by Chris Hedges
Immokalee is a town filled largely with desperately poor single men. Among their few diversions are local bars such as the Chile Caliente, where their meager pay evaporates. Bar owners bring in women from Miami and Fort Myers by van on the weekends to dance with patrons for $5 a dance. The night Joe and I are at the Chile Caliente, the women, in tight shorts, grind in high heels all the way down to the floor and up again like seasoned strippers. The men can flirt with the women as long as they buy them the bar’s overpriced drinks, of which the women get a cut from the house. The height of the harvesting season in the winter sees two or three brothels open up in dilapidated house or trailers.
Sexual exploitation parallels the exploitation in the fields. Clients at the seasonal brothels pay $20 to the brothel managers, or ticketeros, at the door. The patrons are handed a poker chip. They enter and wait on an old couch. They carry their chip to one of the prostitutes when it is their turn. The women keep condoms, a roll of paper towels, and lubricants next to them. They lie passively on mattresses sectioned off by sheets or plastic garbage bags. Clients get no more than ten, at most fifteen minutes. Most of the women are paid $7 to $10 per customer. The night’s wages are determined by the number of chips the women turn in at the end of the night to the ticketero. On a busy night they can have sex with twenty to thirty men. Some women are as young as fourteen, and Collier County Sheriff officials told us of women arrested as old as sixty. Many of the women were lured to the United States by promises of jobs in hotels, cleaning services, restaurants, or in private homes as domestics. The women are told they can pay off the smuggling fee, often as much as $2,000, once they start work. But the debt, magically, never diminishes. It is constantly augmented by charges for food and rent deducted by the brothel owners from the paychecks, as well as the cost of any abortions. The women are trapped, like enslaved field workers, in a cycle of endless exploitation.
Crew leaders, like the brothel owners, often swiftly pile on the debt in farm camps. Workers are charged for rent, food, wine, beer, and cigarettes, leaving them beholden to the crew leader until the debt is paid off, a near impossibility, since it is the crew leader who sets the inflated price, collects the wages, sells the purchased items to the workers, and keeps the accounts. Owners note down the mounting sums owed by workers, siphoning money each week from wages, supposedly to pay off a portion of the debt, a practice few of the workers can challenge since many cannot read and have no access to police or courts.
These debt peonage operations are often large. Miguel Flores of La Belle, Florida, and Sebastian Gomez, of Immokalee, were sentenced in 1997 to fifteen years each in federal prison on slavery, extortion, and firearms charges.34 They oversaw a workforce of four hundred men and women who harvested the fields in Florida and South Carolina. The workers, mostly indigenous Mexicans and Guatemalans, were forced to work ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week, for as little as $20 dollars a week, all under the supervision of armed guards. Those who attempted to escape were beaten, pistol-whipped, and at times shot. The crew leaders charged the workers exorbitant prices for food. Female workers, according to one victim, were routinely raped. Flores told the workers that if they ever spoke about their experiences he would cut out their tongues. This case was only one of the few that have been uncovered, due in part to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which convinced a dozen witnesses to come forward.35
Dancing in Immokalee.
More than a thousand men and women in the state of Florida have been freed by law enforcement over the past fifteen years from slave camps.36 There have been nine federal prosecutions for modern-day slavery since 1997. And there are other operations that law enforcement officials say remain undetected. Workers are routinely “sold” to crew leaders, cheated out of pay, beaten, or pistol-whipped if they complain or are sick. They are kept in gated enclosures at night, at times chained to prevent escape, and warned that their families in Mexico or Central America will pay the consequences if they flee and report the abuse to authorities. Child labor laws are often ignored. The body of an undocumented farm worker periodically appears on the side of the road or floating in one of the irrigation canals, a reminder to other workers of what happens when you attempt to challenge the bosses.
On the north side of Immokalee behind cyclone fencing are two rows of gray wooden huts, rented out to farm laborers for the inflated sum of $55 dollars a week per person. There is a collective shower house and laundry center, also painted slate gray, with a vending machine for soft drinks. Joe and I wander among the huts looking for a man known as Don Paquito, the nickname for José Hilário Medel. Workers eating lunch at the Guadalupe Center told us that he could usually be found outside the Monterrey bodega or sleeping under a mango tree near the rental shacks. A woman, who informs us she has “full-blown AIDS,” says the landlord who oversees the rental huts chased Don Paquito off the property a couple of hours before. She says he will be back. I give her my cell phone number. She calls later in the afternoon to say Don Paquito is with her.
Don Paquito is a soft-spoken, diminutive man less than five feet tall with a broad, darkened face and a wispy black moustache. He is missing several teeth. He is shabbily dressed. An old baseball cap sits backward on his head. His eyes are bloodshot. One of his worn sneakers is missing a lace. He is a gentle, broken soul whose life has been marked by horrible poverty, abuse, and tragedy. He has retreated into the fog of alcoholism. He was held as a slave, forced to work in Florida’s citrus and tomato fields, then trucked in the summer to the fields in North and South Carolina by members of the Navarrete family, who occupied a beige stucco house at 209 Seventh Street on the south side of town. Don Paquito and the other workers held by the Navarretes harvested on some of the largest farms in Florida, including Pacific Tomato Growers in Palmetto, and Immokalee-based Six L’s, a company controlled for four generations by the Lipman family. Six L’s packs and ships fifteen million twenty-five pound boxes of tomatoes a year from its huge warehouse outside Immokalee.37
Cesar Navarrete, at the time twenty-seven, and his brother, Geovanni Navarrete, then twenty-two, were the enforcers. Each received a twelve-year federal prison sentence in 2008 for enslaving Mexican and Guatemalan tomato pickers. They beat workers for disobedience if they tried to run away, if they were sick, or if they expressed a reluctance to work. The Navarrete brothers, who often carried pistols, routinely made the men work seven days a week. The family would pocket most and sometimes all of the men’s paychecks. The workers were charged $20 a week by the Navarretes to sleep inside locked sheds, vans, or an old furniture truck, where they had no choice but to urinate and defecate in a corner. Their beds were plywood boards on top of milk crates. They were charged for the cheap bottles of booze their overseers sold to them on credit. They were charged $50 a week for food, usually rice, beans, and stale tortillas, provided by the mother, Virginia Navarrete, who was also sentenced to jail. They could never repay their debts. And that was the idea.
“Yo estaba trabajando construcción en Naples”—“I was working construction in Naples,” Don Paquito says as we sit on a stoop. “Cesar Navarrete found me in Naples. He offered me a job and a place to live. I did not know I was being kidnapped. We were locked inside the trucks at night. They made us pay $5 to use the garden hose for a bath, and the water was always cold. We had money taken out of our pay for food, which wasn’t fit for animals, and for rent. It was horrible.”
He reaches into the pocket of his dirty trousers and carefully pulls out a worn plastic bag wrapped around his personal documents.
He hands me his Employment Authorization card with his name, José Hilário Medel, and his birth date, February 9, 1963. The card was given to him after he agreed to testify against the Navarrete family. His testimony, however, came with a stiff price. He was blacklisted by the crew leaders. No one would give him a job. He was threatened and for a while went into hiding. And he became destitute.
“The crew chiefs know me,” he says. “I don’t get work. I sleep o
utside, sometimes in front of the Catholic church on 9th Street with about eighteen other workers, sometimes . . . there.”
Don Paquito.
He points to two large mango trees in a lot surrounded by bottles, cans, plastic bags, and cardboard.
“I’ve been robbed three times,” he says, almost as an afterthought. “I don’t have anything anymore. I have a blanket. Sometimes the people in the rental park let me use their water. I eat one meal a day at the Guadalupe Center. I have five children in Mexico, in my village. But I haven’t seen them since I came here six years ago. I used to send them money so they could go to school.”
In November 2007 three workers punched their way through the ventilator hatch of the van where they were locked up at night. The men were free for the first time in two and a half years.
A week later, on November 21, 2007, the Collier County Sheriff’s Department mounted a pre-dawn raid on the house where the remaining eleven workers, including Don Paquito, were being held.
Most of the workers refused to testify, in part fearing reprisals against their families in Mexico or Central America. The workers, the Sheriff’s Office found, were covered with bruises and marks from repeated beatings. One of the workers had an open gash from a knife. Another had swollen and numb hands from having his arms chained behind him at night.
“They were treated like animals,” said Marysol Schloendorn, the victims’ advocate for the Collier County Sheriff’s Office. She took part in the raid:
There was garbage and feces in the yard where the workers lived. One worker had his feet chained to a pole. They were sleeping in old vehicles on boards. And when we went into the house and seized the family’s money, we saw the family was not rich, but they had televisions, running water, clean clothes, and trucks outside. Many of the workers did not want to be considered victims, especially as men. I think it comes from the macho culture. It was only as we did more and more interviews that they came to accept what had happened to them.
The indictment delivered against six members of the Navarrete family in Fort Myers by the U.S. District Court in 2008 sets out in clinical detail the abuses endured by the workers for nearly three years. The court estimated that the Navarrete family had stolen about $240,000 in wages from the laborers they held in captivity.38 In the section of the indictment titled “Overt Acts,” some of the charges against the family included:
•In or about May 2005, defendant Cesar Navarrete stopped paying his workers then told LMD and other workers that if they went to work for anyone else he would find them, beat them and their new employer.
•On an unknown date, at the Navarrete property in Collier County, Florida, defendant Cesar Navarrete grabbed AL and locked him in the back of a yellow truck for approximately four hours because AL wanted to leave his employment.
•On or about June 2007, in DeSoto County, Florida, on a morning when LMD did not want to work, defendants Cesar Navarrete and Geovanni Navarrete picked up LMD, threw him in the back of a truck, beat LMD in the body, head, and mouth, causing him injury and pain.
•In or about July or August 2007, in Walterboro, South Carolina, defendant Geovanni Navarrete, and others known to the grand jury, chained PSG’s feet together and to a pole to prevent him from leaving their employment.
•In or about September 2007, in North Carolina, defendant Geovanni Navarrete struck APS near his eye, causing him serious injury to this eye.
•In or about November 2007, defendant Cesar Navarrete, and others known to the grand jury, hit and kicked RRC because he left the Navarrete property without permission and went to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers office.
•On or about November 19, 2007, in Collier County, Florida, defendants Cesar Navarrete and Geovanni Navarrete, and others known to the grand jury, beat LMD then locked him, JHM, JVD, and two other workers in the back of a box truck to prevent them from leaving and to ensure they would be available for work the following morning.39
Hundreds of thousands of poor from Mexico and Central America have fled northward to escape mounting poverty and unemployment. Plots of land and farms have been abandoned following severe droughts, hurricanes, earthquakes, and sudden, severe drops in the price of coffee, on which much of the Guatemalan economy depends. The Mexican poor have joined this tidal wave courtesy of Bill Clinton’s NAFTA, which permitted the huge agrobusinesses in the United States to flood the Mexican market with cheap corn. This swiftly bankrupted millions of small Mexican farmers, perhaps two million of whom joined the surge of undocumented immigrants into the United States.40 These are the rumblings of a new world order, one in which a mad scramble for diminishing resources, a world where workers at home and abroad are forced, out of desperation and sheer vulnerability, into a global serfdom.
Joe and I are in Laura Germino’s small office in the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’s one-story stucco building. The building is across the street from the parking lot where workers gather each morning in Immokalee. She and her husband, Greg Asbed, helped form the coalition in the mid-’90s while they were working for Florida Rural Legal Services. Germino and Asbed, who met as students at Brown University, each spent time in the developing world—Germino as a Peace Corps volunteer in Burkina Faso and Asbed in Haiti. It would be good training for Immokalee, especially Asbed’s command of Creole.
“In the Ron Evans case,” Germino says, referring to a 2007 case in which Evans kept indebted workers enslaved behind a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, “they would recruit from homeless shelters, or from centers where people were trying to recover from substance abuse. And then they would promise people—homeless people, mind you—a job and a roof over their heads. What more would you want, right? It’s a reasonable thing to want. And so people would then end up in North Florida, or the Carolinas, with Ron Evans in this kind of situation that you’re seeing here in the photo.”
She pulls down from her bookshelf a photo of Evans’s encampment, with its coils of barbed wire and “No Trespassing” sign. Evans worked for grower Frank Johns, the former chairman of the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association, the powerful lobbying arm of the state agricultural industry.
“This was up in Palatka, north Florida,” Germino says:
It shows one of the more classic styles of holding people against their will back since the ’60s. This is a high fence and barbed wire. And it was normally closed. There is an interview with an older man named Jewel, and he talks about how Evans at the end of the workday would take up everyone’s shoes, so that it would be harder for them to leave at night. Evans was sentenced to thirty years back in 2007. But he’d been practicing since at least the ’80s. One of the misconceptions is that people look at farmwork as a snapshot of today. They don’t wind back the video to get the whole time, the evolution.
Germino stresses that slavery will not disappear until the growers and the corporations that buy the produce are forced to comply with basic labor standards. The agricultural industry, she said, has long enslaved citizens as well as noncitizens. The problem did not begin with the arrival of undocumented workers to the fields.
“There’s this invisible hand of this corporate buyer asking for high volume at low price,” she says:
I don’t want them to be forgotten about. It’s like the movie The Burning Season, about Carlos Mendes. There is the middleman who does the actual violence, but it’s the oil people living in Rio or whatever that are behind the destruction of the forests. There’s a lot of talk about factors that make people vulnerable, for example, immigrant workers, why they end up here? They come because you’ve been spit out by the global economy by NAFTA. They don’t come for adventure. They are vulnerable and fall prey to a boss who holds people in forced labor. These are the sending factors. But the more important question is about the receiving country factors. I can understand a trafficker wanting to take advantage of these people. But why does it happen here? This is the question everybody in the U.S. has to ask. Why are there conditions here that allow slavery to
take root? There will always be vulnerable people. There will always be homeless people. But why are such people enslaved here?
“What needs to be eliminated is the sweatshop, the exploitative conditions,” Germino continues:
Forced labor doesn’t happen in isolation. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It is part of a continuum, the end of a whole range of labor violations. It doesn’t fall out of the sky. It has to have conditions like soil in which it can take root. If you eliminate that from U.S. soil, you eliminate forced labor. Agriculture has always had that soil, at least up until now, in the tomato industry. In Florida in the past two or three hundred years, there’s never been a time without slavery, or a form of forced labor. It’s changed. It’s no longer chattel slavery, or plantation slavery. It’s not legal anymore. But it still happens. When they passed the Emancipation Proclamation it continued in different forms, as you saw in the turpentine camps up in north Florida. Agriculture has always had it. And what’s interesting is that other industries are actually now more prone to it, industries that didn’t used to have it. This shows you that when any industry devolves from being an industry with a fulltime work force with benefits and overtime, pensions, or whatever, to a subpoverty minimum-wage workforce—not salaried, day labor—you start seeing more cases of forced labor. We are starting to see labor trafficking in the garment industry and in hotels and construction. It devolves. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened in meatpacking, where salaries have also gotten lower and the benefits have gotten worse. I had hoped that agriculture would become more like other industries, but I fear that in our race to the bottom other industries are beginning to resemble agriculture.
The advances made by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers on behalf of the tomato workers, however, are among the few bright spots in the nation’s agricultural fields, advances made outside the formal structures of power by the workers themselves.