Children Slaves Laborers: Drug Fields to Big Ag Fields

Yaqui for Borderland Beat from: PorEsto

                           "Slave children": They suffer abuses of all kinds in drug plantations

The executive director of the Network for the Rights of Children, Juan Pérez García, said that child labor ranges from family or community employment, to slavery in planting and cultivation of the poppy crops.

The most worrisome is that children are recruited, kidnapped or forced to participate in illicit activities, as there are complaints about the slavery of children and adolescents who are forced to work in marijuana plantations, he said.

Such are the cases of the States of Guerrero, as well as in the so-called Golden Triangle of the Sierra de Sinaloa, where there are "uprisings" of young people from primary and secondary schools.

He recalled that there are reports of attacks on secondary schools in Guerrero, where minors are taken to work on the marijuana harvest. 

In Veracruz they have even closed schools to prevent them from "raising" minors, many of whom are never seen again, he said.

In an interview with Notimex, Pérez García said that child labor is the result of economic inequality, since 47 % of families in Mexico live in and suffer from poverty.

He added that when data on children or people under 18 are disaggregated, poverty reaches 53% of the almost 22 million children and adolescents, according to data from the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Coneval). 

Of that realm, he explained, 4.7 million are in extreme poverty and face difficulties to eat at least once a day, which explains why there are more than three million of them engaged in economic activities between five and 17 years of age.

                       Children participating in the long labor strike, San Quintin, Baja, Ca 2017

Most of them,  eight out of 10 work in small units, and of those more than 3 million, about 500,000 perform domestic work, mainly women, and 2.5 million are in the agricultural sector or family workshops and sales of services.

He explained that there are three types of economic activity carried out by minors, such as family or community activities that are not necessarily pernicious: There is what they do for a third party, where they are actually hired; and there are illicit activities, where they suffer exploitation and may even be enslaved.

In rural communities it is a traditional practice for parents to pass on to their children their knowledge about planting and cultivation, as well as the use of land, involving them from a young age, which does not mean that they leave school or stop playing or are at risk.

Something similar happens with other activities such as street trading, he said, although there is a common denominator: these are families that suffer extreme poverty, where children's work is part of the family as a whole's  income.

The one that is done by contract, exposed, particularly in urban areas, is done mainly in the construction industry, where it is a priority to hire indigenous adolescents, who are urged to obtain an income, without knowing their labor rights and many are illiterate and do not even speak Spanish.

Similar cases are seen in the mining industry and, of course, in the agricultural sector, where entire families travel from Oaxaca or Guerrero to the fields of Sinaloa, Sonora and Baja California, to mention the most notable.

These last activities are pernicious, because they can mean the loss of school, risks to their health, absence of rest days and sometimes even excessive violence and, despite this, hiring can be legal, since the Labor Law allows an adolescent of 15 years and above work with the supervision of the Secretary of Labor.

Minors who are hired face several disadvantages, such as the fact that they receive less salary than an adult worker and can not be registered in the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS), nor be part of unions, nor do they have the opportunity to present legal resources are subject to some injustice.

"They are exploited, they bring an economic benefit to the family income, but they have many disadvantages that make them totally vulnerable," he said.