On November 17th, 2010, The Hewitt School had the privilege to hear Lucas Benitez and Abel Barrera Hernandez speak about their achievements. Both of these men are champions of human rights – they have achieved their goals of improving the lives of others through their hard work and dedication.
Lucas Benitez was the first speaker to present. He has worked for the betterment of labor rights with a focus on migrant workers. Benitez came to Imalokee, Florida when he was seventeen years old, and said he was hoping to find the “American dream” just like so many other people.
Benitez began working on a farm and saw first hand how his own and other people’s rights were violated. He wanted to make a change in the labor system – he wanted to fight for better wages, better hours, and more respect.
And Benitez did just that. In 1993 he founded the Coalition for Immokalee Workers, a community based worker organization in Immokalee Florida, a town twenty-four miles away from Naples. This group focuses on achieving real world results that would improve the lives of farm workers.
The organization works to sign Fair Food Agreements with corporations. According to Benitez these agreements, “seek to improve wages and working conditions for Florida tomato pickers by calling on major buyers of tomatoes to pay a premium of one penny more per pound for their tomatoes. It is ensured that this penny is passed down directly to the farm workers wages….they are all guaranteed better treatment, such as breaks and shade from the sun.”
In order to understand the full meaning of the Fair Food Agreement, one must understand why the farm workers are treated so poorly in the first place. Benitez says that it is because, “large corporate buyers — companies such as Publix, Ahold, Kroger and Wal-Mart — purchase a tremendous volume of fruits and vegetables, and this leverages their buying power to demand the lowest possible prices from their suppliers. This, in turn, exerts a powerful downward pressure on wages and working conditions in these suppliers’ operations.”
The Fair Food Agreement targets the flaws in these farmers workforce, and Benitez says the abuses “are still bad, but before it was actually much much worse.”
When asked if he saw the abuse many of these workers endures, he grimly nodded yes. He told the audience of a specific experience that made him understand the severity of the situation. He shared how, one day, he saw signs on the property where he worked, warning the workers to bring their pets inside because it was supposed to be over 100 degrees. Benitez was shocked that the animals were to be brought inside, but yet the workers were still expected to work. “We were treated like animals,” Benitez recalled. After working for a number of hours, Benitez took a break. That was, until the contractor saw and began to verbally abuse him, and, shortly after, physically abuse him. Benitez said that the following day he was left without a job, and only with the comfort that this was common for many other farmers.
The fight for the Fair Food Agreement has been very successful; as of now, Benitez’s organization is working with corporations such as Burger King, McDonalds, Whole Foods, Taco Bell, and Subway.
The Coalition does not have enough money to send lobbyists to Washington D.C., so Benitez stressed that students hold a pivotal role in helping the Fair Food Agreement progress. He noted that, in many of the schools he has spoken to, students have gone to fast food restaurants and given letters to the manager in which they expressed their support for the Fair Food Agreement. In the end, after hundreds of letters, twenty-five Taco Bell franchises closed temporarily.
Following Lucas Benitez’s presentation, Abel Barrera Hernandez took the stage. He is the founder and director of the
Tlachinollan Human Rights Center in Guerrero, Mexico. His work focuses on human rights abuses resulting from military impunity and narco-violence. These abuses include rape, arbitrary detentions, intimidation, dispossession of lands, illegal interrogations, and forced disappearances.
Hernandez begins his presentation by describing his home village. He says there are people suffering because they do not have enough to eat, the indigenous women are abused by men, and the children are born in homes without a doctor present. Hernandez says that there are many more impoverished villages like his own throughout Mexico, and that the government does nothing to try to better the lives of its poorest citizens.
Hernandez described how those who fight for their rights are targeted and harassed by the government. When a student asked why the government ignores the indigenous people, he responded that the government is reluctant to recognize that they have the same rights as people who work in companies. Hernandez added, “Instead of feeling guilty for a woman who is without shoes, the government sends troops to brutalize her…Those who seek out a better life are sought out and assassinated.”
Hernandez gave a personal example of a woman he worked with who experienced the horrors of injustice.
In 2002, a small village in Mexico began organizing themselves for a protest against the government for ignoring their rights. The government was not pleased and sent soldiers to the village. Valentina was a seventeen year old member of this indigenous village who had just given birth, and under Mexican law, was still considered to be a child. She went to wash her clothes at the nearby creek, when military officials arrived and began harassing her. Not speaking Spanish, she could not respond nor understand what they were saying. As the situation progressed, the military troops became angry and beat her until she became unconscious. They then raped her. When Valentina awoke she ran to closest doctor two hours away who refused to attend to her. Her village then went to the government, which did not respond. Instead, they continued to threaten the village to such an extent that, in 2003 Valentina had to leave her village, and eventually, flee the state.
Hernandez stated that there have been hundreds of other cases similar to Valentina, and that his organization wants to fight against government sponsored injustice: “I can’t be an accomplice of these injustices. I can’t permit that those who give us food are hungry.”
Hernandez’s work has placed him and his colleagues under a constant death threat. Still, they persist in their cause. That night, the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award recognized Hernandez for his determined efforts to better the lives of the indigenous people in Mexico.
Both Lucas Benitez and Abel Barrera Hernandez have helped change the world through their fight for human rights. That fight continues, and their work calls on Hewitt students to get involved.