Hundreds of Minors Rescued from Slave-Like Conditions on Mexican Farms Nicole Akoukou Thompson - Latin Post
go to original April 20, 2015

Alejandrina Castillo, 12, picks chile peppers near Teacapan, Sinaloa.  (Don Bartletti/The Los Angeles Times)

Four-hundred children and young adults were liberated from slave-like conditions, after being subjected to exhaustive work at Mexican farms for a year, according to Alfonso Navarrete, secretary of labor in Mexico and a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Navarrete has urged Mexican authorizes to tackle the root of the problem. Apparently, the Mexican farms that were penetrated by authorities are only part of something far more sinister. El Universal, a daily Mexico City news publication, remarked that at one point, 3 million children were put to work in Mexico. Within the last two years, that number has dropped to 2.5 million, but the problem persists.

The secretary of labor spoke to El Universal and said the method to solving the problem is recognizing the harsh reality with which they're faced and tackling the systematic abuses rooted throughout the nation, evident by the farms and child labor abuses that appear in many regions (Sinaloa, Baja California Sur, Baja California, Zacatecas, Michoacan and Guerrero). The secretary indicated that exploitation and child labor is made possible by the economic cavities that poverty leaves. He also said that child labor does not improve a family's outcome.

Twenty percent of farmworkers in Mexico are minors, below the age of 18, according to the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. And according to the blog Mexico Voices, workers are made to work 15 hours each day, and 80 percent are unable to visit with doctors to tend to accidents and illnesses. The blog also alleged that from 2007 to 2015, at least 40 children have died in farm fields.

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