Desperate workers on a Mexican mega-farm: 'They treated us like slaves'
As promised, here is part 2 of a 4-part LA Times series
by RICHARD MAROSI
DEC. 10, 2014 | REPORTING FROM SAN GABRIEL, MEXICO
Scorpions and bedbugs. Constant hunger. No pay for months. Finally, a bold escape leads to a government raid, exposing deplorable conditions. But justice proves elusive.
Ricardo Martinez and Eugenia Santiago were desperate.
At the labor camp for Bioparques de Occidente, they and other farmworkers slept sprawled head to toe on concrete floors. Their rooms crawled with scorpions and bedbugs. Meals were skimpy, hunger a constant. Camp bosses kept people in line with threats and, when that failed, with their fists.
Escape was tempting but risky. The compound was fenced with barbed wire and patrolled by bosses on all-terrain vehicles. If the couple got beyond the gates, local police could arrest them and bring them back. Then they would be stripped of their shoes.
Martinez, 28, and Santiago, 23, decided to chance it. Bioparques was one of Mexico's biggest tomato exporters, a supplier for Wal-Mart and major supermarket chains. But conditions at the company's Bioparques 4 camp had become unbearable.
They left their backpacks behind to avoid suspicion and walked out the main gate. As they approached the highway, a car screeched up. Four camp bosses jumped out. One waved a stick at them.
Read more: http://graphics.latimes.com/product-of-mexico-labor/
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The strike began when the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, mostly Filipino farm workers in Delano, California, led by Philip Vera Cruz, Larry Itliong, Benjamin Gines and Pete Velasco, walked off the farms of area table-grape growers, demanding wages equal to the federal minimum wage.[1][2][3] One week after the strike began, the predominantly Mexican-American National Farmworkers Association, led by Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and Richard Chavez,[4] joined the strike, and eventually the two groups merged, forming the United Farm Workers of America in August 1966.[3] Quickly, the strike spread to over 2,000 workers.
César Chávez at a United Farmworkers rally in Delano, 1974
read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delano_grape_strike
