Tomatoland (12 page)

“Have I?”

“Yeah, you. Mr. Long. Don Long.”

“Yes, I have looked at what is out there.”

“And have you looked to see whether there are animal studies which relate to long-term exposure and birth defects?”

“But they haven’t related—they have for animal studies.”

“Are you telling me that you think they are going to do that kind of study for humans?”

“No, no, I don’t think they are going to do that kind of study for humans.”

“So in regards to the pesticides that you use day in and day out, as you sit here today you are aware that there are, in fact, studies linking animals who are exposed to these pesticides to birth defects?”

“Yes, there are studies.”

“This isn’t new to you?”

“No, no, this is not new.”

“You’ve known about this for a long time?”

“Yes.”

“Years?”

“Correct.”

“Long before these babies were born to your employees with
birth defects?”

“That’s correct.”

Having established that Long knew that studies existed linking pesticides to birth defects in animals, Yaffa turned to the company’s policy about allowing pregnant women to work in its fields. “Tell me about restrictions, limitations, rules, if any, that Ag-Mart has to keep pregnant women from working with methyl bromide when it’s being injected into the soil.”

“We don’t have any rules to keep pregnant women from working with that.”

“Why not?”

“We do not have any rules to keep anybody from working with it there. We do not discriminate against people for being pregnant.”

“Do you call that discrimination or protection?”

Long went on to make the point that employees were aware that risks were involved in agricultural work and took those risks into consideration before coming to work.

“Do you tell these people what is being sprayed when?” asked Yaffa.

“Yes. There is a list of what’s—what applications have been out there. There’s a central posting for that.”

“How many of these people don’t read?”

“Probably quite a few of them.”

“Okay, so in regard to your central posting that means nothing to those people, correct?”

“Probably not.”

Another heated exchange erupted when Yaffa questioned the reasons and the timing for Ag-Mart’s withdrawal of the five pesticides after the Immokalee deformities became public.

“Why did it take that for Ag-Mart to be proactive and take that step?”

“Because at Ag-Mart, Santa Sweets, that—I think that the products that we were involved with were consumer-based products, and I think that there was a misconception between the consumer and people that maybe believed that if they ate the product it might create a birth defect.”

“So I want to make sure I get this crystal clear. The change in pesticide policy was made out of concern that there was a misconception on the consumer’s side?”

“Yeah, and that if we needed to create a—a safe working environment for employees is to whatever changes we needed to do that.”

“If, in fact, there was a misconception on the consumer end that would directly affect Ag-Mart’s profits?”

“It could affect our business, yes.”

“So Ag-Mart’s concern about their profits came directly into play in their decision to stop using pesticides known to be linked to cancer in lab animals?”

“No, and the perception of the business within—within the ad community and the worker community, it was a whole round situation of what was—what was going to be better for our workers and what was going to be better for our product.”

“Yes, but profit came directly—”

“No.”

“Let me get the whole question out. You knew for years that these pesticides were linked to birth defects in lab animals. We talked about that… Knowing the risk was there, why not be proactive and take that step before you have three women bearing children with such horrific defects?”

“Well, the three women were not all—I don’t believe that –this is my belief, so I—I—don’t believe that the pesticides caused the birth defects. I believe that the pesticides have been tested to cause birth defects in animals, but I don’t believe pesticides caused birth defects in those three women.”

To Yaffa’s disappointment
, Long’s belief was given official legitimacy ten months after Carlitos’s birth when the
Collier County Health Department issued the results of its investigation into the Immokalee deformities. After consulting with a leading Florida geneticist, department officials said that pesticides were unlikely to have been the cause of the cluster of birth defects. “We were unable to make the link between the pesticide usage and the birth defects in these particular women,”
Joan Colfer, the director of the department, told the
Naples News.
“That doesn’t totally rule it out. It’s just that we were unable to make the link.” Which was the very link that Yaffa, who contended that the Collier investigation amounted to nothing more than a noninvestigation, needed to make in the minds of a jury.

A critical break in the suit came when Yaffa found out that
Maria Meza, the woman who had given birth to Violetta, the Tower Cabin baby who died a few days after being born, had aborted an earlier pregnancy at the suggestion of doctors. That pregnancy had also begun while she was working in the Immokalee fields. Like Carlitos, the aborted fetus had neither arms nor legs. The odds of finding two
cases of tetra-amelia in a small community were extremely remote. Then an investigator who was interviewing former Florida farmworkers in Mexico reported that he had found a woman in an isolated village who had been working in Immokalee several years earlier and had given birth to a stillborn child. That baby was also limbless. Although the statute of limitations had passed and she had nothing to gain, the woman agreed to testify. A member of Yaffa’s legal team traveled to the village and deposed the woman. It was the legal equivalent of lightning striking in the same place three times. A trial date in the case of
Francisca Herrera and Abraham Candelario as parents and natural guardians of Carlos Herrera-Candelario v. Ag-Mart Produce, Inc.
was set.

On Friday, March 21, 2008, nearly three years after Yaffa took on the case, he and Ag-Mart’s legal team met to try to reach a
settlement. Negotiations lasted into the night, and when the two parties emerged,
they had a deal in hand. Ag-Mart admitted no guilt but agreed to pay a substantial sum. Both sides agreed that the exact terms of the settlement would remain sealed. “The amount assures that Carlitos will have all the care he needs for the rest of his life,” Yaffa said. At the request of Candelario and Herrera, the money was placed in a life-care plan, overseen by a trustee who is charged with making sure that any funds that are spent directly benefit the boy. The family was able to purchase a small bungalow in Immokalee. Carlitos moves about in a custom-designed wheelchair and is enrolled in school. He is an intelligent, out-going little boy who is well liked by his classmates. Candelario still works in the fields, but Herrera was able to stop picking tomatoes and devote all her time to her boy. Two years after the settlement, she discovered that she was pregnant with a second child. Carlitos’s little sister was born in 2010, “a beautiful baby” according to Yaffa. “Carlitos’s birth stands for a whole lot more than a child born without arms and legs,” Yaffa said. “This child has changed the system.”

Or part of the system. Sadly,
pesticide exposure is only one of a long list of abuses that the men and women who pick our winter tomatoes have to endure.

FROM THE HANDS
OF A SLAVE

S
hould you want to experience culture shock in one of its starkest forms, take the drive from Naples, Florida, to Immokalee. Your journey will begin in a city of handsome boulevards lined with stately palms and bordered by well-trimmed street-side planting strips of tropical shrubs. Visitors and winter residents alike dine at outdoor cafes and shop at expensive boutiques, antique stores, art galleries, and high-end chains like Cartier, De Beers, Saks Fifth Avenue, Gucci, Tiffany, and Hermès. Hundreds of yachts create traffic-jam conditions in the blue waters of the harbor, and squadrons of private jets whistle in and out of the municipal airport. “Ultra high-end luxury homes” in town listed for as high as $24.9 million even after the Florida real estate crash. Beachfront condos can fetch $14 million.
In 2008 Moody’s rated greater Naples
as the country’s wealthiest metropolitan area, with an average net worth of $1.7 million.

As you head east on State Road 846, the gated golf course communities become sparser and less grand. The highway dwindles from six lanes, to four, to two. The mansions and shopping plazas give way
to more humble developments of bungalows and plain strip malls, and eventually to cypress swamps and dry stands of pine, cabbage palm, and scrubby palmetto. Occasionally, you pass a clearing occupied by a low ranch-style home, its property lines demarcated by a rusty chain-link fence and a padlocked metal gate. Yards are cluttered with faded sport utility vehicles, fat-wheeled pickup trucks with tinted windows, and outboard boats that look like they have been sitting immobile on their trailers for several seasons. Farther inland, human habitations disappear, and the occasional citrus grove abuts the road, its neatly rounded, deep-green trees marching off in straight ranks. What you don’t see is tomato fields. But they are there, hidden behind ten-feet-tall berms covered in scruffy vegetation and broken sporadically by access roads festooned with “No Trespassing” signs and guarded by private security men.

Less than an hour after leaving Naples, you round a long curve and enter the city of Immokalee (pronounced like broccoli). A few years ago, county officials attempted to bring a veneer of vaguely Latino urbanity to the main drag by laying down a paving-stone median and crosswalks, planting some small palms, and erecting fake antique streetlights. Maybe the hope was that tourists passing through would not notice conditions a block or so away. Downtown Immokalee is a warren of potholed lanes leading past boarded-up bars and abandoned bodegas, moldering trailers, and sagging, decrepit shacks. The area is populated mostly by Hispanic men, although you will see the occasional Haitian woman (a holdover of an earlier wave of ethnic farm laborers) walking along the sandy paths that pass for sidewalks with a loaded basket of groceries balanced on her head. Scrawny chickens peck in the sandy yards, and packs of mongrels patrol the gaps between dwellings, sniffing at the contents of overturned garbage cans. Vultures squabble over a run-over cat lying in the middle of a street.
Immokalee’s per capita
income is only $9,700 a year, about one-quarter of the national average. Half of the people in the city of fifteen thousand live below the federal poverty line. Two-thirds of the children who enter kindergarten drop out of school
without high school diplomas.
Your chances of becoming a victim
of violent crime in Immokalee are six times greater than they are in the average American municipality. On the crime
index, where zero is the rating given to the most dangerous areas in the United States and one hundred is the rating given to the safest, Immokalee comes in at one. Even the police there are sometimes criminals.
Glendell Edison, a deputy sheriff who patrolled Immokalee for fifteen years, was sentenced to ten years in prison after being convicted for extorting money from drug pushers and possessing cocaine and crack. Florida’s largest farmworker community, Immokalee is the town that tomatoes built.

As a United States attorney
for Florida’s Middle District based in Fort Myers, Douglas Molloy has had more than a decade of experience dealing with crime in Immokalee. More specifically, Molloy, who is in his early fifties and has wavy salt-and-pepper hair and a deeply lined face, has gained an international reputation by specializing in prosecuting an act that was supposed to have vanished from the United States 145 years ago. At any given time, Molloy works on six to twelve slavery cases. Immokalee, he says, is “ground zero for modern-day slavery.” He also says that any American who has eaten a winter tomato, either purchased at a supermarket or on top of a fast food salad, has eaten a fruit picked by the hand of a slave. “That’s not an assumption,” he told me. “That is a fact.”

The one-story, L-shaped house at 209 South Seventh Street stands in stark contrast to the couple of dozen trailers that surround it on three sides. A handsome royal palm shades the front lawn. The dwelling is fairly new, well painted, and in far better repair than the average Immokalee residence.
From 2005 to 2007
,
Lucas Mariano Domingo lived at that address. New to town, broke, and homeless, he faced the prospects of many recently arrived migrants—sleeping at missions and in encampments in the woods and sustaining himself through once-a-day trips to the local soup kitchen until he amassed enough money to get a room in one of the trailers and buy his own food. Domingo must have thought it was a great stroke of luck when
Cesar Navarrete, a strapping twenty-four-year-old Mexican he met on the streets of Immokalee, not only gave him a job but invited him to crash on his family’s property on South Seventh and even offered to front him some pocket cash. For fifty dollars a week, Navarrete’s mother, who also lived in the house, would provide meals. Domingo could pay her after his first check—a handsome sum. Navarrete, who ran a harvesting crew with his brothers, was willing to pay Domingo one dollar for every bushel-size bucket of tomatoes he picked, more than twice what many crew bosses were offering at the time. As for Domingo’s lack of documentation, no problem. Navarrete knew someone who could get him false papers. Domingo, a Guatemalan in his thirties, had come to the United States with the dream of making enough money so that he could send some home to care for a sick parent. With a little quick calculation, he determined that he’d be clearing $200 a week from Navarrete, leaving him with plenty of spare cash to wire back to Guatemala.