By James  Parks AFL-CIO Now Blog November 6, 2009

The murder two years ago of Rafael Santiago Cruz, an organizer for
the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) in Monterrey, Mexico,
is part of a corrupt system of supplying immigrant labor to harvest
crops on America's farms, says FLOC President Baldemar Velasquez.
Over the past two days, Velasquez and members of his union have
been in Washington, D.C., meeting with members of Congress and
international human rights panels to push for justice in Cruz's
murder.

Yesterday, FLOC brought the case of Cruz's murder before the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), an arm of the
Organization of American States. After Cruz's killing in 2007, the
IACHR ruled that the murder was committed for political purposes
related to the work of FLOC in defense of the rights of migrant
workers and granted protective measures to Velasquez and FLOC staff
located in Mexico.

The Mexican government has done little to solve the case. Of the
four people who are known to have participated in the murder, all
but one of Cruz's killers remain at large, said Leonel Rivero
Rodriquez, a Mexican human rights lawyer, at a briefing today at
AFL-CIO headquarters.

The failure to fully investigate Cruz's murder is indicative of the
anti-union policies of the administration of Mexican President
Felipe Caldersn Hinojosa, who last month took over the country's
second largest electrical power distributor, fired the entire
44,000-person workforce and disbanded their union.

Cruz was found bound and beaten to death in FLOC's Monterrey, Mexico,
office April 9, 2007. The union opened the office in 2005 to help
guest workers obtain legal visas to work in North Carolina.

The FLOC office also fights corruption in the recruitment process.
Velasquez says union investigations uncovered widespread corruption
among Mexican labor recruiters, and Cruz, who had been on the job
in Monterrey for less than a month before he was killed, was helping
workers obtain legal visas without paying the exorbitant fees
demanded by some recruiters.

Velasquez said:

Human rights and labor rights will remain unrealized unless we
persist in challenging the criminal elements who would like to use
recruitment programs for bribes and extortion.

Most of the workers who are granted visas work on tobacco fields.
On the tobacco farms, workers face long hours and unsafe working
conditions. But the battle to protect the workers is not with the
farmers who directly employ them, Velasquez said. The battle is
with the major companies who pay the farmers for their products.
That's the impetus behind FLOC's campaign against R.J. Reynolds,
the giant tobacco company, he said.

The ultimate answer to protecting immigrant workers is comprehensive
immigration reform, Velasquez said. But "we can't wait for immigration
reform," he said.

We've got to be out there and defend people and if you do it long
enough and good enough, good things happen.

http://blog.aflcio.org/2009/11/05/floc-mexico-doing-nothing-to-solve-...
rs-murder/

This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from
http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm

__._,_.___

Your email settings: Individual Email|Traditional Change settings
via the
Web<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/progchat_action/join;_ylc=X3oDMTJmMzZvb...
F9TAzk3NDc2NTkwBGdycElkAzk5MjY1NDAEZ3Jwc3BJZAMxNzA1MDYwMzc1BHNlYwNmdHIEc2xr A3
N0bmdzBHN0aW1lAzEyNTc1NzU5MjI-> (Yahoo! ID required) Change settings
via email: Switch delivery to Daily
Digest<mailto:progchat_action-dig...@yahoogroups.com?subject=Email%20Delivery
:%20Digest> | Switch to Fully
Featured<mailto:progchat_action-fullfeatu...@yahoogroups.com?subject=Change%2
0Delivery%20Format:%20Fully%20Featured> Visit Your Group
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/progchat_action;_ylc=X3oDMTJkZWhoM2hrBF...
Dc2NTkwBGdycElkAzk5MjY1NDAEZ3Jwc3BJZAMxNzA1MDYwMzc1BHNlYwNmdHIEc2xrA2hwZgRz dG
ltZQMxMjU3NTc1OTIy> | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use
<http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/> | Unsubscribe
<mailto:progchat_action-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com?subject=Unsubscribe>

__,_._,___