Invisible, exploited, discriminated against, some 3 million agricultural day laborers give their lives to big businessmen, working from sunrise to sunset in furrows and fields where they cultivate and harvest vegetables and fruits for export, amidst chemical poisons. At least a quarter of them speak an indigenous language. Quite a few of them are monolingual.
Many of them are from native peoples, even if they only speak Spanish. Poor among the poor in a sea of wealth, they work in conditions very close to semi-slavery. Their hats bear the logos of some of their new masters: Monsanto, Pioneer, John Deer, Massey Ferguson. Their hats (Cali, Texan, coastal) are a kind of sign of identity that testifies to their origins, which, despite their exodus, they wear on their skin.
They live crammed into sheds and shacks with no ventilation, with scarce and often unhealthy water, which, on the other hand, is plentiful for the crops. Their children not only do not go to school, they work. They lack employment contracts and job certainty. The withholding of their meager wages is reminiscent of the famous tiendas de raya 1In effect, “company stores” that would sell goods on credit to indentured servants on the plantations, maintaining them in perpetual debt of the landowner[ /efn_note] of the Porfiriato.
The mistreatment and insults they suffer by foremen, compounded by being of the color of the earth, are only modalities of broader humiliation. Women suffer abuse and sexual harassment by foremen. They often labor with their babies on their backs. Their grueling days in the scorching sun are simply inhumane.
Lack of medical care and health services result in deaths from curable diseases. Forgotten among the forgotten, the barbaric conditions of agricultural day laborers do not exist for the country’s labor authority. Officials neither see nor hear them.
They do not even inspect the farms (which could very well be a kind of factory, because of the obsession with adjusting food production to factory production chains), and when they do, they only listen to the masters. Many of these firms are subsidiaries or intermediaries of transnationals. For these indigenous people, whose blood is sucked by corporate vampires, there is no law and no justice. But the savage exploitation suffered by brown-skinned day laborers at the hands of agro-export firms is only part of the violence that indigenous peoples suffer on a daily basis.
For example, as coffee farmers or promoters of agroforestry (to cite a couple of examples), they live daily under pressure from multinationals to buy their aromatic coffee at ridiculous prices, directly or through coyotes, and from the loggers who cut down the trees to snatch their timber wealth. One indicator of the level of this violence is the number of leaders killed.
According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, between 2019 and August 2023, at least 46 indigenous defenders were killed or disappeared. Of these, 32 were related to environmental activities and in 33 cases they had suffered previous security incidents, with complaints on 10 occasions.
Yet only once was the perpetrator convicted. “The leaders of these peoples are more exposed to reprisals or violent actions due to their visibility for the defense of their territory and way of life. Their murder or disappearance has a chilling effect on all indigenous people,” explained Jesús Peña Palacios, deputy representative of the organization in Mexico (https://shorturl.at/TgW8T).
This cruelty also often stems from the desire of companies, politicians and criminals to dispossess indigenous people of their lands, waters, territories and natural resources. For urban developers, bottling companies, tourist complexes, mining companies, forestry consortiums, vegetable and vegetable packing companies, thermoelectric plants and megaprojects, indigenous social property is an obstacle to their ambitions to reproduce themselves in an expanded manner.
So, on a daily basis, they resort to the worst tricks to dispossess communities of their property. A separate chapter is the war that the criminal industry wages against the people. Without the intervention of the authorities or with their consent or support, it plunders their territories, displaces the inhabitants, forcibly recruits men to swell their armies, rapes women, executes those who resist and poisons young people with crystal meth.
It is not unusual for these groups to work so that large miners can exploit their concessions and transport the materials they extract, poisoning the aquifers. The narcos have captured important swaths of the state and, in many places, are the true law and order. When communities resist this “development” they act as a surrogate counterinsurgent force to overwhelm the resistance.
The path of capital accumulation in Mexico has an impediment in the native peoples. Their autonomous organization, their community cohesion, their determination to be and to reconstitute themselves as peoples collide head-on with the implacable logic of profit and subjugation. The Justice Plans promoted by the Federation are far from serving to confront this brutal offensive against the native peoples.
On the contrary, on many occasions, they facilitate the breakdown of the community fabric and become tools of injustice (https://shorturl.at/JM4t0). Constitutional reforms that do not recognize their right to territory and direct political representation are of little help either. In the face of internal colonialism, as has been the case since time immemorial, to save themselves, the peoples can only count on themselves.
Original text by Luis Hernández Navarro published in La Jornada on October 15th, 2024.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.