| Fruits of Wrath: Chile's Modernization By Fernando A. Torres © It is winter. Nonetheless we all buy summer-fresh fruit from the local supermarket. Probably those delicious fruits on our tables are from Chile. If that's the case, let me then tell you a story. Fourteen-year-old Ana Muñoz Ibáñez was standing in the middle of the crowded bus looking at the green trees that bordered a dusty road. Her two brothers, Francisco, 18, and Victor, 12, were also standing next to her when the bus violently went off the road plunging into the waters of La Cadena estuary in Punta Cortez, an agricultural region about 15 kilometers of southern Chilean city of Rancagua. In the chaos, Ana grabbed Francisco and Victor firmly. But her thin arms were no match to the pain she experienced from flying broken glass, and to the flailing bodies flying about inside the bus as if there was no gravity. Ana, her two brothers, and the other 67 passengers on the bus were temporeros--farmworkers seasonal employed to pick Chilean fruit. The accident killed three persons, among them Ana. The waters of La Cadena estuary--the same waters that irrigate the fertile lands of the region, swallowed Francisco and Victor. When the police reported on the case, the brothers were still missing. But the accident revealed another crude reality: the poor conditions that temporeros, nomad workers--most of them women--experience throughout the million-dollar fruit season. This warm fruit season has been good news only for big exporters. The exports to the US and Canada have increased by 23 per cent, and by the end of the season, fat growers estimated that temporeros would have packaged more than 1.5 millions of wooden boxes of fruit at a cost of $1.55 million US dollars. All of this is part of the so-called "modernization" of the Chilean economy started by Pinochet's "Chicago's boys" during the eighties. But according to Chilean reporter Ernesto Carmona, this "thriving business conceals a painful portrait of exploitation of unemployed workers and child labor. Under poor working conditions, temporeros provide cheap labor for export prosperity," Carmona said. Exposed to poisonous pesticides, most of then banned in the first world, with no health provisions, nor basic labor and human rights, Chilean temporeros are part of an international market that patronized cheap labor to lessen overhead costs. "Temporeros is a system very similar to the Mexican braceros who harvest fruits in California or the Colombians who travels to work in Venezuela's fruit and coffee fields," Carmona said in a recent article published on the internet. The growers do not hire the temporeros directly. They are subcontracted by the enganchadores. "(This) mafia of subcontractors is like an employment agency, they take about 50 per cent of the temporeros' salary," according to Carmona. "It is an open labor abuse allowed by the authorities and stimulated by the unemployment. Most of them are women. The numbers of birth genetic defects due to the effect of the cheap pesticides are high." It is a system initiated by the Pinochet military regime, where "nobody could complaint and stayed that way throughout the years", Carmona added. The bus accident also uncovered the exploitation of minors. Child labor is very common not only in the fields but also in other sectors such us big city supermarkets. According to Carmona, "everybody pays a child far less than what they have to pay to an adult. In Chile there is an army of children workers." In a press statement, Chile's children and adolescent human rights watch organization Corporación Opción denounced the "brutal ways of the exploitation of child labor in the temporary harvest season by subcontractors aswell as by growers.the craving for profits can not be above human lives." Modernization is a word frequently used among the young CEO's of the Chilean economy today. It means to upgrade and adapt resources and ways to compete in the world economy. It means to invest in the making of new products, to become internationally suitable to enter the overseas markets, to adapt to the ways of the IMF and the World Bank. But the case of Ana and her two brothers show the other face of the coin; a modernization that keeps an archaic and medieval exploitation of labor. And so the sweetness of the orange we peel every morning is tainted by the bitter pauperism of the Chilean temporeros. These are the frutas of Wrath. # # # HOME |