Three Florida fruit-pickers, held captive and brutalised by their employer for more than a year, finally broke free of their bonds by punching their way through the ventilator hatch of the van in which they were imprisoned. Once outside, they dashed for freedom.
When they found sanctuary one, all bore the marks of heavy beatings to the head and body. One of the pickers had a nasty, untreated knife wound on his arm. Police would learn later that another man had his hands chained behind his back every night to prevent him escaping, leaving his wrists swollen.
The migrants were not only forced to work in sub-human conditions but mistreated and forced into debt. They were locked up at night and had to pay for sub-standard food. If they took a shower with a garden hose or bucket, it cost them $5.
Their story of slavery and abuse in the fruit fields of sub-tropical Florida threatens to lift the lid on some appalling human rights abuses in America today.
Between December and May, Florida produces virtually the entire US crop of field-grown fresh tomatoes. Fruit picked here in the winter months ends up on the shelves of supermarkets and is also served in the country’s top restaurants and in tens of thousands of fast-food outlets.
But conditions in the state’s fruit-picking industry range from straightforward exploitation to forced labour. Tens of thousands of men, women and children--excluded from the protection of America’s employment laws and banned from unionising--work their fingers to the bone for rates of pay which have hardly budged in 30 years.
Until now, even appeals from the former president Jimmy Carter to help raise the wages of fruit-pickers have gone unheeded. However, with Florida looming as a key battleground during the the next presidential election, there is hope that their cause will be raised by the Democratic candidates Barack Obama and John Edwards.
Fruit-pickers, who typically earn about $200 (£100) a week, are part of an unregulated system designed to keep food prices low and the plates of America’s overweight families piled high. The migrants, largely Hispanic and with many of them from Mexico, are the last wretched link in a long chain of exploitation and abuse.
They are paid 45 cents (22p) for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes collected. A worker has to pick nearly two-and-a-half tons of tomatoes--a near impossibility--in order to reach minimum wage.
So bad are their working and living conditions that the US Department of Labour, which is not known for its sympathy to the underdog, has called it “a labour force in considerable distress“.
A week after the escapees managed to emerge from the van in which they had been locked up for the night, police discovered that a forced labour operation was supplying fruit-pickers to local growers. Court papers describe how migrant workers were forced into debt and beaten into going to work on farms in Florida, as well as in North and South Carolina. Detectives found another 11 men who were being kept against their will in the grounds of a Florida house shaded by palm trees.
The bungalow stood abandoned this week, a Cadillac in the driveway alongside a black and chrome pick-up truck with a cowboy hat on the dashboard. The entire operation was being run by the Navarettes, a family well known in the area.
Also nearby was the removals van from which Mariano Lucas, one of the first to escape, punched his way through a ventilation hatch to freedom in the early hours of 18 November.
With him were Jose Velasquez, who had bruises on his face and ribs and a cut forearm, and Jose Hari. The men told police they had to relieve themselves inside the van. Other migrant workers were kept in other vehicles and sheds scattered around the garden.
Enslaved by the Navarettes for more than a year, the men had been working in blisteringly hot conditions, sometimes for seven days a week. Despite their hard work, they were mired in debt because of the punitive charges imposed by their employer, who is being held on minor charges while a grand jury investigates his alleged involvement in human trafficking.
The men had to pay to live in the back of vans and for food. Their entire pay cheques went to the Navarettes and they were still in debt. They slept in decrepit sheds and vehicles in a yard littered with rubbish.
When one man did not want to go to work because he was sick, he was allegedly pushed and kicked by the Navarettes. “They physically loaded him in the van and made him go to work that day. Cesar, Geovanni and Martin Navarette beat him up and as a result he was bleeding in his mouth,“ a grand jury was told.
The complaint reveals that the men were forced to pay rent of $20 (£10) a week to sleep in a locked furniture van where they had no option but to urinate and defecate in a corner. They had to pay $50 a week for meals--mostly rice and beans with meat perhaps twice a week if they were lucky.
The fruit-pickers’ caravans, which they share with up to 15 other men, rent for $2,400 a month--more per square foot than a New York apartment--and are less than 10 minutes’ walk from the hiring fair where the men show up before sunrise. At least half those who come looking for work are not taken on.
Florida has a long history of exploiting migrant workers. Farm labourers have no protection under US law and can be fired at will. Conditions have barely changed since 1960 when the journalist Edward R Murrow shocked Americans with Harvest Of Shame, a television broadcast about the bleak and underpaid lives of the workers who put food on their tables. “We used to own our slaves but now we just rent them,“ Murrow said, in a phrase that still resonates in Immokalee today.
For several years, a campaign has been under way to improve the workers’ conditions. After years of talks, a scheme to pay the tomato pickers a penny extra per pound has been signed off by McDonald’s, the world’s biggest restaurant chain, and by Yum!, which owns 35,000 restaurants including KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. But Burger King, which also buys its tomatoes in Immokalee, has so far refused to participate, threatening the entire scheme.
INDEPENDENT.CO.UK

A Palestinian boy rides his bicycle along the controversial concrete separation wall built by Israel in the West Bank town of Qalqilya, Jan. 11.

Using a can of spray paint, Yousef Nijim scrawled messages Tuesday across Israel’s imposing West Bank separation wall in protest of a wall that Palestinians say cuts them off from their fields and stifles trade.
But the messages Nijim writes are not his own. They come from people around the world who want to express support for Palestinians living in the shadow of the wall.
A Dutch group called sendamessage collects money over the Internet for the project, which seeks to raise money for Palestinian charities and awareness about the hardships the wall causes for Palestinians.
For a $43 contribution, Palestinian volunteers like Nijim, 24, paint a message on the 25-foot-high wall--anything from a political statement to a recipe to a marriage proposal. However, hate messages against Israelis or Palestinians are prohibited.
Made up of concrete walls, barbed wire, trenches and electronic sensors, the wall is meant to keep Palestinian suicide bombers and other attackers out of Israel, but Palestinians charge it juts into their land and makes crucial trade difficult.
Israeli military helicopters could be heard flying by, and a stiff wind blew dust and paint in all directions as Nijim painted a message with a bite: “Easy falafel: (Mix chickpeas and onions in a bowl)... For the rest of the recipe, turn over the wall.“
“It’s not about changing the wall, it’s about spreading the news ... that (the separation wall) is in our cities, our towns and our villages,“ said the project’s local coordinator, Faris Arouri.
Arouri, who is also chairman of a West Bank-based youth group, Palestinian Peace and Freedom Youth Forum, called out the text of the messages while Nijim carefully sprayed them in big letters on the huge gray structure.
Arouri said a small portion of the money raised through the Web site goes to administrative costs, while most goes to charities in and around Ramallah, including building a children’s garden, a youth cinema and a basketball court.
The volunteers snapped digital photos of the 14 messages painted in various languages to e-mail to the people who commissioned them.
“I think it’s important for Palestinians to see that people from around the world are supporting their cause,“ said Nabil Kukali, an expert on Palestinian opinion on Israel. “They are happy to see this type of organization standing with them and understanding their suffering.“
AP.COM

An African Union soldier stands south of the town of Al-Fasher in Darfur, June 10.

For the last several years, international efforts to end the war in Darfur have focused on the deployment of a 26,000-man peacekeeping force which Darfurians have come to believe will “save“ them. In the words of one of the force’s strongest supporters:
“Activists have pressed relentlessly for the deployment of a UN-led force to protect civilians in Darfur, and we are almost there.“
The truth is that we are nowhere near there--and most probably never will be. With less than a month to go before the force is due to deploy, senior United Nations officials say ,the best-case scenario is for 6,500 troops to be in Darfur by January 1, 2008, the date of the official transition from the present 7,000-man African Union force to a “hybrid“ UN-AU force (UNAMID).
The Sudanese regime is throwing up obstacle after obstacle, as it promised it would. Unless these issues are resolved, Jean-Marie Guehenno, the UN undersecretary general for peacekeeping operations, has warned, “it means the mission in 2008 will not be able to make the difference that the world wants to it to make--and that it may become a failure.“
No matter what UN officials say publicly, many in the organization believe that the biggest problem with UNAMID is UNAMID itself.
It is, they say, “the world’s worst peacekeeping operation“--too big, too top-heavy, too disorganized and with no strategic plan.
Just how does UNAMID plan to neutralize tens of thousands of Janjaweed, rebels and bandits in a region that is transitioning from genocidal fury to anarchy and chaos?
Crucially, how can the hybrid force safeguard camps whose security is threatened not only by the Janjaweed, but by internal tribal wars, rampant criminality and the presence of arms galore? UNAMID can patrol the perimeters of camps, but does not have powers of arrest and detention and cannot provide security within the camps. Many believe it could not stop the government if it decided to break up the camps.
Those directly concerned with the $2-billion-a-year force are not the only ones worried. Many relief workers in Darfur have major concerns about the potential impact of UNAMID on humanitarian action in Darfur.
And then there is the environmental factor, with UNAMID compounding the problems of a humanitarian-driven construction boom that has already had major environmental effects.
The demands on natural resources of one international peacekeeper are many times that of a single Darfurian. It is estimated that each peacekeeper will use 40 times more water than a Sudanese, for example.
Often run by ill-informed religious groups, “Save Darfur“ campaigns kept the region on the agenda at a time when many just wanted it to disappear,But the unchanging narrative of “genocide“ and “slaughter,“ the inflation of death tolls, and the reduction of a complex conflict to a simple morality tale created mass hysteria which limited the ability of decision-makers to pursue legitimate policy options and craft solutions relevant to the facts on the ground.
“I am sure the hybrid UN-AU mission in Darfur has enabled all those watching the Darfur tragedy helplessly all these years to claim a victory of sorts,“ says Timur Goksel, a 24-year veteran of UN peacekeeping in South Lebanon,“But will it work? I am afraid it won’t. The UN is hardly capable of running its own complex peacekeeping operations.
How it will ever manage an operation that is to be effectively commanded by an inexperienced, under-resourced and relatively new regional organization that has more than a few teething problems is beyond comprehension.“
A senior Western officer in Sudan agrees: “The best we can probably hope for is that UNAMID will be no worse than [the African Union force], But it is going to happen, and we have to try to make it work.“
So, for those who love bullet points, here are three for this already benighted peacekeeping operation, whose failure is being forecast even before it hits the ground:
First, give priority to deploying the civil affairs officers who will be a small but absolutely vital component of the force. One savvy civil affairs officer focused on community peacekeeping, conflict prevention and intelligence-gathering is worth a battalion.
Second, give priority to confidence-building--especially with Arab groups, who are still shamefully neglected by international and humanitarian workers. The few NGOs that have reached out to Darfur’s Arabs have found that they have relatively safe access to parts of Darfur that other NGOs have been unable to reach.
And third, be prepared for a sharp change in the popular mood when Darfurians realize that it will be many, many months, at best, before UNAMID can begin, perhaps, to make a change to their lives. Inflated expectations suggest that the honeymoon will be short.
Julie Flint
DAILYSTAR.COM.LB