Village weeps for lost sons

By Tom Knudson and Hector Amezcua -- Bee Staff Writers
Published Sunday, January 29, 2006

Family and friends of forest worker Antonio Ramírez Pablo, 23, carry his casket Monday to his tomb at the Todos Santos cemetery. He and Gonzalo Ramírez Pérez, 16, were killed in a van accident in Washington in December. Half of the concrete tomb was painted in the colors of the American flag, the other half the Guatemalan flag. Sacramento Bee/Hector Amezcua

Two young men killed in a van accident in Washington were buried last week in the Guatemalan village they had fled for better fortunes to the north. It is a flight that is not only costing lives, but tearing at the fabric of an ancient culture.

TODOS SANTOS CUCHUMATAN, GUATEMALA

Mile after mile, the Mayan villagers gathered along the mountain road, watching and waiting.

As the funeral caravan approached, they spilled into the rutted road to offer flowers, crumpled Guatemalan currency, food and condolences. The men - dressed in traditional red-striped pants - kept their emotions in check. But the women, in beautifully hand-woven red and purple blouses, rubbed their eyes and wept. Some wailed.

Inside a minivan leading the procession, 16-year-old Gonzalo Ramírez Pérez lay in a white coffin. Just behind, inside another coffin in the bed of a Toyota truck, was the body of Antonio Ramírez Pablo, 23.

They were the sixth and seventh villagers from this tiny indigenous Mam community to die in van accidents in the past two years while toiling as forest workers in Washington state. All told, 23 Latino forest workers have died in van accidents across the United States since 2002 - 11 of them from Guatemala.

"Right now, we are in total sadness," said Roberto Ramírez Jerónimó, the father of Gonzalo Ramírez Pérez, standing in dusty work boots in front of his adobe home. "All of us are afraid. We are worried about what is happening."

Peril is no stranger to the legions of Central Americans who cross the border to work in the United States. But to most U.S. citizens, those risks are well hidden and the lives, when lost, go unsung.

Guatemala

Yet there was more to the tears in Guatemala last week than remembrance and sorrow for the men whose bodies the town had waited more than a month to welcome home.

In the tiny mud-brick houses with dirt floors and wood cooking fires, in the toothless smiles and tattered sandals, was poverty so dire it has forced many to flee, illegally and at great risk, to America for jobs. And in that exodus is the latest threat to the much-persecuted Maya: a famine of fathers and a younger generation that now looks north - instead of to their native land - for sustenance.

"There's not enough land to support all the people," said Matthew Geyman, a Seattle attorney who represented families of four of five villagers killed in an accident in Washington in 2004.

"Coming to the U.S. is breaking families apart," he said. But when workers are killed on the road in the United States, "it is breaking them apart forever."

The 100 to 200 villagers from Todos Santos who journey north to Washington each year are part of a much larger tide of an estimated 20,000 Mexicans and Central Americans who work in forestry occupations across the United States every year, on public and private land.

Largely unseen, they plant trees, thin plantations, gather floral greens and slash out brush and dead trees that fuel forest fires. But they do so amid great danger, both in the woods and in long-distance commutes to work in overcrowded, unsafe work vans, problems explored in a recent Bee series titled "The Pineros: Men of the Pines."

Since 2002, the toll of those killed in van accidents has fallen disproportionately on Central America. Of the 23 known to have died, 21 were from Guatemala and Honduras. The other two were Mexican.

"These men provide a very cheap source of labor in an area where there are few, if any, domestic workers willing to provide service at any cost," said Jack Scarola, a Florida lawyer who represented families of four Guatemalans and nine Hondurans who drowned in 2002 when their van overturned in a Maine river on their way to a thinning job.

"This is extraordinarily difficult and dangerous work," Scarola said. "We take advantage of the economic desperation of the Central American workers for whom we hold out the hope of the American dream but, in fact, deliver to them a nightmare."

In Washington, the migrants from Todos Santos work at a specialty job: they harvest the waxy, wilt-resistant branches and leaves of a species of brush called "salal," which is a mainstay of the floral industry and is shipped around the world for use in bouquets and wreaths.

Demand for the greens is nearly insatiable - a match for the Guatemalans' hunger for work.

"We have a pretty hefty floral greens industry here in the U.S., but over in Europe, it is multiplied by a huge factor," said Mark Savage, manager of the special forest products program for Washington's Department of Natural Resources.

"In Europe, it is a standard custom that there are fresh floral greens on the table almost all the time," Savage added. "It's a big deal. Just like you buy milk or orange juice, you buy a bouquet of florals - which have salal."

Savage has seen the demand firsthand in large floral greens warehouses on a trip to Amsterdam. "Some of the operations are absolutely enormous," he said. "I got tired walking through one. They have chairs where you can sit down and rest. You could land a small jet in some of those things."

In Washington, salal is part of a niche market for the nontraditional forest products industry - which includes evergreen wreaths and mushrooms - worth an estimated $236 million a year wholesale. But its financial success is not enriching the Todos Santos pickers.

Like many undocumented workers, they labor in harsh conditions, without workers' compensation or health insurance.

They thrash through thick brush, in pounding rain and even snow, harvesting the nicest-looking leaves and branches, from private timberland and national forests. They are paid by the bundle and earn about $35 to $45 a day.

The packing companies say the Central Americans are not employees but independent vendors, and are therefore not eligible for benefits. If companies had to pay benefits, costs would rise and wholesalers in Europe would instead get their brush from Canada, said Tom Keeler, a transportation manager for Hiawatha Inc., a Washington brush company.

"It's so competitive," Keeler said. "It would dry up the industry."

The U.S. Forest Service, which earns money selling permits to pickers, also distances itself from responsibility.

Both of the recent accidents occurred as Todos Santos villagers were driving long distances in crowded vans to brush fields on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. The 2004 crash, which claimed five lives, happened 13 miles west of the forest and the second, on Dec. 19, six miles west.

"We're very sympathetic to the plight of pineros. They certainly have a very difficult life," said Tom Knappenberger, a spokesman for the Gifford Pinchot forest. "But the safety of people driving to and from the national forest, outside the national forest, is outside the scope of our authority."

Geyman, the Seattle attorney, said someone has to be accountable. "There is no one in this system who is stepping up and saying, 'I will comply with worker safety laws, minimum wage laws.' No one is doing that," he said.

Washington's Department of Labor and Industries is trying to sort it all out. It has audited 26 brush companies and found that in 14 cases, brush pickers were, in fact, employees - and entitled to benefits if injured.

"The industry has been underground for so long that business practices are hard to untangle," said spokeswoman Elaine Fischer.

Labor law is not a high priority for the Guatemalan pickers, most of whom have something else on their minds: earning much-needed U.S. dollars to send home to poverty-stricken Todos Santos.

"Here, we labor as campesinos," said Roberto Ramírez Jerónimó, father of 16-year-old Gonzalo Ramírez Pérez, who died in December. "We dedicate our lives to maize, potatoes and other vegetables. For us to have a little bit of extra money - well, there isn't any.

"All we have is just enough to survive," Roberto added. "That's the reason one starts to think about leaving your village. Not for any other reason."

Indeed, poverty's signature is scrawled everywhere in Todos Santos, which clings to the side of a deep green valley in Central America's highest mountain range, the Cuchumatanes, not far from Mexico. You can see it in the corrugated metal roofs streaked with rust, the missing teeth of those who can't afford dental care, and the bare feet of old women and children walking along dirt trails.

When work is available, it pays just 20 Guatemalan quetzales a day - about $3 U.S. Faced with such bleak economic prospects, young men - and even some women - from Todos Santos take extraordinary risks to break free.

To get to the United States, where they work not just in forestry in Washington but in gardening in California and meat-packing in the Midwest, they must cross not only the U.S. border illegally, but Mexico's, too.

It is a costly journey. Villagers say they must borrow about 30,000 quetzales ($4,000 U.S.), to pay smugglers - a debt compounded at 10 percent a month. Not everyone makes it. Some have died in desert crossings and others have been caught and deported.

Nonetheless, José Pablo Mendoza - the father of three brush-pickers in the U.S., including two critically injured in van accidents - said the risks are no deterrent.

"What can I say?" he said, while attending a wake for his neighbor's son, Antonio Ramírez Pablo, last Sunday. "Our land is poor. If they must go, so be it."

For one picker, the dangers include criminal charges. Rene Ramírez Pérez - the 20-year-old driver of the van that crashed in December and the brother of Gonzalo, who was laid in his tomb Monday - sits in a jail in Washington charged with vehicular homicide and felony hit-and-run.

His mother, her eyes puffy and red, wept inconsolably as Gonzalo's body was returned home. On Nov. 8, Gonzalo - who liked to play drums and joke around with his friends - had told her goodbye as he left to help Rene. Now, here he was in a casket outside her doorstep.

"One is dead. And the other is in jail," said Feliciano Pérez Pablo, 38, barefoot in the dirt. "I feel like they are both dead. All I do is cry. I just want Rene to be free."

The flight of villagers to the north also is tearing at the threads of a Mayan culture that is one of the most intact in Guatemala and, because of its weaving tradition, one of the most colorful, too. In one tiny village of 120 families just outside Todos Santos, 45 men are working in the United States.

"It's very disruptive," said Robert Beattie, a Canadian religious worker who lives in the village. "The guys are no longer available to work on community projects, so the load falls on others."

The shortage of young men, husbands and fathers is having an impact in the fields, too. "Every year, more and more cornfields are not being planted," said Roman Stoop, a Swiss tourist guide who lives in Todos Santos. "This year I've even seen women working in the cornfields. That's new."

The flood of currency back to the Mayan highlands also causes changes. In Todos Santos, land prices are rising - as families with wage earners in the United States snatch up prime pieces of real estate. Big houses built by Mayans with U.S. dollars are going up all over town - next to tiny, dirt-floor adobe huts.

But cultural strains were a distant issue to those grieving last week. Devastation fell especially hard on Prudencia Pérez Escalante, a mother of two - and now a widow at 21.

"I am full of pain and sadness," she said in her native Mam language at a wake Sunday for her husband, Antonio Ramírez Pablo. "I don't have a house. I don't have any money to buy clothes for my children." And, she added, she must somehow pay off the 7,500 quetzales ($1,000 U.S.) Antonio still owes for his trip north.

Beside her husband's casket Monday, Prudencia leaned over for one last look. Strapped to her mother's back, 3-year-old Antolina Ramírez Pérez, pointed to her father and said: "Papá, papá."

Even as he was brought home and interred, Antonio's ties to the United States - and the value of his work as a salal picker - were honored. Half of his concrete block tomb was painted in the colors of the American flag, the other half in the Guatemalan flag.

Those ties had been evident on Sunday as well, as his casket was opened at the wake. A fellow brush picker, Mariano Matias Mendoza, reached in and removed a wreath - sent by Todos Santos brush pickers in Washington made out of salal.

Slowly, Matias Mendoza lifted the wreath above his head. As mourners' eyes turned up, gazing at the brush Antonio worked and died for, his sister wailed and the sound of her voice drifted across the fields.

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