Nobodies Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy

Florida On April 20, 1997, at around 10 p.m., the Highlands County, Florida, Sheriff's Office received a 911 call; something strange had happened out in the migrant-worker ghetto near Highlands Boulevard. The "neighborhood," a mishmash of rotting trailer homes and plywood shacks, was hidden outside the town of Lake Placid, a mile or two back from the main road. By day, the place was forbidding and cheerless, silent, its forlorn dwellings perched awry, in seeming danger of oozing into the swamp. By night, it was downright menacing, humid and thick with mosquitoes. When the sheriff's officers arrived, they found an empty van parked beside a lonely, narrow lane. The doors were closed, the lights were still on, and a few feet away, in the steamy hiss of night, a man lay facedown in a pool of blood. He had been shot once in the back of the head, execution-style. Beyond his body stood a pay phone, mounted on a pole. The 911 caller had offered a description of a truck the sheriff's officers recognized as belonging to a local labor contractor named Ramiro Ramos. At 1:30 a.m., officers were dispatched to Ramos's house. It's unclear how much the officers knew about the relationship between Ramos and his employees. Migrant farmworkers-nearly all undocumented Mexican and Central Americans, in this case-usually arrive in this country with little comprehension of English or of American culture. Since they frequently come with little money and few connections, the contractor, or crew boss, as he's often called, often provides food, housing, and transportation to and from work. As a result, many farmworkers labor under the near-total control of their employers. Whether the sheriff's officers were or weren't clued in to the fraught implications of this dynamic, they would undoubtedly have gained insight into Ramos's temperament if they'd known the nickname for him used by his crew of seven hundred orange pickers. They called him "El Diablo." At Ramos's house, police found a truck fitting the caller's description. When a quick search of the vehicle yielded a .45-caliber bullet, police decided to bring in Ramos, his son, and a cousin for questioning. Interrogated at the station house, Ramos admitted that the night before, he had gone driving around the dirt roads outside town, collecting rent from his workers and looking, he said, "for one of his people." But when the police asked him if his search had any connection with the shooting, he said he didn't know anything about it. According to the sheriff's report, Ramos at this point became "upset" and said he wished to leave. He and his relatives were released. The deputies went into the night, looking for migrant workers who might be willing to offer additional testimony. Witness by witness, a story began to take shape. The dead chofer, or van driver, was a Guatemalan named Ariosto Roblero. The van had belonged to a servicio de transporte, a sort of informal bus company used by migrants. The van and its passengers had been heading from South Florida, where orange season was ending, to North Carolina, where cucumber season was getting under way. Everything seemed fine until they hit the migrant ghetto outside Lake Placid. Roblero had stopped to to make a pickup. And then, as the van waited, a car and a pickup truck raced up, screeched to a halt behind and in front of it, and blocked it off. An unknown number of men jumped out, yanked the chofer from his seat, and shot him. The other driver and the terrified passengers scattered into the night. With each new detail, an increasingly disturbing picture of Ramos's operation began to emerge. El Diablo, it seemed, had been lending money to his workers, then overcharging them for substandard "barracks-style" housing, gouging them with miscellaneous fees, and encouraging them to shop at aBowe, John is the author of 'Nobodies Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy', published 2007 under ISBN 9781400062096 and ISBN 1400062098.