Agricultural Personnel Management Program
University of California

9/26/99 News Report -- Associated Press

IRAPUATO, Mexico (AP) -- For five years, Sabino Munoz Montesino watched
layers of his skin disappear.

At the end of each 12-hour day wrestling fuzz from spiky-stalked cotton
plants, scraping dirt from hard asparagus bunches or massaging fat tomatoes
from resistant vines, he felt the welts grow and the flesh flake from his
fingers.

But like 2.5 million other Mexican "braceros" who worked on farms in the
United States between 1942 and 1964, Munoz expected something in exchange
for his dawn-to-dusk workdays north of the border: pay nearly 10 times what
he could earn in his own country.

Some workers apparently ended up with less than they were promised, not
because American companies didn't pay, but because no one knows what the
Mexican government did with 10 percent of the wages that was withheld under
an agreement with the U.S. government.

The money, which some bracero activists say should have grown to about
$150 million by now, was supposed to have gone into a collective savings
fund for the workers, but it apparently has disappeared.

"They were supposed to give it to us, but I think they spent it all," said
Munoz, a 64-year-old who still works the farms outside Irapuato, a town 170
miles northwest of Mexico City.

The bracero program was set up by the U.S. and Mexican governments to give
temporary work visas to Mexicans to help fill a labor shortage in the
United States during World War II.

Now, decades after the last contracts were signed, thousands of ex-braceros
and their survivors are holding rallies, bombarding government officials
with letters and demanding to know where their savings went.

Pressured by the protests, bank and government officials met with a small
group of braceros last month and promised to investigate the 57-year-old
savings fund. They pledged to share everything they find with the braceros
at a meeting scheduled for Monday.

Even if there was no wrongdoing by past governments -- many former braceros
and their supporters think the government simply spent the money -- the
investigation is not an easy one. The savings fund current officials are
looking for was established more than a half-century ago at a bank that no
longer exists, and records may have disappeared.

"It's strange. ... There haven't been any claims for many years, and then
suddenly the problem comes up," said Miguel Angel Gonzalez Felix, a legal
specialist at the Foreign Ministry who is researching the case. "But we are
investigating in good faith."

The National Bank of Agricultural Credit established the savings fund in
1942 for braceros who worked in agricultural jobs. In 1975, the bank merged
with two other financial institutions to become Mexico's National Bank of
Rural Credit, known as Banrural. Banrural officials so far have found no
evidence of an account, spokesman Eduardo Morales said recently.

Some bracero labor contracts -- Munoz has carefully preserved his documents
for more than 40 years in a plastic bag inside a dresser drawer -- state
that 10 percent of the workers' pay would be withheld and put in a savings
account that could be withdrawn from when they returned to Mexico.

Other contracts from different years designated the withheld share for
agricultural tools and projects to benefit the braceros' hometowns. If the
money was not used in that way, braceros could then collect it, the
contracts said.

"We've had meetings with workers in 15 states, and we haven't found more
than 10 people who collected it," said Aaron Cabanas, president of the
Union of Mexican Farmers and Emigrants, a migrant workers group.

Ventura Gutierrez Mendez, general coordinator of the Union Without Borders,
a U.S.-based migrant workers group, estimates only about 2 percent of
braceros ever collected the money owed them from the fund.

No one actually knows how much was deposited in the account, but Gutierrez
estimates that, with interest, it would now amount to about $150 million.

Braceros tried for years to get someone to take up their cause. But it
wasn't until they came forward with copies of their contracts last year
that the advocacy groups began helping them.

"We had no idea of the number of people that would be involved," Cabanas
said. "People just kept arriving. They've been calling us from all over the
country and the United States."

About 2.5 million Mexicans -- including Cabanas' father and Gutierrez's
grandfather -- were agricultural braceros, while 100,000 braceros worked on
U.S. railroads from 1943-46, Gutierrez said.

The railroad workers also had 10 percent of their pay withheld and placed
in a different Mexican bank, said Gutierrez, who estimates about $300,000,
not including interest, should be in that account.

About 1 million braceros have died, while approximately 20,000 ex-braceros
or their survivors have been located -- many of them elderly and living in
poverty, advocates say.

But Gonzalez, at the Foreign Ministry, says not every bracero is owed
money. He said initial research at the ministry indicates that while the
bracero program lasted until 1964, the savings fund existed only until 1950.

For his part, Cabanas acknowledges the missing money might not amount to
much when divided among the ex-braceros, but he contends the government
owes a moral debt to the men who pumped life into an ailing Mexican economy
while working under difficult conditions.

Besides spending grueling 12-hour days under a hot sun, the braceros were
subjected to humiliating treatment, they say.

"They put us in a line, took off our clothes, sprayed us with dust to
fumigate us, and stuck their fingers up our rectums to make sure we didn't
have worms," said ex-bracero Simon Moyo Vazquez.

He said he was awakened at 3 a.m. for breakfast, seven days a week, and
then driven hundreds of miles to work in the fields.

After his long years of toil, Munoz is hopeful he will get something back
from the savings fund.

"We have the hope that they will return the money," he said. "We need it,
and we are fighting for it."