Toxic migration

The case of agricultural workers from Guerrero state goes before the IACHR

In the mountains of Guerrero state, people recall how the rolling land was once thick with trees and the corn grew big and tall, alongside zucchini and fruit. But that was before logging for firewood lessened the rainfall and the river began drying up during the dry season. That was also before seasons of repeated fertilizer use left the ground largely barren.

What was once a subsistence way of life for the region’s indigenous farmers, now isn’t even that. Earning money to buy the basics – corn, chili, salt, soap – means leaving the mountains.

So every year thousands of people from this – one of the poorest regions in Mexico – travel to other states to work the land that yields tomatoes, bell peppers, and cucumbers. With their children working alongside them, they pick these crops six or seven days a week, for four to six months, earning between $65 and $140 pesos a day. A day’s pay depends on how much is pulled from the soil. The work of bending and plucking for up to 12 hours a day takes places in fields drenched in pesticides. And in the early days of spraying, the rows of fruits and vegetables are at their most toxic. The families’ only protection is the clothes they are wearing.

Much of what these jornaleros agrícolas -- agricultural workers -- harvest is shipped for sale in supermarkets in the US and Canada; at the end of the picking season they go back to the mountains, hoping to have saved enough to live on for the rest of the year, until it’s time to set out again. The cycle repeats: exploitation far away, poverty at home.

Today in Washington, DC, the living and working conditions of Mexico’s migrant labor force will be presented before the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR). The Montaña Tlachinollan Center for Human Rights, a civil organization that works with the jornaleros agrícolas in Guerrero, hopes today’s hearing will result in more guarantees, protection, and systematic enforcement of Guerrero’s migrant workers’ rights, and a better way of life for Mexico’s 3.1 million workers who journey from their home regions to toil in another part of the country.

“There is a very visible absence on the part of the State,” says Isabel Margarita Nemecio, the coordinator of the Center’s Migrant Area program, who will present this panorama today together with colleagues from Tlachinollan and the Washington-based Due Process of Law Foundation. The laws protecting these rights exist, she says, but: “It’s more a question of applying them. We need to find out how to re-articulate them.”

Getting the story

The migrant workers’ plight begins with the reasons they are forced to leave their home regions, where they lack the ways and means to earn a living as much as they do access to basic health services and education, say Nemecio and American filmmaker Alexandra Halkin. Tlachinollan estimates that up to 20,000 jornaleros migrate from the mountain region every year, and up to 50,000 migrate from the entire state. In 2006 Tlachinollan published a diagnostic of this migratory cycle titled Migrar o morir – Migrate, or die – while Halkin directed a companion documentary by the same title. The English-language title is Paying the Price: Migrant workers in the toxic fields of Sinaloa.

The film was co-produced by Tlachinollan and Halkin, who in 1998 founded the Chiapas Media Project, a non-profit that provides cameras, equipment and film training to indigenous groups and farmers in southern Mexico. For the past several years Halkin has also been producing videos about human rights issues in Guerrero, a region she says is often invisible – until people are reminded that Acapulco sits on the coast. Halkin wanted to tell this story “in a way that people can understand and wrap their head around in the US.”

“Most people in the United States have no idea about labor conditions and agricultural labor practices in the US, let alone Mexico,” she says.

The arc of the film traces the journey of the marginalized, largely illiterate population of jornaleros from their home village to the agribusiness farms in the northern state of Sinaloa, a 35 to 45-hour bus ride away. Because the majority of the workers are illiterate, they enter into virtually un-enforceable verbal agreements with employers. Many schools are not inclined to accept children who only come for part of the school year, thereby denying the right to education established in Article 3 of Mexico’s Constitution. At the same time, says Halkin, families need the money their children earn, while no one from the State is monitoring whether or not the camps are complying with child labor laws.

“They are exposed to very high levels of toxic pesticides with no protection whatsoever,” says Halkin.

While the video has been screened at over 50 universities, community centers, and film festivals in the US and Canada – the primary destinations for the produce shown in the film – it is also streamed on the website of Fair Food Across Borders (www.fairfoodab.org), a consumer-oriented campaign that contextualizes the jornaleros’ situation, outlines Mexican labor law, and urges consumers to demand more transparency about where their food comes from.

Viewers, Halkin says, are “particularly impacted by the amount of children in the field and the use of pesticides without any kind of protection for the workers.”

While the legal working age in Mexico is 14, about 20 percent of the labor force in agricultural camps is under that age. The film makes clear that parents need their children to work because they need the income.

One of the examples that Tlachinollan will use in its IACHR hearing is the case of David Salgado Aranda, an eight-year-old boy who died at a camp in January 2007 when he tripped over a wire and fell into the path of an oncoming tractor. According to a summary of the case on Tlachinollan’s website (www.tlachinollan.org), David’s death certificate was made to read that:

“the cause of death was a ‘traumatic brain injury’ which occurred on a ‘public road.’ This would mean that David’s death had occurred outside the field and that the trauma was caused by a blow or a fall, which would relieve the agricultural company of any liability, as it does not recognize that the boy was working as an agricultural laborer for the company at the time of his death.”

Although the president of the Senate’s Human Rights Commission, together with seven senators, did sign a point of agreement in March 2007 in exhorting more attention from Department of Labor and Social Security, and the government of Sinaloa, Nemecio says the case remains unresolved.

“[The company] practically has not paid an indemnity to the family,” says Nemecio. “The case is still open.”
Meanwhile, Nemecio says: “The conditions remain the same.” In addition to David’s case, Tlachinollan has documented six other cases of children dying in the fields.

Pushing for change

This is the first time a case on internal migration in Mexico has been presented before the IACHR. “Being able to position this topic is very emblematic,” says Nemecio.

Unlike when migrants leave for the US, the fact that this population stays within Mexico’s borders means the State should be able to more vigilant about their working and living conditions, says Nemecio. However, “the State’s reaction… is very limited,” she says. “There are many omissions.”

Nemecio says that the corresponding government bodies are the Secretaría de Trabajo y Previsión Social (Department of Labor and Social Security), Secretaría de Desarollo Social (Department of Social Development), Secretaría de Salud (Department of Health), Secretaría de Educación Pública (Department of Public Education), and the Comisión Nacional pare el Desarollo de los Pueblos Indígenas (National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Groups).

Tlachinollan is pushing for “monitoring, continual regulation… an entire, integrated mechanism” that will afford working and living conditions in compliance with federal law and international human rights standards.

On the other side of the border, Halkin sees documentaries like Paying the Price as advocacy tools that educate consumers and effect change through consumer demand. Some of the actions recommended on the Fair Food Across Borders website include letter writing to the agribusiness association in Sinaloa, and a demand for more “supermarket transparency” in the US. Supermarkets are required to disclose what country food has been imported from, but do not have to specify from which state or agribusiness.

“It’s important to create a constituency around this video,” says Halkin. “It’s been extremely useful… to really get an understanding of Mexico that is not available in the mass media at all.”

The IACHR hearings can be viewed online at: http://www.oas.org/en/media_center/webcast.asp

For more information distributing the documentary Paying the Price: Migrant workers in the toxic fields of Sinaloa, please contact: info@fairfoodab.org or cmp@chiapasmediaproject.org

Centro Nacional de Comunicación Social