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FLOC: Mexico Doing Nothing to Solve Organizer’s Murder |
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The murder two years ago of Rafael Santiago Cruz, an organizer for the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) in Monterrey, Mexico, is part of a corrupt system of supplying immigrant labor to harvest crops on America’s farms, says FLOC President Baldemar Velasquez. Over the past two days, Velasquez and members of his union have been in Washington, D.C., meeting with members of Congress and international human rights panels to push for justice in Cruz’s murder.
Yesterday, FLOC brought the case of Cruz’s murder before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), an arm of the Organization of American States. After Cruz’s killing in 2007, the IACHR granted protective measures to Velasquez and FLOC staff located in Mexico.
The Mexican government has done little to solve the case. Of the four people who are known to have participated in the murder, all but one of Cruz’s killers remain at large, said Leonel Rivero Rodriquez, a Mexican human rights lawyer, at a briefing today at AFL-CIO headquarters.
The failure to fully investigate Cruz’s murder is indicative of the anti-union policies of the administration of Mexican President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, who last month took over the country’s second largest electrical power distributor, fired the entire 44,000-person workforce and disbanded their union.
Cruz was found bound and beaten to death in FLOC’s Monterrey, Mexico, office April 9, 2007. The union opened the office in 2005 to help guest workers obtain legal visas to work in North Carolina.
The FLOC office also fights corruption in the recruitment process. Velasquez says union investigations uncovered widespread corruption among Mexican labor recruiters, and Cruz, who had been on the job in Monterrey for less than a month before he was killed, was helping workers obtain legal visas without paying the exorbitant fees demanded by some recruiters.
Velasquez said:
Human rights and labor rights will remain unrealized unless we persist in challenging the criminal elements who would like to use recruitment programs for bribes and extortion.
Most of the workers who are granted visas work on tobacco fields. On the tobacco farms, workers face long hours and unsafe working conditions. But the battle to protect the workers is not with the farmers who directly employ them, Velasquez said. The battle is with the major companies who pay the farmers for their products. That’s the impetus behind FLOC’s campaign against R.J. Reynolds, the giant tobacco company, he said.
The ultimate answer to protecting immigrant workers is comprehensive immigration reform, Velasquez said. But “we can’t wait for immigration reform,” he said.
We’ve got to be out there and defend people and if you do it long enough and good enough, good things happen.
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