Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit

by Barry Estabrook

  The Coalition of Immokalee Workers took the information to law enforcement officials. It required four more years, but in 1996 Flores and his second-in-command, Sebastian Gomez, were indicted on numerous counts, including holding others in involuntary servitude, collecting debts by extortionate means, transporting illegal aliens within the United States, concealing and harboring illegal aliens, and transporting migrant farmworkers in unsafe vehicles. According to court papers, Flores and Gomez had two accomplices, Nolasco Castaneda and Andres Ixcoy, who were stationed near the Arizona/Mexico border. Their duty was to find and hire workers with a particular set of job qualifications. Prospective Flores Harvesting employees had to (1) have no legal documentation, (2) speak no English, and (3) have little or no education. Once recruited, the workers were crammed into vans that had been specially modified to hold up to twenty-six passengers sitting or lying directly on the floor. During the journey from Arizona to worksites in South Carolina and Florida, employees were not allowed to leave the vans. They urinated into plastic jugs.

  In the Flores labor camps, the new arrivals were informed that they owed hefty transportation fees for their miserable rides east. Anyone who attempted to leave the camp while still indebted to Flores would be hunted down like an animal and killed. Many modern-day slavers employ an element of macabre theater to intimidate their workers and ensure obedience. Flores was a master of this craft. Reveille each morning at his camps came in the form of volleys of shots fired by his henchmen, aptly called pistoleros. The same enforcers would stand constant guard over the workers in the fields. Verbal orders to work harder were punctuated by brandished handguns that were often discharged into the air for added emphasis. If that didn’t drive home the message, physical assault did. On one occasion, a worker named Antonio Perez received a severe beating at the hands of Gomez. When his friend, Ramon Pena, attempted to help the badly injured Perez, Flores stepped into the fray, bashing Pena in the head with the butt of a semiautomatic Smith and Wesson pistol and sending him to the hospital for a week with a severe concussion and multiple lacerations to his scalp. Although he was occasionally tossed in jail on minor weapons violations (and promptly bailed out by the big growers for whom he supplied such a large and reliable workforce), Flores ran his operation on the same brutal business model for fifteen years, controlling more than four hundred laborers who worked ten to twelve hours per day and for their efforts cleared about twenty dollars a week.

  Ultimately, something good came out of the horrors of the Flores camps. Because of the courage of laborers like Julia Gabriel, who stood up and faced her tormentors in court, and the efforts of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the Flores case established a template for a string of prosecutions that would soon follow. Law enforcement began to cooperate with civilian organizations with close ties to the workers, including the coalition, Catholic church groups, and other workers’ advocates. As Frost, a wide-faced self-described “white guy” who stands well over six feet tall, put it, “When I walk into town, I stand out like a sore thumb. The coalition members fit right in.” The Flores case also spurred Congress to enact the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000, which codifies what constitutes slavery in modern-day America and sets forth severe penalties for those who perpetrate it. By the time that law was passed, it was becoming clear that Flores was by no means an aberration in the tomato fields of Florida.

  Like Lucas Domingo, Antonio Martinez came to the United States because his parents were both sick. Patchy jobs available to him in Hidalgo, Mexico, provided too little income for Martinez, the only breadwinner in a family of two parents and four younger siblings. So he set out on the same perilous path taken by the vast majority of people picking tomatoes in Florida, the same path taken by seventy-two migrant workers found murdered at a ranch near the United States border in 2010. He paid a coyote to be guided northward to a promised construction job in Los Angeles. At the border between Mexico and Arizona, Martinez was passed along to another coyote, who led a small band of migrants across the desert for three days. They ran out of food and water after the first day. Eventually, a van met them and drove them to a safe house in Tucson. At this point, the second coyote, a man named Chino, demanded more money. Martinez explained that he had none. Chino told him that in that case, the Los Angeles construction job was out, but that he might be able to arrange for tomato-picking work in Florida that would earn him $150 a day, which would enable Martinez to pay what he owed.

  To get to Florida, Martinez and sixteen other recent arrivals boarded a van driven by a man whom everyone called El Chacal, the Jackal. At the end of the two-day journey, during which the men had only two shared bags of potato chips to eat, El Chacal turned off a highway about fifteen miles short of Immokalee and drove along a secondary road leading into the Corkscrew Swamp, a vast expanse of watery cypress stands interspersed with drier pine and palmetto scrub. The van stopped in front of a decrepit trailer set in an overgrown clearing about a hundred feet back from the road.

  El Chacal got out of the van and greeted a man. A heated discussion ensued. Martinez heard El Chacal repeating “$500” over and over again. The stranger shook his head. Finally, Martinez heard him say “$350.” A roll of bills was produced, and El Chacal ordered his passengers out of the van and drove off, leaving them at the mercy of Abel Cuello, their new owner. “We were being sold like animals,” Martinez recalled.

  They were treated like animals, too. At night, the twenty-six men in Cuello’s crew were locked inside the two trailers he owned. Conditions were no better inside than they had appeared from the road. The floor was riddled with holes, providing easy access for cockroaches, rats, lizards, snakes, and other animal denizens of the surrounding swamps. Water drawn from a shallow well outside was rank smelling and foul. The men slept on mattresses on the floor. In the morning, Cuello unlocked the door and drove his crew to the worksites. He never took his eyes off them and threatened to beat them or kill them if they tried to escape. When three of the men made a desperate attempt to flee, he caught up to them and ordered them back to work, screaming, “I lost $5,000 on you. I want my money.” Another would-be escapee was pursued and run down by Cuello’s vehicle. “I own you,” he told the stricken worker. One day about four months after he had begun work for Cuello, Martinez and a few other workers were taken to a convenience store to spend the token sums that they were given. While waiting in the parking lot for the men, Cuello fell asleep, and Martinez escaped. Cuello eventually pleaded guilty and received a lenient thirty-three-month sentence. After his short stint in federal prison, he returned to Immokalee and was immediately rehired as a crew boss at another major tomato company.

  Laura Germino is a slender woman in her mid-forties whose family has lived in Florida for six generations. Germino has been with the coalition since its inception in the early 1990s and runs its antislavery program, which received the 2007 Anti-Slavery Award from Anti-Slavery International. In 2010 Germino accepted another award from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the group’s antislavery efforts. No one at the coalition set out to become an expert at uncovering slavery rings and bringing their activities to the attention of the authorities, Germino told me as she drove north toward the town of Lake Placid, where a slavery gang had operated in the 1990s. But in the course of normal outreach programs, members of the organization were often approached by workers who offered up tidbits of information or sometimes just rumors. “Something’s not right about that guy’s crew.” “A worker got shot up north.” Nothing that a police officer would act on, but stories that Germino let percolate in her subconscious, sure that someday something would happen to fill in the blanks. “There’s usually a grain of truth to these rumors,” she said.

  Several relatives of the convicted men remained in the Lake Placid area, and Germino makes occasional trips there just to check things out or maybe spot a boss keeping an unnecessarily keen eye on a busload of workers he has driven to a bodega. She also keeps her eyes open for re
asons of self-preservation. In 2010 a particularly violent human trafficker she had helped put behind bars in the late 1990s was released from prison. The same law enforcement officers who used the information gathered by Germino and the coalition to make their case against him neglected to inform her that he had been released and was back on the streets of the town where she lived.

  Lake Placid’s commercial heart could belong to any wholesome all-American county seat. Neat brick buildings house a library, shops, schools, hair salons, mom-and-pop restaurants, coffee shops, a local museum, a car dealership, and many, many churches. Tourists pull off the highway to spend a couple of hours looking at Lake Placid’s renowned historical murals. There are more than forty of them: conquistadors, early Florida cowboys lassoing longhorns, modern-day families laughing together as they blast through saw grass swamps aboard airboats, an early-twentieth-century outdoor prizefight, three happy clowns, graduates, presumably, of Toby’s Clown School, a local educational institution. Lake Placid bills itself as “The Town of Murals,” or “The Caladium Capital of the World” because 97 percent of the bulbs that produce the colorful plants are grown on twelve hundred acres in the area. Rolling terrain pockmarked with twenty-seven lakes surrounds the community, an idyllic setting for the middle-class retirees who have settled there.

  Germino turned the car into a development called Sun ’N Lakes (Sunny Lakes to the farmworkers). Like many inland subdivisions in Florida, Sun ’N Lakes never lived up to its initial promise. Pioneering real estate promoters laid down a grid of streets and began to advertise that inexpensive land was available on easy-to-meet financing terms. Prime lots near a small park and beach on the shores of Lake Grassy were sold, and modest retirement homes sprang up. Less desirable sites farther away from the water remained undeveloped and reverted to scrub. For a half mile or so after Germino and I left the main road, the community of neat two-bedroom homes looked pleasant enough, but soon the houses became shabbier and were replaced first by manufactured homes, then by old trailers haphazardly aligned on their lots. The roads themselves disintegrated from pavement, to potholed pavement, to sand. The shoulders provided final resting places for rotting mattresses, old sofas, broken-hulled boats, refrigerators, air conditioners, baby seats, television sets, and pile after pile of bullet-riddled beer cans. Potholes became large puddles that Germino had to ease her car around. Finally, we encountered a pond that spanned the road. “Oops,” she said, reversing course until we came to a marginally more promising crossroad. “I think it’s this way.”

  I was relieved when the road grew wider and less bumpy. It was paved again by the time she stopped at a phone booth opposite a convenience store on Highlands Avenue. On the other side of the road, a narrow track led up to five or six trailers. “The store is new,” she said, with surprise. “That land was just brush the night they murdered Roblero.”

  Ariosto Roblero was a Guatemalan who was a van driver for one of several small companies that transport migrant workers from Florida to northern fields, part of a loose, unregulated, but extremely efficient network that with a few vehicle changes can get laborers to New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Guadalajara, Mexico City, Oaxaca, and pretty much any other city in North or Central America that has a sizeable Hispanic population. On March 20, 1997, police responding to a 911 call found a man lying face down on the pavement in a pool of blood beside a van. He had been shot once in the back of his head, clearly an execution. Witnesses reported that Roblero, the dead man, was taking a group of workers from the area, where the harvest was wrapping up for the season, to North Carolina. He had stopped at the pay phone to wait for an additional passenger when a car and a pickup truck screeched to a halt. A group of men hauled Roblero out of the van and shot him. Initially, the witnesses told police that they suspected the murder might have been the work of an associate of Ramiro Ramos. A local crew leader, Ramos (called El Diablo by his employees) was angry because one of the five hundred pickers in his employ had left the area without having paid off the “debts” he owed. His means of escape was a van similar to Roblero’s. Even though Roblero had not been the driver, his murder was intended to send a clear message to anyone who might be foolish enough to provide rides to workers trying to leave Ramos’s employment. Unfortunately, the case went nowhere. When the time came for formal interviews with the police, no witness would repeat what he had said during initial questioning.

  Germino and I wound our way back to the highway. After about a half-mile, she pulled into the parking lot of a store called El Mercadito and continued her narrative. Almost exactly three years to the day after Roblero had been executed, a similar incident occurred at the store. At a little before midnight, a convoy of four vans that had set out from Immokalee made a prearranged stop at the store to pick up migrants to take them to the next place where crops were ripening. Two pickup trucks barreled into the lot. Six or seven men jumped out. Some held the passengers at gunpoint, while others smashed the vans’ windows. Jose Martinez, who owned the vans, was one of the drivers that night. An attacker pistol-whipped him, splitting open his face from the hairline to the bridge of his nose and continued beating him, screaming, “You’re the motherfucker who’s been taking my people. I’ll kill you.” Seeing what was happening to his boss, another driver escaped from the fray, called 911, then telephoned his brother, Lucas Benitez, one of the founding members of the coalition. “We are being attacked by men with guns! They look like bosses!” he said. Within the hour, Benitez and Germino arrived.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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