Somewhat

analagous to what U.S. labor organizers call "political education," the

basic idea behind educaci6n popular is to use group discussions of con-

crete details from workers' experience to help them analyze the larger

societal, economic, and political forces that shape their lives.

The coalition holds weekly meetings, conducts weekend "leadership

trainings," makes outreach trips throughout the southeastern states,

stages hunger strikes, and had, when I met them in 2002, recently

launched a boycott against Yum! Brands, Inc., owner of Taco Bell, in an

effort to raise wages for tomato pickers working in what they called

"sweatshop-like conditions." The slogan for the boycott, aimed at high

schools and college campuses across the United States, was "Boot the

Bell!" Whi le each of these activities may have seemed like a disparate

pursuit, the thread connecting them is the way the coa lition uses them to

raise workers' awareness of their own power.

One of the coa lition's spokespeople is a former tomato picker from

Mexico named Lucas Benitez. When I met him, he was thirty-two; his

teeth were silver (the signature of southern Mexico and Central Ameri-

can dentistry), his hair was buzz cut flat on top, and he wore a goatee

and Fu Manchu mustache. Despite his relatively young age, he seems a

decade older, not because of how he looks, but because he carries a cer-

tain natural gravitas.

Benitez, who began farm work at age six, is a co-founder of the CIW.

Like the group's other co-founders, he emphasized that the organ ization

is above antiquated notions like hierarchy. "If I need a title," he said, "I

use co-director. But we don't have-we are members of the organiza- tion."

The CIW has several other such nonleade rs-from Haiti, Mexico,

Guatemala, and the United States. They were elected by members, and

for their troubles (they work seven days a week, often late into the

night), they receive around three hundred dollars a week-a figure that

26 NOBODIES

aimed to approximate farm workers' earnings. The organization also re-

quires its staff members to work in the fields during part of the year, and

most members I met live in trailers and shacks not unlike those of their

farm worker constituents.

Without bothering to be cynical about it, Benitez dismisses the idea

that lawsuits and politicians are likely to improve the abysmal condi-

tions facing farm workers. "If you want true change," he told me one day

at coalition headquarters, leaning back in his chair with his feet up on

his desk, "it won't come from Washington, or from the lawyers." Even

if lawsuits are won and laws are passed, he said, you've only won the

battle. The war against overall poor treatment of farm workers will con-

tinue. However, he told me, "if you change people's consciousness"-

and by "people," he means "workers,"-"the people themselves take

care of it." Change from the top down is a nice thing to dream about, he

said with a shrug, leaving behind decades of liberal pieties, but really,

"who cares what happens to a bunch of pelagatos-a bunch of nobodies?"

Benitez took me with him on a walk through Immokalee's trailer

ghetto while he handed out flyers. The conversation was the same with

each group: "Buenas naches." Quick, level eye contact. "I'd like to invite

you to the meeting tonight. Here's a flyer. We're right down there, on

North Third." The men looked quickly at the flyer.

"Maybe we'll see you there," they said. They thanked Benitez and

sent him onward with an "Andale, pues" (a friendly Mexicanism mean-

ing, roughly, "Cool, all right").

It was friendly, but Benitez never got too familiar or pressed his case.

To do so would be inappropri ate. For one thing, workers have little en-

ergy for conversation with strangers after a day of intense manual labor.

For another, most immigrant workers are loath to fraternize with any-

one who might bring headaches into their lives. They simply want to

work, pay off the money they've borrowed to come here, and start send-

ing money back home to their families.

Benitez told me that now, November, was the beginning of the sea-

son, and that most of the workers were new to town. As the coalition be-

came better known to them, the trust level would increase and he would

FLORIDA 27

get a better reception. But for now, hoofing it from trailer to trailer, it

seemed like rough going.

Benitez slowed down in front of a labor contractor's house. It was a

typical middle-class ranch home, nothing luxurious, but several orders

of magnitude above the rotting trailers surrounding it. He looked

through the wrought-iron gate around the house. Smiling ironically, he

said, "You'll find them every Sunday in the church. Monday they're

back out, taking advantage of the workers." As ifby some perverse cue,

a little girl in a frilly pink party dress appeared around a corner and

danced across the patio with a five-dollar bill in her mouth. We headed

back to the coalition office.

Greg Asbed is another coalition founder. Born in Baltimore and raised in Washington, D.C., Asbed is a handsome, perennially stubble- cheeked Armenian American man who favors old T-shirts, worn jeans,

and a gold chain. He became involved in farm worker issues after grad-

uating from Brown University, when he worked in Haiti for a peasant

organization and learned to speak Creole. Still ath letic at forty-three, he

spends three months each summer harvesting watermelons with other

coalition members in northern Florida, Georgia, and Missouri. Despite

working in temperatures that often reach I 05 degrees, he describes it as

a nice break from the pressures of organizing.

Over a plate of one-dollar tacos from the tumbledown taqueria next

door to the coalition headquarters, Asbed told me a story to illustrate

how education translates into power. Back in the early 1990s, he said,

when the group was just getting started, a worker staggered into the of-

fice. He had been out in the fields and had requested a drink of water.

His field boss said no. When the worker asked again, the boss beat

him-severely. The worker held a bloody shirt in his hand.

"We decided to confront the crew boss and see what he was going to

say," Asbed told me. "We invited him here to talk about it. So he came

here with his attitude and his bodyguards. And we said, 'Look at this.

What are you going to do about it?' And he said, 'First of all, I didn't do

28 NOBODIES

it. Second, I don't care. Blah blah.' And we said, 'That's all you got to

say?' And he left. "What he thought we'd be doing was filing a complaint with the De-

partment of Labor.'' Asbed looked indignantly amused by the idea. Par-

odying himself as a hapless do-gooder, he wrung his hands and minced,

"'Excuse, me, Mr. One Department of Labor Guy for All of Southwest-

ern Florida, who doesn't speak Spanish and who's supposed to cover

every labor situation, not just in the fields but everywhere, and who can't

investigate his way out of his car!' " Asbed returned to his normal self:

"That's what they expected to happen. Or that Legal Services would call

him and make him pay a thousand dollars or something and it would go

away and nobody knows about it and the crew leader is off the hook.

"So," Asbed continued, "we organized a march in the middle of the

night with basically"-he laughed-"the whole town. We left the coali-

tion with maybe two hundred people, but en route, as we passed by, peo-

ple just poured out of the camps. It was kind of surreal because it was

around Christmas and all these Christmas lights are everywhere and

we're out there with this bloody shirt and there were twenty-eight patrol

cars around the house and cops with camouflage on from Collier

County, Naples, all around here. We weren't planning on doing any-

thing violent. But there was a sense that the peasants had come to the

king's house. And what we were yelling was 'When you beat one of us,

you beat us all.' " Asbed had been gesturing with a pork taco for emphasis. Here he

paused, looking for the right words. "I don't know if you appreciate-

words like radical and revolutionmy don't mean anything anymore. Or

they mean the wrong stuff. But here, to reverse the power system from

a system where the workers are totally dependent on the crew leaders-

to reverse the way it's always been set up .. .'' He shifted gears. "When

you stay in a town like this, where nobody's from here, nobody dies

here-unless there's an accident-nobody's family is here, nobody

knows each other, to have five hundred guys outside a crew leader's

house saying, 'You beat one of us, you beat us all.' " For most if not all

the workers involved, it was a subtle but indelible first taste of power. In

As bed's estimation, "it was like the end of the old Immokalee.''

FLORIDA 29

He wiped his mouth and recalled a saying he'd learned in Haiti:

" 'When your comrade's beard catches fire, put your own in water.' That

was people's response before the coalition. When a boss would beat

somebody, everyone'd look down at the ground. No one dared to get ex-

cited for fear he'd beat somebody else. When the organization started,

that stopped. Because the next time somebody got beaten, they came to the office."

One Wednesday night in November, I attended the coalition's weekly reunion, or meeting. The point of such meetings varied throughout the year. Early on in the season like this, I would learn, the goal was to

interest workers in their own situation, to offer a sort of orientation to

Immokalee and the world offarmwork . Did they know where they fit

into the pecking order of American food production? Did they know

what the coalition was there for?

Twenty-five or thirty workers had shown up, all of them men, seated

in folding chairs. Most of them, as Benitez had indicated, were new to

town and unfamiliar with the coalition. They seemed shy, curious, and

possibly desperate, as if they were at their first AA meeting. Seated among

the men in a circle of chairs were a number of workers who had been with

the coalition in past seasons and had returned to Immokalee that year.

Benitez led the meeting, showing slides featuring photos of workers,

charts of tomato and orange prices, cartoons, and crude drawings. He

discussed the fact that workers need to pick two tons of tomatoes to

make fifty dollars. "How much is two tons?" he asked, "A truck? An

el ephant? Two elephants? Twenty guys like Pedro?" He pointed to a

chubby old-timer and got an easy chuckle.

The meeting followed this sort of question-and-answer format in

what seemed an attempt-sometimes successful, sometimes not-to en-

gage the workers in a dialogue. Benitez used pictures of past strikes and

protests, including images from the Taco Bell boycott, to spark discus-

, ion. "This is us outside the headquarters of Taco Bell, in Irvine, Cali-

li> rnia.'' He pointed to a picture of a shiny, glass office tower and asked,

" Do you think they have any money?"

30 NOBODIES

Later in the meeting, Benitez passed around a newspaper account

of the coalition's role in shutting down a recent slavery operation.

Some of the older members read the article out loud for the group,

paragraph by paragraph, all of them slowly, some almost painfully.

With each paragraph came a pause for discussion, during which Ben-

itez asked questions like "What date did the workers escape from the

camp?" and "What month was it?" His questions seemed designed to

be sure that everyone understood what was being read and was fol-

lowing the story. As often as not, the new attendees seemed to respond to Benitez's

questions with blank looks and silence. Not only did it seem uncomfort-

able for them, it felt uncomfortable to me as well. On some level, it

seemed potentially patronizing. It was hard for me to tell. The coalition

and I had gotten off to a rough start. I'd walked into our first meeting

and called them "do-gooders." I'd used the term ironically, trying to

convey how other people (not me, of course) might have thought of

them, but it was pretty maladroit of me to expect people I'd just met to

understand my own personal code of irony. Another source of tension

was that not long before I arrived to meet them, they'd spent an entire

month educating a reporter from The New York Times about their

world, their issues, the reality of life for farm workers, and so on. Obvi-

ously, for a shoestring nonprofit organization to give away so much time

was a tremendous sacrifice. But after all that effort, the story never ran.

The coalition felt understandably cautious about another reporter from

New York showing up and asking for another investment of their time

and energy for a story that might or might not run. It also didn't help matters that although I was supportive of their

cause, I was less politically informed, more mainstream, and less liberal

than I had thought I was. I had believed myself(because I'm not rich, be-

cause I'd written a lot about working people, because I think rich people

and corporations should pay more taxes per dollar than poor people) to

be fairly far to the left of America's current political culture. Yet when I

met the coalition, I was shocked by their earnestness. In a culture as

ironic as modern-day America's, and for a person as ironic as myself, it

caught me off guard to meet people who were enthusiastic and aggres-

FLORIDA 31

sive about something as straightforward as fighting for social justice.

Hadn't we all moved on to Beavis and Butt-Head and political apathy?

How uncool!

On another front, the group's claim to having no hierarchy-its

motto is "We are allleaders"-didn't sit too well with me. It reminded

me of entry-level jobs I'd had at Internet companies in the 1990s. On

several occasions, on starting day or at a job interview, I'd hear the

chirpy speech about how "we really don't have a hierarchy here!" Or we

didn't have a boss. Or a pecking order. Or whatever. Inevitably, at each

such job, I would notice that somehow, it seemed, I was always the

person sweeping up the office at the end of the day. It simply made me

uncomfortable when people denied such natural phenomena as hier-

archy.

Aside from these relatively petty tensions, I also felt dubious about

the coalition's methodology. How could "empowering" workers from

one small community in southwestern Florida each year have any mea-

surable effect on the overall powerlessness of farm workers in the United

States? After all, there are billions of poor people around the world who

could easily be imported to toil in the fields of North America. If Mexi-

cans and Guatemalans become a ware enough of their rights that they in-

sist upon fair pay, growers will simply import workers from Honduras.

ff or when Hondurans begin making such demands, growers will turn

to El Salvador-then Panama, and so on, leapfrogging ahead to the next

country where workers haven't gotten uppity enough yet to hold out for

a living wage.

Benitez's reunion had initially seemed to me to be a sort of feel-good

road to nowhere. But as I would realize about many things with the

w alition, they were right and I was wrong.

When I asked the coalition about their methods, Asbed explained,

''Workers in Immokalee today have come here, for the most part, from

small, rural communities, places where literacy rates tend to be far lower

1 han they are here, where there are virtually no media, and where al-

lli OSt all communication is oral. Plus, in most cases, the people working

in the fields here were among the poorest people in their own countries.

l'opular education is designed precisely to encourage people to partici-

32 NOBODIES

pate in group discussions on community problems. It uses a lot of im-

ages-drawings, skits, sometimes video-to provoke discussions on

sensitive subjects. Many times these depictions are kind of crude, and

may seem trite or hackneyed for more media-savvy Americans, but in a

community like Immokalee, they provide a common, concrete reference

point for people to dissect ideas." It made sense, and I realized I was see-

ing things through my own eyes, not those of a farm worker.

Regarding the silent, shy audience Benitez was trying to engage,

As bed said, "Generally, if they're there at the meeting, they're eager to

participate. But even still, it's a process that takes time. Remember, in

Immokalee we have to deal with the fact that this isn't a community in

any traditional sense. Everyone's a stranger. So not every meeting's a

perfect jewel of participation. But when it works, it can move people

like nothing else and allow farm workers to deal with issues they'd never

even think of confronting on their own, including slavery."

I learned later how effectively the coalition's methods worked. O ne

day, after knowing them a few months, I asked a couple of members

what they were doing over the weekend. Oh, they said, they were meet·

ing with some second- and third-year coalition members for some sort

of training meeting, during which the workers-peasants, for the most

part, few of whom possessed more than a sixth-grade education-werr

going to be learning about stocks, the nature of publicly traded corpora

tions, and the strategies of modern corporate public relations. Not bad,

considering that most Americans don't know much about such thingN.

Nevertheless, in my initial observations of the coalition, I remain cl

dubious. Despite their impressive track record of unearthing slavery op

erations, it was hard to see what kind of long-term progress could I

made toward preventing future, systemic mistreatment of farmworkc r

in the United States.

From time to time, during his presentation, Benitez raised his liNt 1

the air and roared, "La coalici6n!" Everyone, it seemed, was to find tlut

voice and yell together, as one, "Presente!" Then, it seemed, they W<' '' 1

clap their hands together, once, in thunderous unison. But when B 1111

yelled, "La coalici6n!" he was joined by only three or four lackad111 t

clappers. At the end of the meeting, as he closed, he made a final I

FLORIDA

33 to exhort some crowd . . R . . splnt. oanng with h .

(tn Spanish), "Who is the I' . IS powerful voice, he asked coa 1t1on?"

Th~ three old-timers piped up: ."WEAREr" Ben1tez rai d h' · ·

se IS VOice a notch hi h . " . the walls? Is it the chairs?" g er. Who IS the coalition? Is it

Once more th ld . ' eo -timers chimed l·n· "N . ' U "Wh . . 0 Its sr" 0 IS the coalition?" ' ·

"WEAREI"

Asbed met his w'fi L I e, aura Germino, in coil . woman in her early forties H f: 'I ege. She IS a pretty, alert · er am1 y ha b .

generations. After a stint w'th h IJ s een In Florida for six 1 t e eace C · B

rame involved in farmwo k . orps In urkina Faso, she be- r er 1ssues when h k .

Rural Legal Services. s e too a Job with Florida

Germino would make a great Hoi! . . ra use the idea of being h ywood actiVIst hero, precisely be-

seen as t at type of d . o J her members of the I' . person nves her crazy. Like

coa ltlon, she work d Jng around the swamps in h 'l s seven ays a week, often tear-

er Sl ver 1970 M l'b h " ~ h e ca ll s it-frequently co I d' h a I u- er muscle car" as

nc u lng er d 10 . ' IIV<'r a dinner of cereal and m 'Jk Sh d ays at P.M. With her husband " "'da ls and a skirt and I . e resses almost elegantly, usually in

, . • wears no makeup. ( 'enntno runs both hot and cold .

ltll il c a minute leapin c b' 'a wealth of tnfonnation who talks . ' ' g Hom su Jeer to sub' .

II dcstractedJy on eve b' Ject, expounding generously ' ry su Jeer but one h I '

clloc II how she got into th. k - erse f. When I asked her IS wor ' and about h d

II Ill(' wa rily, pointedly u . . w at rove her, she looked nmterested tn b ·

II'"' kovich of the swam . "Pl " elng portrayed as the Erin . . ps. ease, she said "D '

'" ' y, I he workers are the h " . on t make me be the eroes. c ,·,.,.m ino d d ·

procee e tnstead to tell me h .. '"'" ' F l D iablo and th R . ow the coahtwn first learned

e amos operatwn "It' . 'I l'"ll hea r about thin " h . s sort of like smoke the

gs, s e recalled. "We h d h' ' 'ell\' .I woman who sell a t IS one woman ac-

s cassettes out of a van Wh ' '",,.! hey go around- ddl . at do you call them?

a pe er. She came . t h " ''nc· time and said 'Y: In o t e office out of the

' ou guys really need to go look at h . . w at ts gomg

34 NOBODIES

on up there in Lake Placid.' This is, like, in '99 or something, '97. And

she left a number and a name, and we called her and the number was

out of order. Then another chofor- came by and said, 'You know, they got

some deal going up in there in Lake Placid, where it's pretty out of con-

trol. They're buying and selling people, and they're not free to leave.'

"You have just fragments, little pieces of this puzzle thrown at you,"

she explained, concluding that it would be easier for me to understand

what she was talking about ifl could see for myself what some of these

pieces look like. So one rainy afternoon, Germino took me for a ride in

her muscle car. We left Immokalee on Highway 29 and drove north,

toward Lake Placid. Agriculture, Germino explained, is "a system of layers. There's a

bunch of shells or layers between the employee, or the picker, and the big

money." Between the worker and the product, she said, stands a long

chain of middlemen: the contractor, the grower, a processor, a buyers'

cooperative or purchasing entity of some sort, another processor, a cor-

poration, and a retail outlet for the finished product. Each entity is pro-

tected by a legal and corporate firewall. While many of the layers are

formed by public corporations, whose books, at least in theory, are open

to the public, growers and labor contractors are almost always private

companies. Their books are closed to scrutiny, and it's almost always im-

possible to know whom they buy from or sell to. A further complication,

Germino explained, is that labor crews often pick for a variety of grow-

ers, sometimes working directly for them, under the growers' own

names, sometimes working under the names of any number of harvest-

ing companies the growers might own, solely or along with brothers-in-

law, cousins, or wives. After about sixty miles, we left Highway 29 and pulled onto a sid

road. The rain had stopped, but the clouds hung low as we entered a

patchwork of meandering streets laid down decades ago for a housin~ development named Sunnylakes that never got built. It was a decidedly

eerie place. The scorched asphalt had buckled off the derelict streets and

was now being gobbled up by the swamp, along with a wake of sofab,

shoes, TVs, and refrigerators lining the road's shoulder. Finally, w

FLORIDA 35

nosed into a sandy driveway leading to a single, isolated mobile home.

Germino paused to make sure we were alone. This, she said, was one of

the places used by the Ramoses to stash their workers.

"Can you imagine," she asked, "what it'd be like to come to this

country, stuck back here, not speaking the language, with people telling

you they're gonna kill you if you try and run away?" A pair of plastic

bags floated by. Something sounding suspiciously like pistols firing

could be heard in the not-so-distant background. There wasn't a person

in sight. "I mean, this is like Mad Max, right?" Germino raised her eye- brows. "You saw that movie.''

The gunshots, if that's what they were, continued. Germino smirked

and revved her engine. "Let's get out of here. We don't really wanna stay too long.''

We drove back along a series of dirt roads, and even after what I'd

seen in Immokalee, the poverty was stunning. We passed a rural ghetto

of trailer homes torn through with rust, stained with algae and mildew.

Chickens scooted herky-jerkily across roads with names like Orange

Street and Citrus Boulevard. The roads and the yards outside the houses

were lined with yet more junk-boats crashed at odd angles, abandoned

school buses with broken windows and smashed hoods, dolls with miss-

in g eyes, swing sets listing at odd angles-all of it sinking back into the swamp.

The rain started again, monotonously. Germino saw someone I

didn't notice and abruptly pulled back from the rain-streaked window

pursed her lips, and muttered, "That guy's back out of jail? That sucks.':

F inally, we arrived at the spot where the Guatemalan van driver, Ar-

losto Roblero, had been murdered back in 1997. It seemed like many

" I her places in South Florida-low, featureless, and isolated. It was both

,., ,sy and hard to imagine that a man had been yanked from a van here

.11H I shot in the head while his passengers went running into the night.

I !· n years of rainfall had long ago washed away the blood.

We pulled back onto Highway 29, veered into a convenience store

1 .. 1 some coffee, and then headed back toward Immokalee. Despite the

1.1\h of slavery cases making the news, Germino said, "you have never

36 NOBODIES

seen any of these growers, or Tropicana, or any of these other companies,

express the slightest bit of remorse or shock. What you get from them is

a resounding silence. And it's because they don't care."

People new to the realm of farmworker mistreatment always get

stuck on the notion that modern slavery and farm worker abuse happen

because today's farmworkers often lack work papers or citizenship, she

said. Such a short-term view is erroneous. Agribusiness has always been

this bad, and it has always been so by design. Since the days of officially

sanctioned, legal slavery, she explained, agriculture has consistently at-

tempted to sidestep the labor rules that have been imposed upon other

industries. In 1938, during the New Deal, when the federal minimum- wage law was enacted, farm workers-at the behest of the agriculture

lobby-were excluded from its provisions. They remained so for nearly

thirty years. Even today, farm workers, unlike !nost other hourly work-

ers, are denied the right to overtime pay, receive no medical insurance or

sick leave, and are denied federal protection against retaliatory actions

by employers if they seek to organize. Further, in many states, they're

specifically excluded from workers' compensation.

"Modern-day slavery cases don't happen in a vacuum," Germino ex-

plained. "They only occur in degraded labor environments, ones that are

fundamentally, systematically exploitive. In industries where the labor

force is contigent, day-haul, with subpoverty wages, no benefits, no right

to overtime, no right to organize-that's where you see slavery taking

root." For this reason, she continued, for every case of outright slavery

making splashy headlines, it is reasonable to assume that there are thou-

sands of additional workers toiling away in abusive, sweatshop-like con -

ditions. Conversely, she said, in labor environments with healthy worker

protections-full-time positions with decent wages, benefits, overtim

pay, freedom to form unions, and so forth-slavery cases simply don't

exist. When was the last time anyone heard of a slavery case in the auto•

motive industry?

Germino compares the fight against modern forced labor to the figh1

against lynching during the civil rights movement. Merely abolishin~

lynching, she said, "would have left in place the whole rotten system C>f

segregation that enabled such vicious violence to prevail." In order 10

FLORIDA 37

put a stop to lynching, it was crucial to addr that enabled and supported 't s· 'I· I ess the system of segregation

t . ImJ ar y she arg d . slavery means improving lab d' . ' ue 'putting an end to . or con lt!ons for all k · mdustries. wor ers tn exploitive

Th · e Issue, she said, was much lar er than .

working people in the U . d S g " agnculture. It concerns all nJte tares. Look at all th .

used to give people pension d I e compames that s, an 1ow now they're tr . h'

one as permanent-tern . ymg to Ire every- porary or contmgent worke " h 'd "

see that and say 'Oh th . . rs, s e sat . People . ' ' ere JS a ternble new tr d l mg more and more I d en 'emp ayers are treat-

peop e as ay laborers a d They're not giving benefit n temporary workers.

s anymore and the ' thing.' That's exactly wh t . I ' y re outsourcing every-

a agncu ture has alw b l'k you could say the other . d . • ays een t e. And now

m ustnes are emulating a . I trying to improve condit' I h gncu ture. Instead of

IOns e sew ere they'r ture more and more A d ' e gonna resemble agricul-

1 ' . n pretty soon people who think 'W: II . c oesn t have anytht'ng t d . h • e , thts 0 o Wlt me ' th · h look th'e same way and th . h ' ey mtg t start seeing their jobs

"Look wh ' ' . e~ mtg t get a lot more interested. at s gomg on 10 our countr " sh . "

ga p between the rich and h y, . e contmued. Where the poor as grown 10 th

phenomenally. I mean I d ' h· . e past twenty years- ' on t ave to say Jt· s C . .

Brandeis-he said it "A d h h ' upreme ourt JUStice . n ere s e paraphrased th I .

introduction· "You h e quote cite in my f t: • can ave great concentration of wealth in the h d

o a tew or you can ha d an s . ve emocracy. You can't have both "

Germtno grinned, both amused and u set b . of' the world. "That h ld b h p y the general obtuseness

s ou ot er everybody right?" Sh r'lllbarassed to have to S'lY it "I I h. '. . e went on, as if

· ' ' mean, t mk life lib d h ul happiness, all that stuff. h C . . ' erty, an t e pursuit

Jn t e onstJtutwn or th D I . ' l ~' pcndence or whatever th h II . . e ec aratwn of In-

e e .tt was-I thtnk th t' II rdr ·a, don't you?" a sa a pretty neat

To take a quick tour of labor abuse in a . 'i on Proclamation through t d . gnculture from the Erpancipa- o ay 1s to see Germi ' · F

'" "'ng all other indu t · h . nos po10t. oremost s nes, t e agncultural sect h

li~<. r g inable length to 'd . or as gone to every avoJ paymg free-market, prevailing rates for

NOBODIES

38

labor, as if for some reason the production of food is necessarily differ-

ent from the production of other goods. In the Reconstruction-era South, employers recently bereft of slaves

had simply to contact the friendly local sheriff and ask him to rustle up

a few hands. Unemployed free black men in the vicinity would suddenly

find themselves arrested , fined for minimal offenses such as loitering,

and locked in prison. The employer behind the scheme would gallantly

step in to pay off the convicts' fines, thereby purchasing a bargain-rate

workforce. Convicts paid their debts to society-and their employers-

by wo<king on the chain gang. At night, wo<ke<> wue locked up and

guarded by force. So much for emancipation. The post-Civil War period witnessed the rise of tenant farming, or

sharecropping. Under the typical sharecropping arrangement, landlords

p<ovided evuything a tenant family needed fo< fa<ming' a hou>e (u•u·

ally), the u>< ofland and puhap• tooh and ,eed, fuel, and feed fo< ani· mal stock. In exchange, the landlord received anywhere from a quarter

to half of the harvest. In theory, there need be no'thing sinister about

such an arrangement. In practice, however, abuse proved the rule mor

often than the exception. The overwhelming majority of tenants were i\\iterate, had no expe

rience bargaining or making contracts, and were utterly depend n

upon the land own« fo< aedit in o<d« to •u<Vive between h""'"· F.' ploye<> dete<mined the inte«" <3t<' tenan" paid on thei< deb", k the books, and brokered crop sales. They charged what they wanted ~ food and supplies and were free to levy fees for such arbitrary servict'

"supervision." Because debt, rather than naked, brute force, serv 1l the leading edge of coercion, this variety of slav ery is usually terlll

"debt peonage." But as in all forms of slavery, force remained the

mate motivator. What is most startling about sharecropping, given its exploitiv

ture, is both how prevalent it proved to be and how over time it 111

more and more (rather than fewer) people in poverty. In 1880, ~I• I cent offarms in the South were operated by tenants; by 1920, thi had risen to 49 percent. Some eight and a half mi\\ion Ameri "' 7 percent of the nation's population, were reduced to tenancy in

39

was then known as the Cotton Belt essen . ra.nt of the United States. By 193~ the ttally the lower eastern quad-

FLORIDA

cltmbed still higher to 55 ' number of tenant farms had

b

. ' · percent of the r · ' c med shocks of W ld W egton s Iarms. Until the com -

or ars I and II and th prompted a mass exodus of e Great Depression

bl k

poor southerners ·11· ac and white famil' I' d ' mt tons of uneducated

h tes tve a step above barn d . ungry, and housed in d )' h yar ammals, ignorant

ere tct s acks · 1. ' kee p. ' earmng tttle more than their

In 1942, farm · t c . m erests, racmg wartime man Congress to enact the B power shortages, urged [; racero Program de . d arm workers across the b d Th ' stgne to bring Mexican

I . or er. e progra . IOn workers, who typicall m tmported four to five mil-

h c Y came to the United S c . eJore returning home A . h tates IOr mne months

· s wtt every oth " ~ram since, abuse and er temporary worker" pro- ' nonpayment of work .

we ren t free to change e I ers were nfe. Workers

I mp oyers, nor were th f

p oye rs who paid late 'd ey ree to organize. Em- ' pat not at all prov d b .

Ma ndard food or living d' . ' e a ustve, or provided sub- con tttons faced little

ways . Any worker foolish h pressure to mend their I enoug to speak u b tran ded a troublemak I d p a out bad conditions was

er, p ace on a bl acklist a d d . ll'turn. The program expired . h . ' n emed permission to

wit out bemg re d · IIH'rous instances of ab d newe m 1964, after nu-

use an outcry fr I b . IIH I community groups. Even the US ;m a or umons and religious •lwge of the program L G . .' . epartment of Labor officer in

I .. ' ee . Wtlltams call d B

I '''" legalized slavery." ' e racero nothing more

Wo rld War II proved a boon for a ri . l'' ' ~nncrs of war cameo th I b g cultural mterests when German ' n e a or market In 1945 h

1 •• 0,000 such work . . . t ere were as many ers tmpnsoned in th U .

'II' put to work in the sugarc fi ld e ntted States. Hundreds

I

. ane e s around L k Ok ''' c · t~hty cents a d Th a e eechobee and

. ay. e work of cutting and b . " and ts-notoriously backbreakin a urmng sugarcane

I II' during daytime rem g nd dangerous, often taking peratures of over 100 d

'''' ,,, nned Karl Beh fr . egrees. One prisoner a rens, su rered so t I '

t, ''!\ ton, Florida that . J ntense y at a sugar camp in ' tn anuary 1945 h

llllnlll a tree. e ran away and hanged him-

"''" •nc rs of war were no substitute for a more per d manent un erpaid

42 NOBODIES

Carolinas, Joyce and Huey found themselves getting drunk, high, and

locked up each night in compounds ringed with barbed wire and

guarded by pit bulls and pistol-whipping guards. The guards, said

Joyce, were an ever-present reality. "You so far back out there in the

woods you can't walk to town. They stay right there with you when you

go to the store," Joyce recalled. "The town's so small there's nowhere to

run. Leaky showers, half-fed people, unlivable camps. No sheets on they

bed. Got you way down a clay dirt road, mosquitoes eat you up. For

lunch, they bring you a little sandwich, sauce, and baloney. It already

melted in the sun. It make your blood pressure high. Treated like a dog."

Once, she said, she saw Carrie Bonds wringing out a tampon into the

workers' food as she prepared it. (According to local superstition, not

unlike certain voodoo beliefs, if you make people consume your blood,

you attain the power to control them.)

Joyce said that the Bondses charged $9.50 for a six-pack of beer. A

bottle of wine that ran a dollar in a store went for six out at the camp. "If

you pickin' a hundred bushels of peaches qr potatoes," she said, "you

making thirty-five or forty dollars in that day. But you gonna come

home and you gonna get some shine and some drugs. They gonna get that money you made."

One day when Joyce was too sick from drugs and exhaustion to work

in the fields, the Bondses took her in a van to Atlanta, trolling for hom

less men on the streets by offering them crack. Embarrassed by her

havior in those days of addiction (she had been sober for many year when I spoke to her), she recalled, "I was telling these men how we h swimming pools and how nice the camp was. Pool tables, this, that, a the other."

Sometime around 1992, while working at a camp in Benson, Norl

Carolina, Joyce and Huey decided to run away and clean up their liv

It wasn't going to be easy. The guards counted everyone each night

fore bedtime and hung around outside the barracks getting drunk wl

their rifles beside them as the workers slept. Joyce told me that sh

Huey snuck their belongings (clothes and a television) out into thr

rounding peach fields over the course of several nights, also makin14

FLORIDA

43 tact with a h .

sympat etlc crew leader do h pie. Referring to Huey, she said, "Whe wn t .e ~oad. The plan was sirn- running." n he Said Start running,' you start

The scene sounds like a B . . h movie starrmg th I W t e local sheriff When th I e ate arren Oates as

e coup e began to h them into the night Th B d run, t e camp dogs chased d . · e on ses sent out d · lrt roads. At one point J guar s In cars to prowl the

' oyce recalled she fj 11 · tumbled in after her Th I . ' e Into a deep ditch; Huey

In 199 . ey a most didn't make it. 3, the Bondses were charged . h .

in a state of peonage dist 'b . f Wit conspiracy to hold workers ' n UtJOn o crack · .

federal Migrant and S . I . cocaine, and VIolations of the T easona Agncultural W k hey were released from . . or er Protection Act

. pnson 1n 2000. · Incredibly, cases like Joyce's still

American crew leader named M' h pop up. In 2001, an African 1c ael A ll en L 1 d .

twenty-four African A . ee p e guilty to keeping · mencan orange · k ·

nineties by providing th . h pte ers mdebted throughout the , ern WJt . crack coca, I

named Ronald Evans h. . c tne. n 2003, a contractor ' IS W11e, and his .

homeless African Ame . son were discovered luring ncans to a remote b b d .

!'; Jstern Florida wher ' ar e -Wired camp in north- e potatoes and cabba e w

hoi, and cigarettes were off d . g ere grown. Crack, alco- . 'ere on credtt sn · k .

II lour-year cooperative effi t b ' anng wor ers In debt. After I or etween the CIW a d fi

I 1<' Evanses were convicted . F b n ederal authorities . 10 e ruary 2007 0 · ' llnan ctal-reporting . I . n conspiracy, drug and

. VJO attons and sentenced . ' yr·urs 111 prison. to a combmed fifty-one

But with the influx of farm workers from . h ' ' • I he wino and crackh d . Mexico and Central Amer- 1 ea crews wtll soo b h.

I ll'lr place has arisen the t f n e a t tng of the past. In I . ype o case exemplifi d b G , ~~ - I ncnds-the exploitat' d e y arcta Orozco and

Ion an enslaveme t f fj , ' ' AI ready it's possible to s . . . n o orelgn migrant work-

ee mtnor vanatio . h h lnSeptemberl999 Ab IC nstnt et erne.

I . ' e uello, Jr., Basilio C 11 d lil lr lias, labor contract fi ue o, an German Co- ors rom Immok I

'"''~:gling and inv I . a ee, were arrested for the o untary servitude oft

lt d k en held against th . 'II wenty-seven migrants, who I etr WI and forced t k . "lid a's tomato field C . o wor tn southwestern

s. ovarrubtas and the Cuellos told the· k 1r wor ers

44 NOBODIES

that their raite fee from the Mexican border (which in those days was

typically about seven hundred dollars) was actually seven thousand dol-

lars. Workers were held in dilapidated trailers and threatened if they

tried to escape. Perhaps the most vicious case of modern migrant slavery is that of a

Florida-based labor contractor named Miguel Flores. Flores was in-

dicted in 1996 for enslaving hundreds of Mexican and Guatemalan

farm workers on a camp in South Carolina. Flores had been hired for years by large companies selling fruit and

vegetables and entrusted to handle payrolls worth hundreds of thou-

sands of dollars, despite an arrest record in Florida and South Carolina

and a well-known reputation for violence. The newspaper in Flores's

hometown of La Belle, Florida, the Catoosa Belle, repeatedly printed let-

ters from citizens complaining about shootouts in broad daylight at a

local bar between Flores and ex-employees, guards who had worked for

him. Rumors circulated widely that Flores and his crew committed nu-

merous murders and dumped the victims into th e Caloosahatchee River.

Charges were never brought, but as one local cop observed, "When Flo-

res left the area, the rash of accidental drownings stopped." His labor camps were scenes of unrelenting barbarity, with guards

firing guns into the air to get workers moving along. "It was horrible for

the women," a former Flores employee told me. "One of them was six-

teen, seventeen years old. She was very pretty. The drivers and the bosses

got talking about how they could help her work off her debt. They

raped her. When they got bored with her, the workers started in, too. If

the bosses could do it, why couldn't they?" The level of intimidation was so high that even after Flores was shut

down, it was nearly impossible to persuade anyone to testify against him .

It took five years for CIW investigators, later joined by Mike Baron of

the Border Patrol, to piece the case together. Finally, however, in Jum·

1997, Flores was convicted and handed fifteen years. After the senten

ing, in which workers recounted their sufferings at his hands and ex

pressed their hopes that this kind of abuse might one day be abolished,u

television newsman reportedly asked Flores if he had anything else tu

FLORIDA 45

say. Flores's answer captures rather succinct! th tions in agriculture· "Y: h F k y e essence of labor rei a-

. ea . uc you, motherfucker."

Seventy years ago there were near! . . and about 25 percent of th A y ~even mtllwn American farmers, e mencan popul t' ·

farm production. Toda fifi h a ton was tnvolved in y, ty t ousand farms ace f, h

of American food producti Th ount or t ree-quarters on. e average fa nne . fifi

old, and it is predicted that as t d ' r r .ts over ty-five years . o ay s rarmers conttn · tdate, merge or qut't th b . ue to rettre, consol-

, e ustness, the bulk fA . , produced by as few 'lS thirt th d . o menca s food could be

A < Y ousan farms.

"Th s Greg Schell, a farm worker advocate in South Florida e I . d e growers who prosper in toda , . I . ' xp atne ,

vertically integrated 'lnd . y s agncu ture market are diversified, ,. growmanumberof l . · ( fi .

countries), insulating· th . ocatiOns o ten tn several . em agamst the eff, f h

pnce swings. Some fanner I d ects o s art-term market · s w 10 use to sell th ·

tionally grow for la rger g d etr own crops now addi- . rowers un era contr mstances, the large gro , b . _act arrangement. In most

wers egan as famtly fa . d are still run by the descen I· f h rms, an many of them

. cants o t e founders H their operations is usually h AI h . owever, the scope of

uge. t ough p . . I h ld behave much more like . nv<~te y e ' these farms

The d . co~porattons than the traditional family farm " pro ucuon and dtstribution of South Fl . . ' .

dominated by a handfi I f . onda s tomato crop is u o pnvate firms, such as Six L' p k'

pany, Gargiulo Inc and p 'fi 'T' s ac mg Com- ' ., aCJ c J.omato G h'

.tnd buy from others tens of 'II' rowers, w tch often grow mt tons of pounds f

pnmarkets and corpo . h o tomatoes to sell to su- rattons w 0 sig 0 h ' n year-round contracts

wners tp and distribution is even more . . t tlrLts industry Lyk B h . ttghtly controlled in the

. es rot ers IS a billion-d II ltoldings in insurance r d o ar conglomerate with

, IOrestry, an cattle as w II . . ( 'onsolidated Citrus wh. h 5 e as Citrus. Larger still is

' tc owns 5,000 acres in Florida I dttcc s about seventee '11' b . a one and pro-

n ml ton oxes of frUJt each Th II Y of the state's crop in th r f . year. e vast major-

' e IOrm o etther fr i . . ~-: • >e' S to three final b . C . u t, JUICe, or concentrate

uyers. argtll Inc a $75 b'JJ' ' tll d one of the large t . I ., t ton commodities giant

s pnvate y owned companies in the world . h , wtt op-

NOBODIES 46

erations in fifty-nine countries; Tropicana, which is owned by PepsiCo;

and Minute Maid, owned by Coca-Cola. This transformation of the food business from ma-and-pa-style op-

erations to big business is frequently referred to as the "industrializa-

tion" of modern agriculture. In part, this is because of the immenseness

of modern food-growing operations. Additionally, however, the term

refers to fundamental changes in the nature of farming techniques,

namely, the substitution of small-scale, self-sustaining, home-produc~d "inputs" for supplies purchased from off the farm. Where once famtly

members served as a farm's labor force, farmworkers are now typically

hired from outside the family. Horses, formerly the primary source of a

farm's muscle power, have been replaced by tractors. Organic fertilizers

like manure and mulch have been exchanged for petrochemical-based

fertilizers. While once upon a time, fanners simply reused a portion of

last year's crops for next year's seed, they now buy genetically modi~ed seeds from Monsanto, which come with a one-year license (as wnter

Michael Pollan describes it in The Botany of Desire, Monsanto now hires

Pinkerton detectives to roam the fields of rural America, making sure

farmers aren't violating their licenses). As farms have supersized, and as farming has become more

technology- and chemical-based, it has become, in the public conception,

a more "rational" and "efficient" business. And yet an analysis of mod-

ern agriculture shows that nothing could be further from the truth.

Between 1910 and 1983, the amount of energy consumed to fuel

American agricultural production increased 810 percent. It now re· quires ten fossil fuel calories to produce a single food calorie. A~cording to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, pesticide use on maJor field

crops, fruits, and vegetables tripled from 215 million pounds in. 1964 tO 588 million pounds in 1997. The trend is mirrored worldwtde: our planet uses five hundred times more chemicals than in 1940. T~is mon strous deployment of chemicals, many of which are known carcmogen

has produced a temporary illusion of bounty, but one that is, in fact, be

ginning to fail. Between 1945 and 1985, the number of crops worldwide destroy

by insects rose from around 7 percent to nearly 14 percent. In 1980, at

FLORIDA 47

of fertilizer applied in the United States yielded an average of fifteen to

twenty tons of corn. By I 997, this same ton of fertilizer yielded only five to te~ tons. At the same time, our soils are burning out. Irrigation and

masstve water-diversion programs have caused farmers to throw into

production arid and other marginal land, resulting in massively waste-

ful water u.sage. Since 1960, the United States has lost half its topsoil. Currently, tt has been estimated, we are losing topsoil seventeen times

faster than it is replaced by nature.

By every measure but the most myopic, short-term calculations

modern agriculture is a debacle. The most hopeful perspective-tha;

our environment is being sacrificed to feed the world's hungry-is sadly

del~sional. During the second half of the twentieth century, so many

Thtrd World economies formerly devoted to subsistence farming re-

tooled themselves toward high-profit export crops such as sugar, coffee,

soybeans, flowers, beef, shrimp, and cotton that although worldwide

pro~uction of consumable calories has risen, so has the number of hun-

g? ~eople around the planet-by more than 11 percent. Eight hundred

nullwn people worldwide go hungry every day. Even in the United

States, the world's number-one exporter of food, thirty-three million

people are officially included among the world's hungry.

Th~ .last ~hirty or so years have seen a massive wave of mergers and

acqUisitions m each of the industries that touch an American farmer's

busine~s life .. Ev~ry one of these fields is now dominated by a very small

and sttll-shnnkmg handful of players. Whether one looks at seeds

( Mo~~anto, Dow, and Syngenta), fertilizer (Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta),

p~sttctdes (Monsanto, Dow, Syngenta), commodities trading (Cargill,

< .onAgra, Archer Daniels Midland), food manufacturing (the AI tria

<; roup, Nestle, Unilever), or supermarket retailing (Wai-Mart, Safeway,

Albertson's, Kroger) , each sector is now dominated by three or four gi-

o~ n ts who control 60 to 80 percent of the business. The same holds for the pmcessing of corn, wheat, soybeans, chicken, cattle, and pork, in addi-

' 1"11 to railway and barge shipping concerns and even suppliers of trac-

'"rs and farm machinery. It is staggering to contemplate the power and

1.1\ l re~ch of such near monopolies. We walk through the grocery store

11 11. 1gmmg thousands of brands and companies, homey little entities that

48 NOBODIES

put cows, farmers, rolling hills, and sunbeams on their products' labels.

The reality is that nearly all of them are owned by a very few giants. To

unscientifically cut and paste the products sold around the world listed

on the Kraft Foods website is to behold a document over twenty pages

long. (Kraft is owned by the Altria Group, which also owns Philip Mor-

ris, the cigarette manufacturer.)

Gigantic fast-food chains such as McDonald's, Burger King, and

Yum! Brands (which owns the Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken,

Pizza Hut, Long John Silver's, and A&W chains) buy billions and bil-

lions of dollars' worth of food each year, primarily in the form of fresh

fruits and vegetables. Such massive buyers are uninterested in going

from farm to local farm, buying produce from one small farmer at a time. Instead, they want a manageably small number of suppliers who

can guarantee them year-round supplies. All of this is understandable.

What is less easy to understand is how radically and detrimentally thi1

consolidation has reshaped the food business.

Classic capitalist theory assures us that the law of supply and demand

always finds its own level, that buyers and sellers in a free market ar I

able to make decisions of their own free will to ensure their maximum

benefit. If it costs farmers x amount to raise their crop, well, then, a cording to capitalist theory, they will charge x plus whatever profit th

can get away with, depending on the number of competitors they fa and the unique positive or negative qualities of their product. In pr

tice, however, the food business is more complicated. No matter how

growers become, their trading partners have become much bigger- 1

transfonnative degree.

In a fascinating passage about the purchasing power of large cor

rations, Charles Fishman, in his book The Wal-Mart Effect, tells th · I

of the Vlasic pickle company's experience "partnering" with Wal -M

In the late 1990s, it seems, Wal-Mart proposed to Vlasic that Wal

feature Vlasic's one-gallon jar of pickles. The gallon-sized jars hod r

existed as something of a novelty, but for Wal-Mart, the idea

than the product-was enormous. The gallon jars weighed t

pounds and looked great on display cases. What better symbol ol

FLORIDA

Mart's ability to bring consumer 49 earth? s more for their money tha

n anyone on "And "F' h so IS man continues

'

Vlasic's gallon jar of pick! . es went mto ev W

stores, at $2.97, a price so I h . ery al-Mart, some 2,500 . ow t at Vlaslc a d W I mg only a penny or two . . n a -Mart were mak- 1 on a Jar, If that I ets near the front of st I . twas showcased on big pal-

ores. t was an ab d was selling 80 jars a w k un ance of abundance . "It

ee ' on average · Vlasic VP of marketing St ] y ' Ill every store," says [former

. 1 , eve oung D ,

UntJ you do the math: That' 240 0 . oesn t sound like much, I . s ' 00 gallon f . k on Jars, just at Wai-Ma t so plc Ies, just in gal-

r ' every week Wh I were heading out the d . o e fields of cucumbers oar.

For Vlasic th 11 ' e ga on jar of pickles

ca lled a devastating success. "Quick! . became what might be non-Wal-Mart business" y y, It started cannibalizing our

' says oung "W used to buy the spears and th h. : e saw consumers who the Wai-Mart gallons. The 'd e c .rps rn supermarkets ... buying

thing away when they go: m:: a quarre~ of a jar and throw the enough " Y· A f.1 mliy can't eat th c

· em tast

The gal lon jar reshaped Vlasic' . th e profit margin of the b . . s prckle business: It chewed up

usmess With Wal M r·rall y. Procurement had t - art, and of pickles gen-

o scramble to fi d g.dl ons, but the volume \ I . n enough pickles to fill the

gave 1 asrc str 1 J.t low th numbers and a fi ong sa es numbers, strong W I M ' power ul place in th

;/ - art. Which accounted fi 30% e world of pickles at or o of VI . , b

' " lllpany 's profits from p· kl h . asrc s usiness. But the . . . rc . es ad shnveled 25%

'' 1 \' S - mrllrons ofd 11 ° or more y o ars. ' oung Th e gallon was hoisting Vlasic and h . Yo ung remembers b . Urtmg it at the same time · .. eggrng Wal-Mart fo 1· f" · 11

' 1Y· says Young "Hr . r re re · They said 'N

· vve sa1d we'll · , o '' "J dd have helped t rncrease the price"-even $3 49

remendously " d · rll '''c other products of - an they said, 'If you do that I yours we buy 'II ' 'Il l threat." , we stop buying.' It was a

50 NOBODIES

Finally, Vlasic was able to get Wal-Mart to agree to let them sell a

smaller, half-gallon jar-for $2.49. But it was too late. In January 2001, partially due to the hit sustained by "partnering" with Wai-Mart, Vlasic

filed for bankruptcy. (It has since emerged from receivership-free and

clear from their contract with Wai-Mart.)

The point is not to complain specifically about Wai-Mart so much as

to illustrate an example of what has come to be called "monopsony," the

power that any massive trading partner wields over any smaller one.

One imagines that in a truly free market, sellers of products, not buyers,

dictate the price at which the product is sold. It's a great idea. But it's not

always true--especially in the food business, where growers are ever-

increasingly dwarfed by their business partners.

As an article from an agricultural trade magazine, The Packer

(www.thepacker.com), noted in 2005, "Recently, Miami-based Burger

King changed its tomato pricing method to the extreme detriment of the

tomato farmer and tomato repacker." The article noted that the whole-

sale purchasing co-op that buys all of Burger King's supplies is so big

that it "sets the rules by which the game is played." (The em phases ar mine.)

The effects of such an uneven playing field can be seen in what ia

called the "food price spread," calculated by the U.S. Department of

Agriculture. In 1952, farmers earned an average of forty-seven cents out of every dollar consumers spent in the supermarket. By 1970, their share had slipped to thirty-seven cents. By 1990, it had slid to thirty cents, and

in 2001, using an average basket of food products common to grocery stores nationwide, the farmer's share of the consumer dollar had fall n

to a measly twenty-one cents. Florida tomato producers receive, on aver

age, nineteen cents of every dollar purchased in the grocery store. In

2000, the last year tracked by the USDA, orange producers received sill

teen cents per dollar for whole, fresh oranges.

These figures only show how much farmers receive for their crop•

The other side of the equation is how much farmers pay for everythin

they need to grow our food. And on this end, too, farmers are facin~

squeeze.

FLOR I DA 51

To get a glimpse of the power d . growers' return on equity f: ynamic, we need simply compare

-a ancy way of sayin " fi " . their suppliers and bu A d. g pro t -with that of

yers. ccor mg to · d' and the USDA Am . f: vanous stu Ies by academics

' encan armers earn about 2 4 dollar they invest The d . to percent on every

. more ominant food firm (C . Tyson), by contrast, generate retur f I s onAgra, Umlever, · . ns o at east 20 p S

Dies, In particular grain ercent. ome compa- . processors General Mills d Q

at tunes enjoyed return o . an uaker Oats, have n equ1ty rates of 259 3

cent, making them hu d d f . . percent and 132.6 per- n re s o times more fi bl h

that supply them. pro ta e t an the farms

How do farmers respond to bein forced . . position? Here is where b . g Into an unfair bargaining

we egm to scratch at th " I' " . labor at the heart of A . . . e pecu Jar Ideas about

mencan agnbusmess. In December 2003 The P. k .

' ac eJ ran a story ab Fl . producers' response to . . . out onda tomato

an Increase In the pri f ca lled methyl bromide Th . ce o a common pesticide . . e Increase was acce t d . h

simple cost of doing b . p e Wit out a fuss as a ustness, and farmers re d b .

the price of their tomatoe acre y Simply raising s a penny a pound Th P.

tomato salesman as saying "Th ' b . . e acker quoted one • ere s een v1nuall ..

Th e article went on to h . y no oppositiOn to it." quote t e presJdent f I .

who said, "I guess [buye J k h o a arge packmghouse, rs new w en the PI 'd

decided to do someth. d . on a tomato shippers mg, an It was unanimous th d'd '

much choice anyway." ' ey 1 n t have

Such a price increase is a normal, free-mar development One pi . ket response to a common

· · ayer m a supply chain raises · · ,,ffected deals with it B h. Its pnce, and everyone

. ut t IS generates an obvio . . o~cceptable to farmers that th . f . . us question: Why IS it

e pnce o pestiCides 'II · l o time but it is unacceptabl th l'k . WJ Increase from time

e at, 1 e everythmg 1 · l'fi l.ibor will do so as well? e se In 1 e, the price of

The following is a story I heard from the .. Wo rkers. During a thirty-d h . Coalition of Immokalee

ay unger stnke held b f ' " ~' lnbers in 1998 to . y some o the group's

protest tomato pickers' low w '" speak with them Wh ages, growers refused

· en a produce brokers h · workers asked one of th I . ympat etJc to the farm-

e reca Cltrant growers why he refused to even

NOBODiES

52

meet with the coalition, the farmer grumbled, "I'll put it to you this way.

The tractor doesn't tell the fanner how to farm." At the risk of pointing out the obvious, the story illustrates the degree

to which unfair pay in agricul ture stems from attitudinal, not economic,

causes. As another Florida farmworker advocate expressed it, "When-

ever anyone tries to regulate them, farmers always complain-'Oh, but

we're just poor farmers\'" As she described the problem, fanning had

managed to maintain an aura of self-serving exceptional ism about it that

no other industry in the country could have possibly gotten away with:

farms produce food, and food is necessary to our survival; therefore, it is

okay to mistreat brown people. Or whomever. If it sounds stupid, it's be-

cause it is. Tomato pickers' shares of retail sales come out to roughly l.4 cents

per pound. It would require a raise of about $3,200 a year for each farm-

worker in America today to earn the minimum wage. This could be ac-

complished by raising the cost of food by about $50 per year per

American household. According to the Economic Research Service, a branch of the USDA

that compiles statistics about the food and farm economies, Americans

in 2002 spent 6.5 percent of their income on food-less than any other

country tracked. Canadians spent half again as much. Swedes spent

nearly twice as much. Japanese spent over twice as much. Spaniard

spent nearly three times as much. Another interesting statistic is that from 1929 to 1958, American

spent between 18 and 25 percent of their disposable income on food .

From the mid-1980s to the present, the share has dropped, from aboul

12 percent to about 10 percent. How is it that as we've become a va tly wealthier country with a far cheaper supply of food, we've succeeded I

creating a food system that can't pay farm workers a living wage? The food sector (food, groceries, food processing, and restaur 1111

businesses together) is worth about a trillion dollars a year in the Unit tl

States and is second only to pharmaceuticals in profitability. Consid till

that the American public gives some $47 billion per year in direct suh I

dies to agricultural producers and billions more in tax breaks, resrlll I

allocations to univ ersities, marketing initiatives, subsidized water, ltll

FLORIDA

'd 53 at programs to poor countries and so . . . ceit to say the money just isn't ;h on, It IS blmd idiocy or willful de-

ere.

. enter or Responsive Politics . According to the c ll profit campaign watchd . ' a nonpartisan, non-PA og group, m 1998 ·b · Cs (political action . . . ' agn usmess-through

committees), mdividu I d . money contributions-gave h a onatwns, and soft-

dates. In 2000, they gave close :~;0 t ~~~· $43 million to federal candi- $54 million. In 2004 it I ml IOn. In 2002, the figure was over

' was a most $53 m'lr d to $44 million. These fi d ' . I lon, an in 2006, it fell back

. gures on t mclude th . gomg to state and local ca . . e many mtllions more

mpalgns, or commg f dd' . scured sources or indu t . b rom a I tiOna! and ob-

' s nes eyond the " 'b . " . fast-food chains, hotels d . agn usmess designation, like

d

' an construction firms . h . pen ency on an illegal-alien I bo f, ' Wit an mcreasing de-

Th fi a r orce. e rst and foremost response from th

ge nerosity is the deliberat bt· d e federal government to such

1

e m ness to the run I t ocumented workers in th U . d away popu ation of un- 1\. e ntte States A d ·

ccounting Office in 1999 th US . . ccor mg to the General ' e · · Immtgratio d c

lll ent agency took actio . n an ustoms Enforce- . n agamst 417 co · f,

.th ens. By 2005, that number h d d mpanles or employing illegal Immigration and Nat ]' . a ropped to three. In fact, in 1999 the

' ura lzatton Service listed . . ' l:t st among its five enf< . . . momtonng workplaces

orcement pnonttes Th INS ll.t: nship and Immigration Se . d . e 'now called U.S. Cit-

rvtces evote b 4 mnnel to enforcement in the k 'I sa out percent of its per-

I

wor p ace down f 9 n a well-circulated pa f ' rom percent in 1999.

per .rom January 2005 . I ··~(' tnent: The Uncle d entlt ed "Asset Man- 1

rgroun Labor Force I R' . "''s Robert Justich and B N . . s lstng to the Surface," ana- l

etty g, wntmg for th . Ifill Bear Stearns found th US e mvestment-banking

' at Census t · · h "' mal and deceptive th . . . s atlsttcs ad become so delu-

1

at mvestors could n I I wy wanted to make sound b . d . . o onger rely upon them if

usmess ects "A . ll.tl cd, "we need not accept th Jons. s mvestors," the report

e accuracy of the offi . I ''"n statistics, which are wide! . eta census immigra-

lustich and Ng used th . y reco~m~ed as incomplete."

I

e1r own cntena t · '" umented immigra t· ]' . . o estimate the number ofun-

n s lvmg In the United States ' namely, remit-

NOBODiES

tances (the amount of money sent to home countries each year by immi-

g.,n<'), hou•ing po<mit> in immig.ant "g"oway" communitio>; ><hool

onmlhnont>, and "o"-botd« flow•. Thoy oakulatod th•t tho numb« of

il\ega\ immigrants in the United States may be as high as 20 million peo- pJe-almo>t doubk tho offidal \0.5 million e>timated by the Con•u• Bu-

mu. Sueh a reality, tho autho" noted, w"' "oating a di>tortod viow of the American economy, altering the ways in which we factor such essen-

tial >tati>ti" "' tho ovwUI pmduetivity of tho oconomy, national "te' of

inflation, and the eventual tax-burden cost for society to provide benefits

Concluding that employers in the United States have become "sim-

54

to workers il\ega\\y.

ply hooktd on ehoop, i\kgal wotko,.," Ju.tieh and Ng '"ted that Am<'·

ican employers have responded to free-market pressures of overseas

competition by finding "innovative" and even "extra-l egal" ways to

compete. "These employers," they found, "have, in turn, placed pressure

on the government to ignore the flood of cheap labor." Far beyond merely ignoring the massive influx of foreign, undocu-

mented workers, however, the federal government seems in recent years

to have declared outright economic war on them. In the mid-eighties, Congress declared that agricultural worker ,

formerly exempt, would henceforth be required to pay federal incom

tax (Social Security tax is also deducted from their pay).ln 1996, after in

tensive lobbying from the agriculture industry, Congress moved to im

po>' <O>trietion• on pmvide" of kgal ,.,;,tanto who ,oeeivo fod« I funds, including Rural Legal Service corporations throughout the coun

tty. Tho now toottittion• fotbado tho RLS ftom toptO'enting undo u mented workers or bringing class-action suits. The restrictions remov

one of the last measures of \ega\ protection available to America's mn

vulnerable, poor, and abused workers. Government agencies such as the Department of Labor's Occup

tiona\ Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Equa\1'.11

ploy mont Opportunity Commi,.ion (EEOC), "oatod to ptotett wotk

have slowly seen their budgets strangled over the last thirty years utul

a series of\abor-unfriend\y administrations. The Bush administratiot

pmpo.od 2006 budget fot tho Dopattmont of La bot toeommondod th

FLORIDA . . 55

mating the National Farmw k 'II' or er Jobs p mt JOn for migrant and season If: rogram, which allocated $81 this kind f d . . a arm worker prog T o epnontization oflabor r . . rams. he results of

the Wage and Hour Division of th ;gdulatwn ts palpable : In the 1950s one · e 1e era! D ' mspector for every 46 000 epartment of Labor had

r ' workers By th 199 spector tor every 150 000 k . e Os, there was o . ' wor ers ne m-

As recently as 2007 th . .

fL b

' e pnmary pub!' . r o a or's Wage a d H . tc mtenace of the D . . n out D.vi•ion inFo opattmont area wtth perhaps a hundred h rt Myers, Florida-serving an w k t ousand S · h

or ers-consisted of . pants -speaking m ' an answenn h. tgrant enumerates in bland, English b g mac me. The outgoing message

the office does handle (and the ~~:~ucratese the ~ew types of complaints mg further explains that the fifi yhmore that tt doesn't). The record-

!

o ce as n f II . open on y once a week on W d d o u -time staff and that t't' . ' e nes ay f, h If s

tton to hear the recording in Spanish s, or a a day. There is no op-

Laxness with regard to abusive . ployer) has become mind-bo lin growers.(or any other malfeasant em- ment of Labor cited I gg g. In one mstance, in 1998 the D . a arge North C I' ' epart- farm for stiffing a aro ma tobacco and sw group of Jamaican t eet potato :~ggregate $100,000 in wage Th emporary guest workers out of an fmed $650 s. e grower was d d , - . After the 1999 slav . . or ere to pay up and I· lorida, the Department of L ebry convtctJon of the Cuello brothers in w· tg f, h a or was tasked · h '

' es or t e enslav ed worke Th d ' Wit collecting back lc· fi rs. e epart vy a ne against both the c ment was also supposed to tl N ontractors and th

lc m. o such actions were take e growers who employed

E h n. ven t e Supreme Court has .

wo rkers' rights I . gotten tnto the game of den . r . . n a compltcated ca f ymg tarm- ( om pounds v. National Labor Relat. se ;om 2002 called Hoffman Plastic

' " ·'' while foreign workers in A zo~s oard, the Court essentially ruled l llgage in union activity, as prot:~:~c: are as ent.itled as Americans to \, I' employers who illegally fir f, . y the Natwnal Labor Relations

" "It· activity will face no penalt :ho relgn workers for participating in tlw face of the law's int ( y atsoever. The ruling not only fl' .

. ent to protect th - . . tes m ,llllzc rs), it makes 'll I e acttvtty of would-be I b

. I ega workers fa a or or- ~·' of antiunion discrim. r more attractive to hire-in th

' matory employers. e

NOBODiES

56

But the most hypocritical instance of feder al intervention to protect

abusive employers surely has to be the manipulation of the 2000 anti-

trafficking bill. In 2000, the Department of Justice, alarmed by the increase in

human trafficking, worked with allies in Congress to pass the Victims of

Trafficking and Violence Protection Act. The essential proposal was to

create a federal felony charge for holding people in involuntary servi-

tude, updating the Thirteenth Amendment's prohibition of slavery to

take into account the combination of debt peonage and psychological co-

ercion that characterize modern slavery. The original version of the bill was introduced into Congress by Re p-

resentative Chris Smith (R-NJ) and focused primarily on sex slavery.

Several cases of forced prostitution had recently made headlines, and as

one congressional aide involved in the bill's evolution told me later, "I t

was a big winner that everyone could get behind; people on the Ch ris-

tian right were really repulsed by the issue and wanted to nail it, and th

feminist left were also very against it." As House Democrats studied the bill, however, they became con·

cerned that it ignored other victims of slavery, like fannworkers and

garment workers trapped in sweatshops. They reasoned that if modern

slavery is to be a crime, it should be a crime wherever and however ito

curs. In response, the Democrats, through Sam Gejdenson (D-CT), in

traduced a competing bill , which included provisions relating to wh

they called "labor trafficking." Early drafts of the bill provided a prison sentence for any person wh

makes a profit "knowing, or having reason to know," that a worker wtll

be subject to involuntary serv itude. What this meant, my sources (wh

I should mention, both worked for Democrats) explained, was that "I

you had a case where you had field workers who were basically lx• enslaved, and you were in charge of that field, and you knew that th

guys were in slavelike conditions, and you benefited from it,. then y•

could go to jail for twenty years." To the great surprise of all involved, even after extremely inten 1 n

gotiations in multiple committees, the bill managed to pass must r I

FLOR I DA 57

both part' d · tes, an m November 1999 . of my aides described it the I . I . a compromise was reached. As one

f " ' egts atwn that result d

o true bipartisanship." e was a rare example

Suddenly ho . ' wever, as Congress moved JOUrnment, the bill hit a dbl k toward the Christmas ad-

(R

roa oc -namel S -UT), head of the Jud. . C . y, en a tor Orrin Hatch

"H tCJary ommtttee In h atch felt that agricultural . . t e words of one aide

d

. ' enterpnses wo ld b ' idn t want th e higher- . u e too vulnerable. He

ups to get pumshed f, . senator and his staff sat on the b'll f" . or turnmg a blind eye." The

I

I , re uswg to · ess the "pro-labor" . . . pass It on. Until and un-

provlslons were removed h . come to a vote. ' t e bill was not going to

Hatch's staff disputed thl's ch . . aractenzati f h . countenng, "Hatch wanted th b 'll • on o t e bill's evolution

h

e ' to pass H · ' t e federal government . . e was JUSt concerned about

prosecutmg peopl f, . reason to know' as d e or cnmes because ' they had

oppose to whether the standard was so broad th y actually knew or not. The

. at you could hold a sal . Kmart cnminally liabl b h . esperson selltng a shirt in

e ecause e 1s ' fi · , f that were produced ov b pro tmg rom the sale of goods

erseas ecause he had ' so me of the overseas fact . h a reason to know' that I ones ave such poor k'

I le workers were 'basically' enslaved " wor mg conditions that

The bill passed · h h · -wit t e provisions re d · " . rl'ason to know" left in pi c gar mg knowmg, or having

ace tor sex slavery bu ~'~'Y· As a result, the penalties c . I t removed for labor slav- 1 wr mvo untary · d

un y to labor contractors-th I serv!tu e apply virtually

I

. e owest rung of 1 . ' •am that brings produce f h emp oyers m the long

.. rom t e field to the table My personal view," concluded m .

I I.Jtch staff were going to b d y.source on the Hill, "is that the e am ned tf und h .

ll" ••n a open up new avenues of er t etr watch, they were attack on corporate A . " men ca.

nd users of Florida's . l agncu rural commod' . I he largest buyer of Fl 'd ttles, such as Tropicana

. on a oranges em lo . ' Ill l•dds and test for h h' ' p y supervtsors who roam

sue t mgs as qualit d '' I' abreast of soil-moistu y an sugar content. They

re content and prices in world commodities

58 NOBODIES

markets. For all intents and purposes, they control the harvest, dictating

what fields are picked when, and to which local processing plants the

harvests go.

Not surprisingly, however, when confronted by the fact that several

of South Florida's recent slavery cases involve workers picking oranges,

a Tropicana spokeswoman with whom I talked denied anything like re-

sponsibility. In a sympathetic, perky voice, she informed me that "Trop-

icana no longer owns any actual groves in the state of Florida. We

purchase from companies that own groves." She clarified this position,

adding, "We're really not in the business of policing the groves. We're a

business and we have to rely on what's in our purview."

When asked whether Tropicana had a position regarding the treat-

ment of the laborers who supplied its product, she replied, "We do our

very best to make sure our growers operate at the highest ethical stan-

dards." When asked what that actually means, she explained, "We have a written policy in the growers' contract. When they sign that, they say that

they're committed to following the labor laws that all companies in Amer

ica do." When asked what Tropicana would do if it was discovered that

one of its suppliers was engaging in unsavory labor practices, she an

swered, "Well, if it came to our attention, we would take action. W

would terminate the contract." When asked if they had ever, in fact, ter

minated a contract, however, the answer was no. When informed oft

ongoing case against the Ramos brothers, who worked for two of Florid

largest orange growers, Lykes Brothers and Consolidated Citrus, Tro

cana responded, "Well, we don't actually buy from Lykes Brothers."

According to Jonathan Blum, vice president for public relation

Yum! Brands, the parent of Taco Bell, which in 2003 bought or eleven million pounds of Florida tomatoes, the company does not

vulge the names of its suppliers. When I asked Blum about the boy1

against the restaurant launched by the Coalition of Immokalee Wu

ers, he said that his company wasn't responsible for helping farmwu

ers negotiate with local growers for better pay and conditions. "II

labor dispute between a company that's unrelated to Taco Bell :uul

workers," Blum told me. "We don't believe it's our place to get invul

in another company's labor dispute involving its employees." A fu

FLORIDA

relationshi b 5 9 p etween slavery in South Flor· .

pas, Blum said "My g h I' . Ida and his company's ch I ' os , m sorry It' h . a u-

anything to do with us." ' s emous, but I don't think it has

0 n the night of May 27, 2000 the foil . . the Highlands County, Flo~ida, Sh~:~ng two calls were received by IS one county north of Lee Co h f's Office. Highlands County h unty, orne to I k

ave a population that is for two-thirds of mmo alee. Both counties The first call is answered b d' the year at least halfHispanic.

twan "911 . Y a lspatcher w 'th h A g. p.ollce emergency." I a eavy southern

. male Hispanic speaks with a panicke . . ch-spea k eh-Spanee?" d, hlgh-pttched voice. "Uh

The dispatch ' er answers curtly "N ~

The caller pauses "Ok u· ' o. ou speak English?" Th . . ay. mtre flook ]. Um-"

e dispatcher cuts him off. "~ what?" . ou need police, ambulance fi

, re, or The caller panics "EI M . Th I' . ercadlto! Lake Placid I"

e c lspatcher's concern unfo . "Where?" she barks . ' rtunately, registers like impatience.

The caller's panic surges l..1ke Placid!" commensurately "Eh · -store Mercaditol

The dispatcher b · egms to understand h. . "

The caller answers "J I" lm, At the store?" she asks , es. . Dispatch . "Wh er. at street?" · The caller says .. ..,.. • • ' J. wenty-seven." rhe dispatcher sighs "Ok

'' '" c, then panic Th . ay, what's the problem?" She's met b . · ere are shouts · h y SI-

'" 'PPt'ning. "What' h tn t e background. Som th' . s t e problem?" she h " e mg IS

1/,,11 .\peak s English?" s outs. Is there someone there

' f 'hc phone is hun u Th . · .1 g P· · e dtspatcher s · . I H: phone rings aga· Th . ays, tnto the night: "Hello?"

ln. e same d h · ll ll (' rgency? " tspatc er answers "91 I h '

· ' , w ats

\ different male, with a slightly better co ' di , I need a cop over here 'coz th ' b mmand of English, speaks.

ere s een fight with gun!"

60 NOBODIES

k "Where at, sir?" Th dispatcher as s, I"

' "El Moc<adito ""''· din' whot T

he man answers, l . . "I'm not understan . ll houts at lim. Th dispatcher htera y s .

e I" · I kt 're sayin'! Slow down d The man begins to pamc, ' you . the backgroun . Bedlam breaks out In I" he screams.

ll "El Mercadito! Is the store. ll 'tl" she commands. the fim " "· d d "Ma,guoc_,pe ' · ,

The dispatcher is confoun e . d shouts, "Hello? Hello?

rabs the phone an I not under-A third man now g "Y ! Where you at? am h h uts back. es k?" The dispatc er s o . S bring? Avon Par .

. , h you're at! Are you In e . "Plis! Is emergency ! .roodm w e« ent when he "'"m', d hm

The man sounds more urg I Emergency! Everybo y . kl I Hello? Emergency. Here! Come qmc y.

gun!"

The phone clicks.

Dial tone .

b th outside the El II o a phone oo tl .es were able to trace the. ca t 27 When the sheriffs officer Depu H 1ghway · d '

Mercadito grocery store on . h smashed windows, forty-od petri . d they found four vans Wit . kers and a man named Jo amve , . 'gmnt wo' ' d

fied Guatemalan and Mex!cadn rnlh bloody lip and a split forehea . . he groun wtt a porte com pan Martinez lytng on t I nokalee servicio de trans .

M t '!nez the owner of an rnl . kup There was nothmg u

" ' keo P" · d' d at El Mercadito to rna ' . , d pickers were hea I had stoppe as endmg, an h . h citrus season w . I 11·30 P.M., o umal about It; t e b d At appro,mate y , . k

th t o the Carolinas and eyon . paring to leave, two pte no' , n waq" t h

'le Martinez s carava . d out and began to at ever, w 1

ed men JUrnpe k

. ed. Six or seven arm h ld the passengers at ,IIU true s arnv f trackers e the drivers. While one gro~p ~ a s others demanded to know w point and smashed the varns :~~:r~i~ez, several attackers sur,rourul

When they roun . d h' with a L a!1l the boss was. istol-whippe un h' while at least one of them p . "You're the motherfuckcr

•:ring hi• fwhead open •nd •houtm:~ motheofuoking "'n of a"" sp k'ng my people! I'll kill you, Y. 11 h ne his assailants kr been ta ' . ll 911 on his ce p o ' When Martinez tned to ca

FLORIDA

the phone hom hi, hand and <ontinoed be"'ing him until he <ollapred

in the du", unoon.oiou., hi• face and •hitt OO'<oed with blood. Du,ing

the m,I,e, the p""nge,. and ooe of the 'On d,ive" managed to get

away, making two calls, one to the police, the other to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

61

Lama Ge<mino and Lum, Benite> ani'<d amund midnight. At loo.r th,ee of the mock.,, had managed to «cope, but police had"·

""<d Juan and Ramim Ramo,, along with a mu,in, / o" Lui, Ramo,. A

g un was found in their truck. Germino recalled that if the reason behind

the ottook hadn't aheady been de.,, it become ro when •he "w one of

th e cop," the crime •cene •haking hi, heod, "'Ying, "It'• the"'"' guy' who did thi, th 'ee yea" ago, On! y l"t tin>e they killed the guy."

Tho coalition •oon obtoined a mpy of the un,ele.,ed police «pon dc.cribing the 1997 mmd., of A,i.,to Roblem. The •imil'<itb be.

I ween that attack and the current one were too numerous to be coinci-

" ''"tol, The ciooum,.an.,, •toongly indiwed mndition, of involuntory

•n vitude. A, Ge<mino <>pla ined, "Cutting off people'' ""P< mute. i• tl" 'Orn e " locking them behind a fence o' holding guo, to thei, heod,, /'here's no difference."

Local pm,eeuton failed to'" the laoge< pktuoe, howeve<. Ram.,, I'" b,othe<, and the;, oou.in We<e chaoged with ""ult, a mi•dtmeono,, l'l"·i, lawyoo, oeaohed a pleo agoeement with the '"te ottomey whe<eby

tlw .<u.peq, eooh '<<ei'<d a yeao of pmbation and a bill fo, Maotine>'• ~1 111 windows and broken cell phone.

Coalition memben •taned making inquirie.. Once Rami co Ram.,·, "" k•wme began ei"uloting through the membe,.hip, <epon, began to

lt h, ' baek '"h" quiekly: "Oh, El Diablo, yeah, he killed a guy a few

, ·" ' ago right up there(" fn little time, it became clear that Ramos was ldi'C·d the head of a large and awful operation.

"'find out mooe about the Ram.,.,, a nineteen-ye"-oid <oalhion " , ,1 , ., named Romeo Ramfoez volumeeoed to go unden:ove< and "' k li n them. Ram loez, a Guaten,lan, appmoohed the brothe,., "ked ' ,, Job, and went to live in La Pinita, the barracks where Garcfa " , o, Sanchez, and Hernandez were held against their will.

Ill"·' ' '"ti ng by <>am pit why FBI agen" ( umiJ and unJe, tho Buoeau

NOBODIES 62

starts hiring Guatemalan agents) may never be suitable for such under-

cover work, Ramirez explained how he approached the job. "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 the indigena style. I pre-

tended to know nothing." Inside the camp, Ramirez said, living quarters were "the ugliest I

ever saw in my life. I have lived in bad conditions, all types of conditions,

but this was the worst. In one room where a couple would barely fit,

there were four people. The beds seemed to have been retrieved from

the garbage. There were cockroaches all over the place; the floor was

black. The worst was the stove. Horrible. And the bath, forget it." Act-

ing as if he were merely asking for advice from his fellow workers,

Ramirez made his inquiries: Were people getting paid? Were they free

to go when they wanted? The answers to both questions were no. Armed now with an eyewitness confirmation that the Ramoses were

holding workers by force, the coalition approached the authorities.

Would the FBI help liberate the workers? According to the coalition,

the FBI declined. One reason given was a lack of material evidence;

without witnesses, victims of the Ramoses, who were available to be in·

terviewed, the FBI couldn't get involved. Another excuse was that it

would be too dangerous. The CIW was on its own. As the Easter holidays approached, the coalition decided to make

surprise visit to the Ramoses' workers. They surmised that the Ramosea

would be in church on Palm Sunday. If so, the coalition reasoned, their

ce\1 phones would be turned off, and the goons guarding the barrack

would be unable to warn their bosses. So on Palm Sunday, 2001, sever 1l coalition members visited the workers at La Pinita and began handin

out generic booklets from the Mexican consulate, which, Germ.i

explained, said, more or less, "Welcome to the U.S. and here's som

guidelines." Slipped underneath these pamphlets, however, were sotn

coalition handouts, advising the workers of their rights and urging th I

to call if they had any problems. "It was an incredible moment," she recounted. The coalition h

known about the workers' situation for so long but had never been a

to approach them directly. Ironically, because that day there was a r I

FLORIDA 63

gious event the k . ' wor ers were more accessible tha of mvestigation Germino . d " n usual. After months

. ' sat ' we were able to act ll k wtthout interruption W h d 1 ua y spea to people

. e a at east twenty min t h " could talk, Germino said the fi h ' u est ere. Once they

' rst t mg out of thei h not allowed to leave" F ' 11 r mout s was "We're

· ma y, a bus cam · h guards, and the first group of k .' e wtt more workers and

I

wor ers satd the coal' t. b eave. The Ramoses sho d c ' t ton rnem ers better

we up a rew moment I k. about what had happened. s ater, as mg questions

The following Saturday Her , d ' nan ez sneaked f h the Kash n' Karry and called h I' . out o t e barracks to " t e coa Itlon As Be . 11 We want to get out of here W ' . mtez reca ed, he said,

to try and leave." . ere really, really, really afraid. We want

An escape plan was set for later that evenin . ever, Juan Ramos (Nino) sho d g. Around mtdday, how-

we up at LaP'- · · escaped the night before N' tmta m a rage. A worker had

. mo swore and sho d h workers, then asked for their IDs W ute at t e remaining wanted them, he answered "B . hen one of them asked why he kill you." ' ecause that way I can find you faster and

For the three friends, it was too late to ch . Orozco recalled his f, 1' b ange thetr plan. Garda

ee mgs a out entrusting h. f: we re shivering" he 'd "W ts ate to strangers . "We

' sat · e were shakin B th ey are his people too d h . g. ecause we thought maybe

' 'an t ey mtght kill "H group decided "we could 't d . us. owever, he said, the

n en ure tt any 1 S wdl. If we're going t d. anger. o we thought, Oh . o te anyway, better to die . ' final precaution Gar , 0 trymg to escape." As a . . ' eta rozco tucked a pai f . . I he three men went into th d . r o sctssors mto his boots. I e yar outstde the barra k .

I H.: y were simply passing the time. c s, trymg to act as if

Around sunset, a white Mercur Grand . . . .lows pulled off Hi hwa 2 y . Marquts wtth tmted win-

1

. g y 7, a short dtstance fro L p · -. lnntez emerged and . d h h m a tmta. Lucas

ratse t e ood as if che k. ,,,.,r. From the balcony of h R- ' c mg an overheated radi-

t e am ada Inn acros th h. h ,,,ul Germino signaled that th ' s e tg way, Asbed

e coast was clear

Garda Orozco, Sanchez and He ~ d . ' rnan ez sat 0 ·1 d ,,,,,,p'sedge nearth h' h . naratroa tieatthe

' e tg way, debattng what h I hrn , leaving all their belo . b . . t ey were about to do.

ngmgs ehmd, mcluding their Mexican doc-

NOBODIES

64

l toward the roadside. As they neared the uments, they walked slow y . d J·umped into the backseat

. h broke into a spnnt an d Grand MarqUIS, t ey b h' d the wheel, and gunne

l d h hood closed, got e m as Benitez s amme t e k h . beads down until they

h . The terrified passengers ept t elr

t e engme. '1 down the road. . d h

were twenty ml es · d and interv1ewe t e Two days after the escape, FBI agents arnve . they orga-

h . f the Ramos operanon,

k Realizing t e stze o h freed wor ers. . 1

. d ens of officers from t e 'd h R mos camp mvo vmg oz 1

nized a rat on t e a bo d the INS . Unfortunate y, 1 D partment of La r, an

FBI, Border Patro ' e h . b ' 1 s in plain view one town . k of pa rking t elf ve IC e

they made the mlsta e . d ineptly-using buses h

h Ramoses ltve, an -more . over from w ere t e I 't an especially swtft move,

D DEPORTATION. t wasn . marked DETENTION AN , d d f 'I included cousins and tn-

. . h h Ramoses exten e ami y cons!denng t at t e h . ble of using a cell phone.

h h t the area eac qUJte capa

laws living t roug ou . ~. h c d food stoves still warm, . d t La Pmtta t ey roun '

When agents arnve a . l ' k (Lucas Benitez later told me b

b ot a stng e wor er. and sleeping ags, ut n b ·ously campfires of work·

. the orange groves, o vt he could see fires out m 'd d . The enforcement agents

h fi ld to avot eteenon. ers spirited out tot ~ e s ) Th R oses were arrested. Now, how·

1 d .d ' once them e am f evident y I n t n . d d f witnesses to choose rom, d fh . ng dozens or hun re s, o b

ever, instea o avt . 'ld have only the three workers sprung y the Department of Jus nee wou

the coalition.

R a nd Jose Luis Ramos begnn

. R os Juan amos, .

The trial of Ramtro am ' . . C t cor the Southern Distrt t . h U S Dlstnct our 1 ' on June 4, 2002, tnt e .. d c d ere charged in a four-coun . p· The e1en ants w

of Florida, tn Fort !erce. . h ld eople in involuntary serVI . · h onsp1racy to o P

federal indictment Wit c of a firearm du ri ng th . h . terstate commerce, use

tude, interference wtt tn h b . '\legal aliens for the purpo commission of a violent act, and ar onng 1

of financial gain. . . b t 125 miles up the con · d 1 f 1 lookmg City a ou

Fort Pierce ts a o e u • . 1 d 1 ckadaisically restored t . Th n proper me u es a a

from Miamt. e tow k db nl' nt' -slum sprinkled wtl · d' · t" flan e Y a 1 · '

block square "histone tstnc c bl' h nents such as Grann · d . s 1or esta IS I

Haitian-style hand-pamte sign

FLORIDA 65

Kitchen, Da Hair Boutique, Mae J Da' Musik Den, and the Being Seri-

ous Unisex Salon-by Teresa. Less quaint are the signs advising NO LOI-

TERING, NO DRUG DEALING and NO STANDING OR DRUG SELLING. What Seems

to connect the different parts of town is a bizarre preponderance of char-

acters whizzing around in electric wheelchairs. Some seemed aged and

disabled, others too obese to walk; a good number seem merely to prefer

them to other modes of conveyance.

Rumors circulate before the case gets started: K. Michael Moore, the

presiding judge, who lives in Miami, hated Fort Pierce; he wanted to

rush the trial in order to start his summer vacation; Moore is extremely

conservative but fair; he almost automatically hands out maximum sen-

tences; John Ashcroft, then attorney general of the United States, had re-

quested weekly updates about the case; a feather-assumed to be a kind

of mafiosi-style warning- was reportedly left at the local FBI office. None of these rumors was verifiable.

What was ascertainable, however, was the contrast between the de-

l'c nse and prosecution. On the right side of the courtroom, the Civil

Ri ghts Division of the United States Department of Justice was repre-

.1c nted by three prosecutors, Daniel Velez, a goateed, amicable-looking

former assistant district attorney from Brooklyn; Adrianna Vicco, an

uccrbic, no-nonsense former district attorney from Queens; and Andrew

I luang, a quick and eager assistant, new to the Justice Department. All

three attorneys were focused, tidy, and self-assured, a modern, multira-

l t:d, updated version ofG-men I'd seen all my life in movies and books.

A blond twenty-eight-year-old paralegal named Amy with very

t. tn ned, strong tennis arms assisted them. Amy had a satchel with a De-

l'·' ''ment of Justice patch on it featuring a slogan in Latin that looked

lt kl' something from a superhero cartoon. When the attorneys needed an

ool d ca se for a legal citation, it was Amy's job to sift through the dozens

ol ttnmaculately organized plastic bins, each bearing hundreds of well-

'' '· 'n ged, smartly labeled folders .

T he lead strategist for the defense, representing El Diablo, was

ln.,q uin Perez, a handsome Miami Cuban in his fifties with thoughtful

'' ~. :t full head of lightly gelled black hair, and a flair for stylish suits.

I';"''· had a history of representing high-level Colombian drug dealers

66 NOB O D I ES

fighting extradition to the United States. He also happened to represent

Carlos Castano, the notorious head of the Colombian paramilitaries,

who are reported to kill around two thousand people each year.

His colleague, representing Juan Ramos, was another Miami Cuban

named Nelson Rodrlguez-Varela. A third attorney, Alfredo Horta, a

Mexican from Orlando, represented the Ramoses' cousin Jose Luis. He

had never tried a federal case before. In contrast to their opponents'

meticulously organized library, the defense lugged in a few bruised

cardboard boxes, haphazardly crammed with folders and loose papers.

A fter the first day of court, I returned to the Radisson Hot~ I, just north of town. I was about to go for a run on the beach when m the eleva-

tor I bumped into Rodriguez-Varela. I'd introduced myself to both sides

during the lunch recess, and the government lawyers had politely told

me they were forbidden to discuss the case during the trial. Rodrlguez-

Varela, on the other hand, grinned and invited me to dinner, adding,

"Hey! You should go running with Joaquin! He's about to go !" Mo-

ments later, I found myself running down the beach with Perez.

He was eager to discuss the case. He wasn't going to earn nearly the

amount of money he would make from his drug clients, he said, but

from a legal and even an anthropological point of view, he found the

case engaging nevertheless. "I mean, slavery-it's exciting, right? It's

sort of sensational! It raises a lot of issues." He compared the Ramoses to

his usual clients. "When it's like, 'Okay, you got caught sitting on fifty

kilos of coke,' or if they've shot someone and the corpse is the re, and

they're going, 'Oh, it was self-defense!' it's very ha rd to feel sor ry for

them. But here, it's not so clear-cut." Chugging along in the sand, he practiced his arguments for the jury.

The trial, he said, was clearly for show. Why else would the governme nt

bother with only three witnesses out of seven hundred workers em

ployed by the Ramoses? It was a bullshit case, stemming from the CIW'a

need to make headlines about slavery and the feds' need to seem proa

tive.

FLOR I DA 67

Perez laughed wryly at the idealistic pretensions of the Coalition of

Immokalee Workers. "I used to be very liberal. I worked for Florida

Legal Services in Liberty City," he said, referring to the African Ameri-

can slum in Miami famous in the eighties for rampant carjacking. "I was

like those people in the coalition, you know, 'Let's change the world!'"

He paused and smiled a little ruefully. "But you can't. You don't change

anything." In the end, he said, you had to look at the facts. The case was

really quite simple, he said. "They got the wrong guy."

For the first few days, the defense tried to paint the plaintiffs as dis-

gruntled employees, crybabies, in fact, who found orange picking too

difficult and ran off to avoid paying legitimate debts. The alleged slaves

didn't always shine in the courtroom. Their shyness and fear sometimes

seemed to read as indifference or vagueness.

Rodriguez-Varela volleyed effectively with Hernandez, the youngest

of the witnesses, when he grilled him about his expectations oflife in the

United States. "Was it a possibility in your mind," he inquired, "that

things here were free?" Had the witness felt he simply deserved to come

to America and be given free food, work equipment, and housing, even

though he had no experience whatsoever picking oranges? Why should

a boss be willing to give him all these things? Rodrfguez-Va rela then

;tsked Hernandez if he had ever paid his thousand-dollar debt for the

rid e from Arizona. The witness admitted that he had not. By the time

I lernandez left the stand, it seemed plausible that he'd possibly pan-

dered to an overeager prosecution, overstating his case for a green card.

The defense also managed to bar several pieces of evidence as

hea rsay-things the Ramoses had not actually said but rather utterances

I hci r workers had heard from others. It eventually became clear that the

Ramoses had never, in fact, actually harmed any of the witnesses . It also

hl'ca me quite evident that had the workers wanted to "escape" at any

11111e-as they eventually would do-all they had to do was walk out the

' I no r to the highway nearby. No guns had been drawn, no bars had been

l'l aced over the windows. Was this really slavery?

NOBODIES 68

. the beach, I met up with the Each night, after mal and a run ~n . d casual clothes, flowered

h b th lawyers 1anc1e Cubans. After ours, o W f h d a drink at the hotel bar,

h' d weatpants eo ten a guayabera s lrts, an s . II d Nora's Ribs. Rodriguez-Varela, a then went to a local restaurant ca \ f a guy with an amiable,

tall, boisterous, light-skinned, frat- o~ so~~o John , he asked me one chubby face, liked to tell jokeds a:~ ~~n~;{? It':y:eally ~ot so badl" When

. ht "Have you ever fucke a a g . f h' mg · . h d the ume o IS sec- his wife called on the cell phone ev~ry mg t arhotuyn buoyant grin and an-

. h ld break mto a naug , ond gin and tome, e wou d ke or drink would

. .,, Perez who oes not smo , swer, "Hey, httle mamz. , h' . d as clearly taken up with the

d resent but IS mm w

smile an try to seem~ , ld me he hadn't slept the night before. case. On several occasiOnS he to . was Garcia Orozco. He

. , · mportant Witness The prosecutiOns most I . h r dded as

d l k' nauseous with fear, his eyes eavy- I , took the stan oo mg . h b • el'ther Speaking through a

h d , I t the mg t eiore, . though he a n t ~ ep . h k b k ·,n Mexico but refused even after

h d bed h1s s ac ac · translator, e escn . h During his entire test!· . . name his ometown.

repeated questtOnmg to H' jaw muscle stuck out he d id not once look at the Ramoses. IS mony,

like a walnut. . t witness was the van driver, h rosecution's next most unportan

T e p ' I k d a bit like the late actor Ernest Borg- J~se Martinez. Marnn~:rdo;o~king. A regular guy's regular guy wh~'d mne-sweet, lovable, ' 'fi d that he had m n

f n Marunez testt e been working since the age\o ;eve , ty-four years worked seven day

d I. d · I moka ee 10r twen ' kids, ha tve m m II d Zapateria El Oasis, selling shoes,

week and ran a general store ca e ' . a , . nd tickets for his van service. COs, cassettes, belts, clothmg, a . h ck Martinez identified th

When it came time to descnbe t e atta , h ho'd said . r t Ramiro Ramos as t e one w I

three defendants, smg mg ou . \e, He r . f b' h who's takmg our peop .

"You're the fuckmg so~ o a . ttc b' h inimized the pistol blow I h m crymg a It, t en m

countedtheassauton I '. f l"h 'd "It)'ustfeltlikefingerstouch "N . sn't pam u , e sal .

to his face. o, It wa h' h . I' e to the bridge of his no~ • . , He showed the scar from IS atr m mgme.

and another one on his lip. . . throughout the trial. Rami s made bad Impressions .

hadT:: ~:::~y tendency to crack his knuckles loudly, then Sit

FLOR I DA 69

with his fingers laced behind his neck, glowering impassively. Juan sim-

ply looked unkempt, as if he was on a bender. Ramiro had a tendency to

seethe, smirk, and roll his eyes at testimony he found dubious. When

Martinez started to cry, Ramiro made a big show of suppressing a laugh

and turning to the ceiling, as if unable to stand such blatant foolery.

The defense ultimately attempted to prove that the citrus industry,

not the Ramos family, should be on trial. Perez called Jack Mendiburo to

the stand. Mendiburo, a tall, stalwart man, was the safety, labor, and en-

viro nmental compliance manager for Consolidated Citrus. Consoli-

dated, the largest citrus grower in the state, owns 55,000 acres of citrus groves and produces 30 percent of the state's crop. The Ramoses had

worked for the company for years. Mendiburo testified that in May

2000, after accounts of the attack upon Jose Martinez were published, the company became concerned about the Ramoses' "issues with labor."

To discover whether the accounts had any merit, Mendiburo went out to

1 he fields, pulled about a dozen of Ramiro's workers aside, and asked

1h em if they were being treated okay. Although one of the workers,

Reube n Rivera, answered that he wasn't being paid, that he was only

w· tting deeper into debt, Mendiburo concluded that there was no cause

ltlr concern. The Ramoses remained in company employ.

Perez asked Mendiburo to describe how pickers were paid .

M(· ndiburo described an elaborate system in which paychecks were

111:1 de out to the workers themselves but only after passing through an

11 rount held by the Ramoses. The Ramoses, however, were legally and

11 rhnically unable to access the account. Nevertheless, Mendiburo em-

ph.lsized that his company was not the employer of the pickers. When

I' rcz asked to what extent the company fe lt responsible for the work-

' 1 ~. Mend iburo answered that Consolidated was reluctant even to use

1o 1111 s like "co-employer" when referring to its rel ationship with orange

111• kns . Explaining further, he said, "It would bring to our company • 11. 1in dynamics that we do not want."

Ncxt, Rodriguez-Varela called Rich Hetherton to the stand. Hether-

'" was the director of Human Resources at Lykes Brothers, one of

lo" 1da's largest citrus growers after Consolidated . Lykes Brothers had I "wo rked with the Ramos brothers for years. Rodriguez-Varela asked

70 NOBODIES

him if his company owned the groves. H etherton affirmed that this was

correct. Rodriguez-Varela next asked Hetherton if the pickers who har-

vested the oranges for his company were his employees. Hetherton de-

nied that this was so.

A: We don't employ those people.

Q: Technically you don't, but they are in your groves all day picking

fruit?

A: Yes.

Q: They are on your property picking fruit from your tree?

A: That's correct.

Q: They are loading oranges into containers that are shipped to compa-

nies that process fruit based on your contractor?

A: That's correct.

Q: So it is your fruit, it is your worker, too, isn't he?

A: No, he is not my worker.

Q: Because there's a piece of paper that says he is provided by a contrac-

tor? That's it, right?

A: Our relationship is with the contractor to provide workers.

Hetherton then described for Rodriguez-Varela a check-writing

process identical to Consolidated's, and Rodriguez-Varela asked him if

it wasn't strange for someone to write a check to someone who does

work that benefits them but then refuse to call that person an employee.

Hetherton said he really didn't know.

During both witnesses' testimony, Judge Moore leaned forward. It was the first time during the entire trial that he seemed engaged and in-

terested. Indeed, the testimony of the growers' employees seemed mo-

men to us. I remembered the moment, a few days earlier, when Ramiro, now

looking very small and scared, passed by me outside the court when no

one was looking and shyly asked me in a surprisingly small, squeaky

voice, "What do you think they will do? Do you think they will find m

guilty?" It was hard to look at him and his brother after the growers' te

FLOR I DA 71

timony and feel the same outrage I'd felt earlier. El Diablo and his

brother looked like shrimps, two guys about five feet three inches tall,

dressed in cheap, gray flannel pants, white polyester shirts, and inexpen- sive black fake-dress tennis shoes.

In a sidebar, the defense approached the bench and asked Judge

Moore to dismiss the charges on the ground that the prosecution of the

Ramoses was selective and arbitrary. As Perez asked, "Do you not think

for one moment, you know, that the growers don 't know what's going

on? ... Everyone knows that somebody has to buffer them."

The judge considered th e request but answered, "That's the way the

whole system works. I'm not defending it. You come up with proof of

that, and maybe you can ta lk to the U.S . attorney's office about it and ex-

pose the whole system for what it's about." The motion was denied.

BY the end of ~he trial, the government's case had become impreg- nable. When It came out that of 680 Alien Registration Numbers

used by the Ramoses for payroll and Social Security documentation, ex-

actly 10 were correct, you could almost hear the defendants hitting the

mat on the charge of harboring aliens . After Jose Martinez's testimony

about being attacked by the Ramoses while trying to conduct his busi-

ness, it seemed pretty inarguable that use of a deadly weapon and inter-

f(: rence with interstate commerce had been proven. When Garda

< )rozco, Sanchez, and Hernandez took the stand, they were credible

mo ugh. Never mind the rumors of violent conduct the judge didn't

.t il ow; the direct verba l threats established the climate of fear necessary '"prove forced servitude.

T he Ramoses were found guilty on fifteen of sixteen counts and sen-

lnlCed to twelve years; their cousin Jose Luis was sentenced to ten. They

were also ordered to surrender $3 million in company and personal pt operty. No one had expected anything so absolute. After the sentences

were pronounced, Judge Moore, without excusing the Ramoses' actions,

W ntl y admonished the prosecutors not to devote the lion's share of their

11 ' ources to the "occasional case that we see from time to time that this

NOBOO!ES 72

case represents" but, rather, to recognize that "others at a higher level of

the fruit-picking industry seem complicit in one way or another with

how these activities occur." Juan and Ramiro Ramos were given five minutes to cry and remove

their belts, watches, wedding bands, and cash. They handed them over

and kissed their wives and children good-bye before being cuffed and

led out of the courtroom. Rodriguez-Varela shook his head and dried a

tear. He told me, "You never get used to that. I don't care how many

times you see it." Perez had already flown back to Miami to start the

next case. Yet another defense associate, Lorenzo Palomares, moved in

to handle the seizure of the Ramoses' bank accounts and properties.

Rodriguez-Varela couldn't stand it. He asked me for a ride back to the

hotel. As we left the courthouse parking lot, we passed El Diablo's wife,

Alici a. She held her husband's belt in front of her, looking a little like

Lady Macbeth, stunned, numb, sleepwalking. The sight of her launched

Rodriguez-Varela into a full-out tantrum. He punched the dash of my

car while fulminating against the citrus industry and the government.

"What a bunch of bullshit! The whole thing-these guys, Juan,

Ramiro--they wouldn't have had a problem except for that stupid inci-

dent on Highway 27!"

I n March 2003, the Coalition oflmmokalee Workers was honored with

the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. In February

2005, it received a letter from FBI director Robert Mueller thanking it

for its assistance with the agencfs antislavery efforts. The coalition ha s

been invited to participate in training seminars for FBI agents and local

law enforcement agents around the country. But perhaps most impor-

tant, it has begun to convince major corporations that by and large-at

least, when they're aware of it-the American public prefers not to buy

goods produced with slave labor, or anything like it. In March 2005, Yum! Brands agreed to the coalition's demands in re

turn for an end to the four-year boycott of Taco Bell restaurants. Th

boycott, ignored at first by company officials, had gained widespread

FLORIDA 73

support from church organizations, former resident . and the Student-Farmworker Alliance- p Jtmmy Carter, campus-based movement E 11 a group that spearheaded the

· ventua y the p t I . ishment of Taco Bell ro ests resu ted tn the ban-

restaurants and products from twe t Yum! Brands not on! d . n y-two schools.

Y agree to commtt t · per pound directly to th I . o paymg an extra penny

e wor (ers who ptck th · that will nearly double th . k ' . etr tomatoes-a move

e pte ers wages-tt 1 with the 1· · d a so consented to work

coa tttOn to evelop and enf. for its Florida tomato sup I' N or~e ~ tough new code of conduct h

p ters. egottattons are under wa b . . oped that before the end f 2007 y y, ut tt ts

0 , urn! Brands will h rest of its restaurant chains-KFC A announce t at the ver's, and Pizza Hut- will . . , ~W Restaurants, Long John Sil-

. parttctpate m the top-to-bottom " b " poltcy to help bolster farm workers' . h d pay- ack ng ts an wages.

Soon after the boycott's end the 1' . . McDonald's asking th h . , rcol a Jtton and tts partners took aim at

, e c ain to w low T B 11' I responded by partnering with the Florida ;rc~t a:dsV~;~~ ~c~onal~'s tiOn, or FFV A-a powerful growers' lobb . . a e ssocta- tions firm to counter . bl' y-and hmng a public rela-

negattve pu tc sentiment M D ' commissioned a study that ro d h r . c onald s then

1 ' un t at tarmwo k · Fl · fact, very well paid and . r ers In onda are, in

• recetve as much as eighteen dollars an h I Unfortunately for McDonald 's ublic rei . our.

suppliers, Ag-Mart Farms Fl 'd ; I attons efforts, one of their , on a s argest gro f

hired Abel Cuello the I b wer o . grape tomatoes, , a or contractor convicted of I .

media reports surfaced th t h b . savery m 1999. As a e was ack In bu . ll . th at he continued to expl 't h' k Siness, a egattons arose

ot ts wor ers Accord . [; vocate Greg Schellt'n 'If . mg to arm worker ad-

an e-mat rom 2006 "S dl . was not rehabilitated in[. d I . , a y, tt appears that Cuello

e era pnson. Last we k ' poke with a group of k f e , our outreach worker . wor ers rom southern M . h .

ttved in Immokalee Each f h extco w o had JUSt ar- . o t em owed a sub t . I d b

th e cost of being smuggl d. f . s antta e t to Cuello for e tn rom Mextco As h h d d .

p• ·o nage conviction Cuello h d I d h . e a one pnor to his ' a P ace t e wo k ·

I ra il er that he controlled a d . hh ld r ers tn an overcrowded ' n wtt e most of th k •

to recoup the smuggling debt." e wor ers paychecks

In 2006, grower Frank John h Mc Donald ' I b . s, t e 2004 chairman of the FFVA s a or-compliance d ' partner, rna e news when one of his

NOBODIES 74

vans after investigation by the Coalition of labor contractors, Ron E ' . nd drug charges for

k convicted on consptracy a Immokalee Wor ers, was . . 1 'th crack cocaine, alcohol,

. 1 bl k men mto hts emp oy WI . lunng home ess ac h d h' ed Evans said the tssue

. J h whose Tater Farms a tr , and ctgarettes. o ns, d' "I'd like to think our opera-

. 11 bl n by the me ta. had been typtea y over ow d I think Ron Evans is an above-average tion is a little above average, an

crew leader," Johns said. . '12007 McDonald's announced that h 1 months later, tn Apn ' · k d W en, on y . $13 4 '11' on in mostly profit-ltn e

. k ' uld recetve · mt 1 . CEO Jtm S mner wo '1 d Days before the coalition and

. bl' trage bot e over. compensatton, pu JC ou d s gathered for a huge

d eligion-base partner . . its student-group an r d . n Oak Brook, IlltnOIS,

ld' cor orate hea quarters t march on McDona s p d articipate in a program nearly the company cracked and agree to p

identical to Taco Bell's. h r workers' victories is the way · ·fi ntaboutt e1arm

What is most stgm ca the notion that state or federal governmen· in which they leapfrog over k fl k' g after farm workers on

1 er up to thetas o . oo tn tal efforts are any ong h fF t Food Nation and a long

'1 A E . Schlosser aut oro as I American SOl · s nc ' . . New York. Times editori

. . orter would wnte m a time coahtlon supp ' h r '1 f government to protect

. . b t "T e 1a1 ure o about the vtctonous oycot: k . the United States has

ke st and most impovenshed wor ers tn

wea , · and consumers.

the job to corporations . . . turned out to be far mor d

h J't' n's actiVISt taCtiCS In the en 't e coa I to ld b By ski\lful\y educating

h d · · ed they cou e. fective than I a tmagtn f ts with sixth-grade

. r . 1 all groupo peasan motivating a 1atr Y sm . l d force change

d ake nattona news an they had manage to m . h d · d "Who cares

h Wh o if not them? As Bemtez a sat ,

t e system. b h of pelagatos?"

happens to a unc . h y I Brands will affect only about one The agreement wtt um. . h M Donald's adds another

k d the agreement wtt c sand wor ers, an d fi hundred workers oul h d d Two thousan ve

sand to fifteen un re . . f kers in the United Still million and a half or so -:ntgranTt harmwr~rsome who question w

f m vtctory. ere a clearly a long way ro 1' . re anything more than the efforts of groups such as the coa ttton a

bolic.

FLORIDA 75

The most hopeful way, perhaps, to view the coalition's gains is not by

measuring their material impact, but in asking what they mean for the

future of America's worst-paid, least-protected workers. When in the

1960s African Americans successfully boycotted the segregationist poli- cies of the Montgomery, Alabama, public bus system, the victory didn't

trigger an instant transformation of black Americans' material circum-

stances. The significance of the victory, of course, was the birth of the

civil rights movement and the sea change in public attitudes it heralded:

Black citizens had triumphed over a white-owned company, thereby

marking the beginning of the end of generations of systematic abuse and

ex ploitation. With luck, the coalition's protests and the beginning of an

ultimately positive corporate response might be the dawning of wide-

~ pread acceptance-that general conditions in the fields of Florida are

untenable, and that labor relations in American agriculture are an em-

barrassment to modern notions of human rights.

Since leaving the Ramoses' employ, Garcia Orozco, Hernandez, and Sanchez have worked in Georgia, South Carolina, Missouri, Indi- tl ll . l , and Kentucky. Today they share a tidy one-bedroom apartment in

.1 wo rking-class neighborhood in Florida lined with palm trees and live

1111 ks . Inside the doorway are several pairs of cowboy boots, polished and hiiH iing in a row. A lime-green stuffed dog sits on top of the TV, be-

l 11 t'l' ll the rabbit ears. In the corner are a set of keyboards and a guitar.

I 1!1 1 ht' stove are pots and pans filled with Mexican, Chinese, and Italian

lo•u l -the result of a foray into international cuisine.

l 'ht' three men relax in the living room. Garcia Orozco wears a long-

''' 1 t·• l striped shirt, white jeans, and cowhide boots. Sanchez is wearing IIIII\ shoes, and Hernandez strums a guitar. The three have found jobs

1 1 11 1rniture warehouse. (Since the trial, in exchange for cooperating

lilt 1111' prosecution, they have received papers allowing them to work

!111 l lnited States.) Garda Orozco says that he likes his job. He has

1111 oli o drive a forklift, which he enjoys, and his bosses never tell him

'"""' hurry up. "I work like a normal person, and they treat me like

'"''·" person." He works from two in the afternoon until eleven or

76 NOBODIES

midnight and is earning enough to call home frequently and send

money to his family to buy food and medicine for his sick son.

Hanging from a mirror is a commemorative ID pass that Garcia

Orozco wore at a recent march with the Coalition oflmmokalee Work-

ers. He's been to several protests, including a road trip to Taco Bell head-

quarters in Irvine, California. He likes them. "I get to talk to people

who've been through what we went through," he said of the coalition

marchers. "You know, thank God. Because if they hadn't done any-

thing, we wouldn't be free right now, and we wouldn't be here." All

three men hope to become more involved with the coalition, but

whether that's possible depends on money and work opportunities. Most

likely, they'll follow the summer watermelon harvest through Florida,

Georgia, and Missouri, then return to Florida.

One contribution Hernandez has already made to the coalition is a

corrido, a type of Mexican folksong that usually tells tales of heroism and

courage. In a note to the coalition, he wrote, "This ballad is about what

happened to us. I hope you all like it. I'll be there soon to sing you all the

song."

I'm going to tell, sefiores, the story of a p;·eat friend.

He was called Rafael Solis Hernandez and came from Campeche.

He came to the United States to seek his fortune.

One day, the twentieth of February, he consoled his wife,

"Don't cry, I love you, you are the owner of my soul.

I'm leaving, but I'll be back soon, and you won't be lacking in money."

A famous coyote recommended by many

Crossed all of them over the mountains, through the pasture lands,

And once in Arizona, distributed them alt over.

In Lake Placid in Florida, his boss awaited him.

He promised to give them wor~ but he never paid them.

He treated them like slaves, and took everything from their checks.

FLORIDA

T~ey ate famous gunmen, the kind who kill and bury, Wzth. ~umerous crimes that they're now paying for Awamng their punishment in the county jail.

Ramiro Ramos is the name of the cruelest one I've ever known. I hope that one day in prison, they sing him my ballad

just to remind him that in his court I was a witness.

Garcia Orozco S/ h d H , ' anc ez, an ernandez are to tht's day I

talk b h R re uctant to a out t e amoses, fearing that it might be taken as a p .

Hernandez said "Y k , rovocatton. . ' ou now, I m a pretty cocky guy. I like to 'oke <!round a lot. But I'm scared. I'm still h . . h J

. av ing ntg tmares about u com mg after me with machetes and stuff. I' b I . g ys I ld · m gonna e ookmg ove s lou er for the rest of my life." r my

Garda Orozco looked f h 'trauma ' " H . up rom t e TV, concurring. "That's called

. . e contmued. "When you're in the kind of situatio were tn, you feel like the world has ended A d ' n we I 'd . ' . n once you re back here o

I. le outst e-It shard to explain. Everything's different now. It was lik: wm mg out of the darkness into the light Just ima . . horn. That's what it's I 'I " . gme If you were re-

• 1 <e.

77

Tom

When I published an article telling the story of Garda Orozco and his friends, its subtitle was: "Does Slavery Exist in Amer-ica?" It might seem strange to ask. After all, a court of law had found the

Hamoses guilty of holding people in involuntary servitude. But even

,aficr thinking about the subject for two years, I felt slightly hesitant

.1hou t using the word slavery. Wouldn't it be just as appropriate to say

t1~.11 Ga rda Orozco and his friends had simply been intimidated, threat- ' ll <' d, and unpaid for a few weeks' work?

The answer to my question, I would eventually realize, is no.

T he means by which tribes, ruling elites, religions, kingdoms, and

lo f.\1\ la t ures justified, arranged, codified, and promulgated slavery have

1 11 wd with almost infinite complexity. Likewise, the quality of life and

.j, ~:~~'l' of oppression for those enslaved have varied immensely. Some Ill' <'\ wo rked full-time, constantly on call, every moment of their lives,

• 1 y calorie's worth of productive effort given over to their masters.

'hlwr\ worked part-time, a few months per year, for their master, the

' ' 111' the year for themselves. Slaves working the mines and farms of

80 NOBODIES

ancient Rome Jed lives of donkey-level drudgery, limping, wounded,

and suppurating in heavy chains till early death. In other cultu~es, no-

tably African, slaves were treated much like members ofth~ family th~t

owned them. Sometimes, such slaves even married into their new fmm-

lies.

In many societies, slaves were allowed to own businesses, property,

and even other slaves. In others, terms of bondage were limited to three,

five, seven years. In some settings, slaves were occasionally granted far

more power than average private citizens, given command of armies

and governmental departments to run like their own private fiefdoms.

Eunuch mandarins in China, for example, were enormously powerful,

highly educated, and unleashed by preeminent warlords to rule over

and humiliate enemy chieftains.

Despite these many variations, what all forms of slavery share, in-

cluding that of Garda Orozco and his friends, is the temporary or

permanent condition of having one's rights and one's person utterly con-

h d " I " ? trolled by another. W at oes utter y mean. As Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson found, most slave owners

in most societies that had slaves treated them better rather than worse.

After all, slaves were property. It was better to keep them al.ive and

happy and useful (for labor, for sex, for abusing at some later time, for

whatever) than to have them be sick, miserable, and dangerous. Regard-

less, how well or badly a slave is treated does little to alter the fact that

introducing nonfree entities into a free polity based on equal rights, such

as the United States, is a radical, transformative alteration.

When I first began to write this book, I realized that achieving even

a general understanding of the intricacies and dynamics of thousands of

years of slavery would require an immense sifting through the thou

sands of books and opinions about the subject. There would have be n

no way to do so with any thoroughness or objectivity, so I decided to hir

a research assistant. I posted a notice at the Columbia School ofJournal

ism and, in the end, hired three recent graduates, each on a part-tim

basis. It was my first experience in almost twenty years with managinJI

employees. (The last employee I'd had was in the 1980s, when I had

house painting company. His name was Tom. He wasn't a great paint er

T 0 M 81

One mo~ning he s.howed up to work and confessed to me that he'd spent the previous evemng drunkenly making out with my girlfriend. I fired hun.)

My researchers and I got along quite well, I like to think. I realized

that there were better jobs than working for me for fifteen dollars an

hour, one a~d ~half days a week, and partly to compensate them, partly out of g.enume.mterest in their ideas, I offered any assistance they might

want. With stones, pitches, and career strategizing. For this, I expected a

certam amount of loyalty. By and large, I got it, and to this day we re- main friends.

~ut there was a moment when our mutual happiness took a littl e dip. Dunng the course of an otherwise overwhelmingly positive work rela-

tionship, two of my researchers and I found ourselves in the middle of

w~at I la~er realized must be one of the occasional, ordinary, and in- evitable disappointments that pop up between employers and employees.

I was traveling a lot, fourteen time zones away, to the island of

Saipan, reporting on what would be the third part of this book. And

wddenly, I cou ldn't get my employees to do what I wanted them to do.

It felt to me lik e they were reneging on a promise. A month came and

wcn.t. I e-mailed them a few times, asking how things were going, but

rl'cetved only vague answers. Six weeks passed. I cleared my throat-as

well as one can do over the Internet and by answering machine. Noth- Ing . By the time six weeks became eight weeks, I was furious.

Eventually, I reached the point where our employment situation be-

1 omcs emotional-at least for me. I undoubtedly would have lashed out

Il l th em in some way-even an unlawful way-if I could have. At the

vny least, I would have fired them for sure, and perhaps, if asked by some

I Ill lire employer about them, I would have given them poor references.

What was amusing and enlightening for me was to see that there I 11

' " • the supposed ly nice guy writing a book about slavery, social justice, ' 1111

1 so on-yet I was as capable as any employer of becoming murder- 11111 ly pissed off.

In a different time and place, what might I have done to punish my 11

11 ployees? Ifi were a nobleman or a high priest, assigned by God to oc- •llpy my station in life, and they were mere lackeys, serfs, disposable

82 NOBODIES

wretches protected by nothing but the vagaries of my whim, would I

have resisted the urge to chop off a finger as a little reminder that things

go better for people who don't break promises to me? If they had come

from a class of people-Christians, Muslims, Belgians, barbarians, war

captives, debtors, red-haired people, people with big ears-deigned be-

neath me by fate, circumstance, or local law-would I have had the

slightest hesitation about punishing them?

What kept me from killing my employees in cold blood was more

than me being a nice guy. It was the consequences I would have faced in

modern America ifl hadn't acted like one. Even if I'd just chopped off

one finger, the little ingrates could have gone and squealed to the police.

They'd have run off and complained to their families. Even ifl went on

the lam, word would get around the publishing world that I was sick,

dangerous, scary, and mean-and criminal. I would discover that I

couldn't get work anymore. I'd be ruined in my community. And then

I'd be arrested.

If it sounds like a far-fetched scenario to invent, it's not. This kind of

treatment of workers by employers was the norm for most people, most

jobs, most workers, throughout history. What's far-fetched, when viewed

against the backdrop of time, is the fact that modern employers are re-

quired to play by the same human-rights rules as their employees.

Before the advent of modern industrial capitalism, laborers in their

physical person-not labor itself-were the perceived commodity. Be-

fore, during, and even after slavery, in Europe and in the Un ited States,

early industrial labor relations between nonslave workers and their em-

ployers were appalling. As Ted Nace wrote in Gangs of America, a his-

tory of modern corporate evolution, workers in England's industrial

revolution toiled for eighty hours a week. What spare time remai n d

was often spent under duress in church, learning the virtues of produ

tivity under the instruction of teachers and clergy hired by workers' em

ployers to keep employees in line. If workers didn't want to spend thl'ir

"free time" being told what to do and where to be, they would be denlt

with in the prisons, workhouses, and orphanages with which most laq,

employers had relationships. Troublemakers were taken care of. In t

American colonies, the idea of "free labor" was pathetically unfree 1,

T 0 M 83

modern standards in most countries of h 1843 that American courts sto ed t .e .world. It wasn't even until employees. PP permm~ng employers to beat their

Somehow, between the bad old da d completed the transitJ'on fi ys an now, American workers

· rom peons top fi the highest bidders- Th ersons, ree to sell their hours to

or not. e employer bu s 1 ' and labor, and everything 1 . 1'c . y on y a workers time

e se In IJe remams the What happened? ' property of the worker.

What happened was a reappraisal of hum . workplace rights that . . an nghts, freedom, and

contmues to this day L workers to change J'obs h h . aws were passed allowing

w en t ey wanted to t · · · pensated at standard rates t b 'd ' o JOin unJOns, to be com-

' 0 e pa1 extra fort' week. Still more laws w d ' Jme over forty hours a

ere passe codifyin d ]' .. employers to interfere with work '' fif h ~an. lmltlng the right of l 1 ers o -t e-Jobhves k ' 1 eve -at least to tr11 t 1 1 h . 'see mg a ways to ' ·.r o eve -t e play~n fi ld b their employers. Laws(-; b d g e etween workers and

or a e employers to d' . . ers for reasons of famil I l' . lscnm~nate against work-

y, cu ture, re 1g10n dre l litical orientation-an ' ss, sexua preferences, po-

y reason an employer co ld person differently from another u use to try to treat one

T . he res~lt of all these laws, naturally resented b

warranted Intrusions upon th . c d y employers as un- c · err 1ree om was the . lOr workers . Freedom t d . . ' creation of freedom

0 spen tune With th · [: ·1· attend school or church t . h . eJr ami Jes, to read, learn, . ' o enJoy t e frUits of lab h .

Side of work-a sense of If If . or-to ave a hfe out- se , a se , penod

These laws have come a lon . structure of what we call " d g way .~o cr~ate the psychosocial infra-

mo ern, free societ A h ~ peech and freedom of asse bl . . y. s muc as freedom of

m y, It IS workplace r I h . !'SSence of modern life B . . u es t at provide the

. ut to Jmagme that sim I b hl'en banned made 'll I d p y ecause slavery has

' I ega an uncommon the d I . o l ~ war between employe d k ' un er ymg, organic tug-

rs an wor ers has . .I way, is nai've. gone away or will ever go

Recently, in The New York Review of B . i/, c Leviathan" b s· ooks, an article called "Inside

y lmon Head de 'b d h Mart's senior management to fl ~·n he t e formula used by Wal- i/)('ir workforce: orce Jg er levels of productivity from

84 NOBODIES

When deciding how many workers to employ, Wal-Mart manage-

ment relies on a formula guaranteeing that the growth of the labor

budget will lag behind the growth in store sales, so that every year

there will be more work for each employee to do. In her paper "The

Quality of Work at Wal-Mart," presented at the conference in Santa

Barbara, Ellen Rosen of the Women's Studies Research Center at

Brandeis described in detail how this squeeze on labor works. Each

year Wal-Mart provides its store managers with a "preferred bud-

get" for employment, which would allow managers to staff their

stores at adequate levels. But the actual budget imposed on the store

managers always falls short of the preferred budget, so that most

Wal-Mart stores are permanently understaffed. The gap between

the preferred and actual budgets gives store managers an idea of

how much extra work they must try to extrac t from their workforce.

The intuitive legal solution would be for managers to ask workers to

work extra hours. But such a solution would require paying overtime.

And in fact, Rosen found, managers who let their workers work more

than forty hours per week are guilty of a company "offense" and can be

terminated. As a result, managers are forced to connive with their work-

ers so they can put in extra hours off the clock.

Such practices fall considerably short of slavery or even physical

abuse. Yet it's fascinating to observe: here is a wildly profitable company

that has already killed off much of its competition but that nevertheless

continually seeks to further its gains, even if it means that some of its

practices will violate the bounds oflegality. I fit were not for the law stat-

ing that workers logging more than forty hours a week are enti tled to

higher overtime pay, the company would surely become more brazen in

its tactics.

I used to think of such greed and senseless aggression as evil. I now

see it to be the nature of power. It would be no more productive to gC'I

mad at water for being wet than it is to be shocked that power seeks to

enhance and justify itself.

In a country like the United States, where the rule of law is reliabl ,

T 0 M 85

if imperfect, most kinds of power I' . -re Igwus ·

are held in check If 'economic, and political- . someone does somethin .

counterforce to punish h. h g agamst the Ia w, there is a Hn or er and to corr 1 h b I .

ward what we as a . h a t e e 1avJor back to- ' society, ave deemed f.

the world of globalization h d pre erable. But what about in ' w ere su denly we ha

and businesses with First nr ld . ve people, employers, vvor money and

workers f~om other countries? power meeting up with Americans ha h

ve spent t ree centuries fi htin . and legislating for a relati 1 g g, argumg, debating ve Y peaceable playi fi ld . . ' country. But sud de 1 . h ng e WJthm their own

n y, Ill t e era of globaliz . vast workforces in other c . . atwn, employers have found

ountnes With few lab . h expectations. It's an all . . or ng ts and lower wage

unng temptatiOn C 11 · whatever you want· as . a It profit, opportunity or

. ' consumers, as em lo . ' want access to the fruit f h p yers, we In the First World

. s o t ese weaker peo 1 A d 'f their countries to do b . . p e. n I we can't go to

usmess wnh them? We'll b . h nng t em to ours.