Yesterday, at federal court in Ft. Myers, FL, farm bosses from Immokalee pleaded guilty to “numerous charges of enslaving Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants, brutalizing them and forcing them to work in farm fields.” (“Five to plead guilty on charges of enslaving immigrant laborers,” Ft. Myers News Press, 9/2/08).

Check out the CIW website, http://www.ciw-online.org for all the details.

According to the News-Press report:

“The 17-count indictment in the case — one of the largest slavery prosecutions Southwest Florida has ever seen — was released in January. It alleges that for two years, Cesar Navarrete and Geovanni Navarrete beat agricultural laborers, chained them up, locked them in boxes and trucks on the family property while keeping them in ever-increasing debt.

Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney Doug Molloy has called it “slavery, plain and simple.”

Many will remember this latest slavery case — one of the most extreme stories of exploitation to emerge from fields renowned for their brutality — as the prosecution that began when workers escaped from a locked u-haul truck and made their way to an Immokalee police cruiser to denounce their employers… on the same day that a delegation comprised of representatives from the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, an industry-friendly “third-party” monitoring group by the name of Intertek, and Burger King were visiting Immokalee to declare Florida’s fields free of slavery.

The CIW issued the following statement to the News-Press about the convictions:

“The facts that have been reported in this case are beyond outrageous — workers being beaten, tied to posts, and chained and locked into trucks to prevent them from leaving their boss. How many more workers have to be held against their will before the food industry steps up to the plate and demands that this never — ever — occur again in the produce that ends up on America’s tables?”

“What’s most frustrating is that there is a solution. As US Senator Bernie Sanders said when he visited Immokale, ‘Slavery is the extreme. The norm is a disaster.’ If we can improve the norm — guarantee fair wages and humane conditions for all Florida farmworkers — then we can eliminate the extreme. And there are now several retail food industry leaders who have agreed to do their part to promote social responsibility in Florida agriculture. Yet the leaders of Florida’s tomato industry — who are holding their annual meeting this week at the Ritz Carlton in Naples — continue to stand in the way of progress. The FTGE needs to start working with Yum Brands, McDonald’s, Burger King, and the other major tomato buyers who want to put an end to exploitation in Florida’s fields.”

Go to the CIW site, http://www.ciw-online.org for the whole story.

And be sure to check back in the days ahead for much more breaking news as the season approaches and the Campaign for Fair Food shifts into high gear.
Thanks – Coalition of Immokalee Workers