24466: Hermantin ( News) In the fields, a harsh life awaits Haitian farmworkers (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Sun, Mar. 06, 2005



In the fields, a harsh life awaits Haitian farmworkers
Thousands of Haitian farmhands of all ages live and work in horrible
conditions in the huge sugar complexes of southeastern Dominican Republic
BY GERARDO REYES
greyes@herald.com

SAN JOSE DE LOS LLANOS, Dominican Republic -- Shuffling down one of this
village's dirt streets, a sleepy Emmanuel Sanjuan slips on a white work
shirt, brown with dry mud. It's 5:30 a.m. on a Sunday, and he has not had
breakfast.

There's no school today, so the shy 14-year-old Haitian walks to the
surrounding cane fields carrying a borrowed machete, with which he has cut
four tons of sugar cane in the past two weeks.

His survival during the sugar harvest season depends on a chillingly simple
multiplication. For each ton of cane stalks he cuts, he will be paid $1.80
-- the price at a Miami supermarket of a five-pound bag of refined sugar.

In other words, for the sunrise-to-sunset work he performed over he past two
weekends, plus a couple of hours he worked while he was supposed to have
been at school, he will be paid a little less than $8.

And there's no guarantee that he'll receive that sum in cash. Most often,
come payday his bosses will give him a voucher, which he will have to spend
at a village grocery store that will charge him 10 percent of its value just
to accept it.

Yesterday, Sanjuan ate only rice.

''The way life is, I don't know what I'll do,'' says Sanjuan, who learned to
speak a bit of Spanish in the 18 months he has worked in the Dominican
Republic.

Sanjuan is one of estimated 20,000 Haitian picadores and braceros --
farmhands -- of all ages who live and work in horrible conditions in the
huge sugar complexes of southeastern Dominican Republic.

The windowless, 9-by-6 foot wooden shack where he lives -- no electricity,
no water, no toilet and a dirt floor -- is the latest stopover in his
migration. He lives like an orphan because his parents remained in Haiti.

Since age 13, Emmanuel has worked in the plantations and company towns that
form the sugar empires of families like the Vicinis, Fanjuls and Morenos and
of the Dominican government.

Behind the green walls of sugar cane and not so far from luxury beach
resorts, tens of thousands of Haitians who have fled starvation at home must
now face overwork, malnutrition and disease, often without a penny in their
pockets.

Yet most of the Haitians interviewed for this report said they do not wish
to return to Haiti because the situation is so much worse back there.

''They are slaves in paradise,'' said the Rev. Christopher Hartley, 45, a
British-Spanish parish priest at San José de los Llanos, who has become the
defender of local farmworkers.

''Tell me if this isn't Uncle Tom's Cabin,'' asked the priest, pointing to
the barbed wire covering a gap in the roof a hot and foul-smelling barrack.
He said the wire was there to prevent workers from escaping the horrible
working conditions.

For four days, this reporter and a photographer looked into the dark corners
of this area and talked to dozens of workers in some 10 cane cutters'
villages, known as bateyes, most of them in Vicini family areas.

MISTREATMENT ALLEGED

Aside from the hunger, a common complaint voiced by the workers is their
mistreatment by plantation foremen -- from insults to beatings and even
being locked in fertilizer sheds for trying to escape. Other complaints
focus on the deficient and often nonexistent medical services.

Three workers disappeared after they were caught and beaten by Vicini
complex employees when they were trying to escape in November of 2003,
according to a complaint by the nonprofit Dominican Center for Advisory and
Legal investigations.

One month after El Nuevo Herald published this and other stories on the
plight of the Haitian farmworkers, José María Cabral Vega, president of the
Vicini family's Cristobal Colón sugar mill, sent a letter to the newspaper
rejecting the complaints against the Vicinis.

The company never hires minors, invests ''millions'' in housing for its
workers and pays salaries that are ''within the regulations that rule the
market,'' Cabral said. Workers have an ''efficient'' health service, and all
the bateyes have running water and some electricity. The Vicinis run 21
schools for 2,580 students. Cabral also said the three Haitians who
''disappeared'' were in fact arrested and deported.

Living conditions at lands run by José and Alfonso Fanjul -- Cuban-Americans
who also own vast cane fields in Florida -- are less onerous than at other
places, according to Sister Marie Maude, a Haitian nun who directs several
humanitarian projects.

Workers at the Fanjul's Central Romana complex are paid 20 to 30 cents more
per ton of cane and their housing is usually better, although most still
have no electricity, running water, toilets or kitchens.

Central Romana Vice President for public relations, Francisco A. Micheli,
said in a written statement that the complex has been praised by independent
observers as ``a model facility that has made major contributions to [the
country's] economic and social development.''

''Many of the people who have expressed some sort of complaint, as you
assert, may live in worse conditions in their homeland'' Micheli wrote.

The new government of President Leonel Fernández, nine months in power, will
not allow the situation to continue, said Carlos Amarante Baret, director of
the Migration Directorate. ''We shall not permit or condone abuses or
sanitary conditions that denigrate human dignity,'' he said.

COMPLAINTS NOT NEW

But the complaints are not new. The U.S. State Department's 2004 Report on
Human Rights noted many of the same issues and added that activists had
described the Haitians' living conditions as ``modern-day slavery.''

Cane cutters said that most of them were recruited in Haiti and brought
directly to the plantations by bus after Dominican immigration officials
were paid bribes to let the workers into the country without proper identity
or work documents.

But once in the bateyes, many realize their salaries will be minimal and try
to reach the capital city of Santo Domingo, where construction jobs are
better paid. That's where the barbed wire comes in.

''They can't afford to let them go. They have paid for them,'' said Hartley,
who said that armed foremen patrol the fields on horses to intercept
escapees and lock them up in the fertilizer sheds for two or three days.

A reporter was present when four workers who tried to stop a bus to Santo
Domingo, were caught by Ricardo Moreno, a Vicini sugar mill manager. He
ordered them back to the batey, but Hartley drove them in his vehicle to a
nearby intersection after a verbal confrontation with Moreno.

''Tell these boys,'' Hartley said to one of the four who understood some
Spanish, ``that the priest has told them that they're free, that they're not
slaves.''