(By María Novoa, reporter for ISA news service, based on a report on the television programme “La verdad sea dicha”)
Every year more than 1.2 million Mexicans travel across the country from their places of origin to work as laborers in the agricultural fields.
In the television program “La verdad sea dicha” (if the truth be told) broadcast by the Mexico’s legitimate government, Margarita Nemesio, of the civil association Tlachinollan explains that internal migration in Mexico basically consists of agricultural workers and their families: “agricultural workers work as families, including children, pregnant women and breastfeeding women, and almost all of them are indigenous people.”
Child labor that so typified the era of the Industrial Revolution is being used more and more in our Mexico of today, you get the impression that the rich and powerful want children —better still if they are Indians— to know dirt, sweat and fatigue until they get used to the future that awaits them —that is if they have any at all— “men and old people too”. Why not? They say that the old are like children, i.e., in today’s Mexico, where childhood has been abolished, old people no longer have the option of sitting around reminiscing.
Margarita tells us that in the agricultural fields the rights of indigenous people and migrants are constantly being violated. Indeed, at no distance from where we live, humanity is being annihilated. And, indeed, as when we chose to ignore the existence of the concentration camps, none of us are innocent of this crime.
On the screen, Nemesio Margarita continues “Contracts are oral, which doesn’t go to create the best working conditions and allows anomalies to occur; arriving at the field, the farmers will perhaps say they have sheds for the workers, but in reality these are structures of barely 3 by 6 meters, no bigger, and there are no beds; showers facilities are at a minimum in fields where anything from 300 to 3000 farm workers might be accommodated. Normally they are surrounded and separated by irrigation ditches; these ditches are supposed to be equipped with water-purification plants to make the water suitable for a family to use, however, as the water is for irrigation it is thoroughly polluted and people can fall sick by just coming into contact with it”.
Margarita will not shut up and I do not have the heart to switch off and stop feeling guilty: “in theory the wages are 68 pesos (just over three dollars) a day for an 8-hour-day, but in reality an agreement is reached with the laborer: they have to cut a certain amount of bucketfuls —they call them tasks—, if the limit is 50 buckets, for every extra bucketful they cut, they get another peso, so in an 8-hour-day they can earn 120 or 150 pesos always depending on how much they have managed to pick by the end of the day. But that is the equivalent three or four tasks. This means it is really piecework and piecework implies exploitation”.
“This is exhausting work for a child. Mexico’s Federal Labor Law bans the employment of children under 14, and sets very precise limits on the jobs that young people between 14 and 16 may be employed in. The Mexican Constitution forbids child labor and this issue is highlighted by what happened to David”.
It seems that on January 6th —the day when other Mexican children are playing with the toys that the Three Kings brought them— David was working in the fields of Sinaloa in Northern Mexico for a piffling wage and the only thing he got for his troubles was death. He was only 8 years old and very short for his age, as is usual for children in our country, always undersized.
David was one of so many children who have to migrate with their family. He turned eight on the day when he left his community in Ayotzinapa, Veracruz where he was born. They left to work on one of the farms of Sinaloa, for a company called Agrícolas Paredes for which, like so many other companies, the life of a little boy is of no great account while profits are the main thing.
On the Day of the Three Kings -who knows why had to be that cursed day? maybe because for the greedy and powerful one day is as good as another when it comes to killing - he “was with his mother and siblings collecting tomatoes when he tripped over a line used to mark out the furrows It had been covered over by soil and he didn’t see it. A tractor backed up into him and he took the blow on his head “. He died instantly, just a child, without knowing that it was the Day of the Three Kings; he died without knowing that he should have been playing with new toys; in fact he died without knowing about presents and kings and childhood.
“When the Attorney General’s Office drew up the death certificate, it specified that the minor had died from a head injury in a public thoroughfare, meaning that the boy had died in the street not in an agricultural field, thus immediately absolving the company from any liability”.
Imagine if the poor company, on top of having lost a valuable eight-year-old worker, should have had to pay compensation as well! The fault must lie with the children of this country who go around dying in the streets and gutters of our cities and in the ditches of our fields. According to Margarita, the company “has refused to accept any legal responsibility, I am specifically referring to compensation”. Where is the State and where is the justice system to make people without a conscience obey the law? None exists.
Mrs. Zavala, the wife of a very humane gentleman called “President” Calderón who also uses frauds to win elections, is busy attacking the new Mexico City law on abortion. The lady is extremely distressed because, she says, “to accept that law is to accept the right of the strong over the weak”. It is worth mentioning that Mrs. Zavala is not concerned about David or about the cold-bloodedness of the strong company that exploited weak little David; she has never shown any signs of having been moved by the death of any child laborer. I would like to be able to wipe that smile off her face along with her concern for unborn with one fell blow.
“If the company and these transnationals operated under better conditions, with more respect for the law, and by this I mean better wages and better working conditions, parents would not be placed in a position where they have to say ‘hire my child’. Companies must improve working conditions so that these parents will not have to send their children out to work. While this is not the case we will continue seeing children working in situations like those of David or worse. This type of exploitation is like slavery and goes hand-in-hand with poverty and exclusion”.
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