HOW TO FIGHT TRUMP'S ATTACK ON FARMWORKERS

HOW TO FIGHT TRUMP'S ATTACK ON FARMWORKERS
By David Bacon
The Nation, 4/11/25
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/migrant-farmworkers-trump-2025/

On March 25, Alfredo Juarez was driving his compañera to work in the flower fields of Washington Bulb, the largest tulip grower in Washington State. His family, including two uncles, all work there, and until two years ago, he did too. That's when Lelo (as he is known) started working full-time for the union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ).

That morning, however, was anything but normal. In the predawn darkness he saw flashing lights in his rearview mirror and pulled over. As a Border Patrol agent approached the car, Lelo rolled his window down partway. He asked why he was being stopped and if the agent had a warrant. When he reached into his pocket for his ID, however, the Border Patrol cop broke the window. The agent dragged him out of the car as his partner began shouting, demanding to know why he was being brutalized, before the agent took him away.

The Border Patrol first brought Lelo to the nearby Ferndale Detention Center, and then to the giant migrant prison in Tacoma run by GEO Group. Within days, he was lined up to board a deportation flight to Sonora, Mexico. But, without a clear reason, he was called out of line and returned to detention while the others were flown off. There he remains, at least as of the publication of this article.

Meanwhile, workers at Washington Bulb report that ICE agents picked up two more people from the company warehouse.


 

Lelo speaks to migrant farmworkers and their supporters on a May Day march to call for unions and human rights for farmworkers. (David Bacon)


Was Lelo A Target?

The recognition Lelo earned for his years of organizing farmworkers created the pressure that kept him off the deportation flight, according to Rosalinda Guillen, director of Community2Community, the farmworker rights organization of northwest Washington. He joined FUJ when it won a contract at Sakuma Farms in 2017, after a watershed four-year strike and boycott of the giant Driscoll's berry company, buyer of the fruit Sakuma workers picked. After the union stabilized, its members began organizing in the tulip and daffodil fields in the same valley, trying to win better wages there as well.

As a leader of the flower workers' union committee, Lelo and his workmates tried to get an agreement from the company about their pay and rights as the harvest started. At the same time, crowds of tourists began to fill the valley's back roads, gawking at the fields of brilliant blooms, and the workers laboring in them. The union's efforts to fight for workers extended beyond the fields. The week before he was picked up, Lelo spent several days in the state capital, Olympia, trying to ensure that the Keep Washington Working Act would stay in force. The law, won five years ago, prohibits state agencies from cooperating in federal immigration raids. In the Trump era, it is predictably under attack.

Teresa Romero is the president of the United Farm Workers.(David Bacon)


Lelo spoke so many times to so many members of the legislature that politicians know him well. Within hours of his arrest they were already discussing his detention. US Senator Patty Murphy said she was tracking his case. "I don't care what Trump promised on the campaign trail," her statement said. Other expressions of concern came from US Representative Rick Larson and Governor Bob Ferguson.

Unions and immigrant rights groups began demanding Lelo's release. Teresa Romero, president of the United Farm Workers, called for it during a recent march in Delano, California, celebrating Cesar Chavez's birthday. Local groups have mounted continuous demonstrations in front of the Tacoma center.

While this broad coalition tries to free him, immigrant rights activists report that ICE is picking people up on warrants for detention across the country. ICE Director Tom Homan calls all undocumented immigrants criminals, and therefore credible targets for deportation, no matter how many years they've lived in the United States. "Sometimes they have a list," reports Fernando Martinez, organizer for the Mixteco Immigrant Community Organizing Project in Santa Maria, California. "But when they can't find a person, they go for any family member they can find."

Yet Lelo's arrest wasn't just one of many. "ICE claims it had a warrant from 2018," Guillen says. "But it's clear they'd been surveilling him, because they knew when he was leaving for work and what route he'd take. He was targeted because he's been such a visible activist. That's why there's been this massive support for him."  

Guillen believes thousands of people are in ICE's database of immigrants who weren't notified of an immigration court date or somehow were flagged by the system, providing the pretext for warrants. But why was Lelo singled out, Guillen asks, and by whom?

Lelo's supporters believe his detention is another example of immigration enforcement targeting social movement activists, from working-class leaders to students protesting the genocide in Gaza. But his case raises particular questions, Guillen believes, about the use of immigration enforcement against farmworkers.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta marches with Lorena Gonzalez, executive secretary of the California Labor Federation and Yvonne Wheeler, President of the Los Angeles Labor Federation.(David Bacon)


When Lelo spoke in the legislature the Friday before his arrest, he denounced the abuse of farmworkers brought to the United States in the H-2A guest worker program, and the use of that program to displace local farmworkers-almost all of whom are immigrants. His union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, has a long record of opposing the H-2A program because of its exploitation of both guest workers and resident farmworkers. And over the past decade, the union has built a reputation for helping guest workers themselves when they protest abuse or strike against it. That makes FUJ, and Lelo himself, a target in this new era, in which the Trump administration uses detentions and deportations to terrorize workers, while encouraging growers to bring in guest workers to replace them.

Attacks Against Farmworkers

Trump's immigration enforcement strategy is not new. Some of it expands measures already initiated by Republican-held state legislatures. In the last few years, states like Georgia and North Carolina have passed laws mandating that employers use the E-Verify database to identify undocumented employees, and then fire them. Last year Florida passed a law, SB 1718, not only mandating E-Verify but making it a crime to give a person without papers a ride to work, and requiring hospitals to check the immigration status of patients.

During the 2024 election campaign, Democrats and Republicans vied to claim each was more committed to enforcement than the other. After Trump's election, the Border Patrol office in southern California didn't wait for his inauguration. For three days, starting the day after the January 6 certification of Trump's win, agents stopped farmworker vehicles on their way to the fields, and detained workers at day labor sites in front of Home Depot and gas stations.

In the orange and grapefruit groves that supply the winter's few field jobs, the normal cacophony of ladders and voices grew silent, as workers stayed home. "I didn't go to work for two days," Emma, an orange picker, told me. "I have a 5-year-old, and that's the fear, that I won't be able to come home to him. But on Wednesday I went back to work. The fear is great, but the need is greater." Some of her coworkers, however, decided to leave for other areas, or even to go back to Mexico, she said.

Biden officials claimed that the raid was a "rogue operation," but self-deportation-the predictable impact of the raid and the arrests-is also not new. In one four-month period in 1954, at the height of "Operation Wetback," Fay Bennett, executive secretary of the National Sharecroppers Fund reported, "300,000 Mexicans were arrested and deported, or frightened back across the border." As raids drove undocumented workers back to Mexico, the government then relaxed federal requirements on housing, wages, and food for braceros, the guest workers of the Cold War era. In one year, 1954, over a million workers were deported, and two years later, the number of braceros brought to the United States by growers reached 450,000.


 

Guillermina Castellanos and members of Nueva Sol, the new San Francisco organization of day laborers and domestic workers, march behind their banner.(David Bacon)


The parallel wasn't lost on Marc Grossman, who spent a lifetime as communications director for the United Farm Workers. In a Sacramento Bee op-ed in early March, he wrote that the growers' agenda "is replacing the domestic farm labor work force-now comprising both documented and undocumented farm workers-with many more H-2A guest workers."

Grossman highlights the vulnerability of H-2A workers, who can only work less than a year in the United States before returning home and are tethered to the growers who recruit them. "If undocumented workers are mistreated," he wrote, "at least they have the option to leave and work elsewhere. More vulnerable H-2A workers, however, are at the total mercy of employers who control their livelihoods through the visas they obtain for their employees. If H-2A workers complain about abuse, they are immediately shipped home. The H-2A program is practically serfdom."

Trump's Immigration Priorities

Combining deportation and expansion of the H-2A program has been an explicit Trump goal since his first administration. At a Michigan rally in February 2018, he told farmers, "We're going to have strong borders, but we have to have your workers come in." In 2020 then-Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue emphasized the government's support for more H-2A workers. "That's what agriculture needs, and that's what we want," he said. In her nomination hearing, Trump's current secretary of agriculture, Brooke Rollins, told Congress that she'd modernize the H-2A program "to do everything we can to make sure that none of these farms or dairy producers are put out of business [by immigration enforcement]."

The growth of the H-2A visa program, however, has been a bipartisan project. Twenty years ago, the Department of Labor issued 48,336 certifications to growers for workers brought to the United States with H-2A work visas. Eight years later, that number had almost doubled, to 85,248. In Trump's first year in office growers received 200,049 certifications, and in Biden's last year they received 384,900. The total number of farmworkers in the United States is about 2 million, so almost a fifth are now H-2A workers.

In Florida, with its draconian anti-immigrant and anti-farmworker laws, growers' 47,416 H-2A certifications last year covered over half of the 80,821 people employed on its farms. Georgia's 43,436 certifications were for over three-quarters of its 55,990 farm laborers. Of New York's 51,330 farmworkers, 10,294 come on H-2A visas.

 

Narcisco Martinez, an artist whose work is based on the lives of farmworkers, marches with Veronica Wilson of the UCLA Labor Center.(David Bacon)


When Lelo denounced the impact of H-2A certifications in Washington, one big target was the Washington Farm Labor Association (now simply WAFLA), the state's biggest labor contractor. Both WAFLA and the website Save Family Farms-which has a long history of fighting environmentalists and FUJ-lobby hard for growers, who last year received certifications for 35,884 H-2A visas, among the state's 90,166 farmworkers. Save Family Farms calls itself the voice of Washington farmers, and takes credit for defeating overtime pay for farmworkers.

During Trump's first administration, at WAFLA's instigation, Washington State's Employment Security Department and the US Department of Labor agreed to remove the guaranteed piece-rate wage for H-2A workers picking apples, the state's largest harvest. That effectively lowered the wage by as much as a third.

In his last term, in addition to lowering H-2A wages, Trump allowed growers to access federal funds earmarked for farmworker housing, and even use federal labor camps, to house H-2A workers. This December, before Trump took office, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr (who is currently running for governor) asked him to discard the federal rule setting the minimum wage for H-2A workers in the state.

Armando Elenes, UFW secretary treasurer, says bitterly, "On one side of their mouth they're saying they're worried about their workforce, but on the other they're trying to strip away workers' rights from the guest worker program. They don't want to pay the workers what the law requires or provide the housing that the workers need. They don't want to pay for the transportation of the workers. They want to make it as cheap as possible."


 

Lelo and his family.(David Bacon)


What Can Be Done?

The sharp increase in detentions and deportations raises big questions: Will unions be able to organize in this political environment? And can they protest the raids and displacement of immigrant workers who are already residents (including their own members), and at the same time organize and defend the rights of H-2A workers brought by growers to replace them?

Over the last several years, UFW has organized H-2A workers in New York State, where Elenes has headed the UFW effort to use the new state labor law for farmworkers. As a result, the union has won votes on six farms, and has invoked arbitration to force contract negotiations on four of them. California's new law gives farmworkers an easier way to organize. Growers have to bargain if a majority of workers sign union cards; if they don't, the state can impose a contract. The union has won five campaigns covering about 3,000 workers, and has signed two collective bargaining agreements.

 

"Esta es nuestra tierra" -demanding recognition that the land of California's corporate agriculture is unceded land of native people.(David Bacon)


The UFW currently represents H-2A workers under contract in California as well, as a result of organizing drives where resident workers were a majority of the workforce. At D'Arrigo California, for instance, the union contract gives H-2A workers workplace rights while guaranteeing that resident workers can't be replaced.

Other unions also represent H-2A workers, particularly the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, which has a bargaining agreement with the North Carolina Growers Association covering over 6,000 workers.

Roman Pinal, UFW's organizing director, says it will take a lot of work to build unity between immigrant workers residing in the country and the H-2A workers being brought here. "I've heard workers living here say their shifts are being cut from five, six days to two, three days a week, as growers use more H-2A workers. At the same time, H-2A workers have a lot of issues of their own. Growers threaten one group with being replaced, and the other with being sent back to Mexico. We have to help them stick together. And we have to stick together with unions like FUJ as well."

Andres Cruz, a Triqui farmworker and irrigator for D'Arrigo Brothers Produce, came to the march from Greenfield in the Salinas Valley.(David Bacon)


While fear induced by grower threats or immigration raids can be paralyzing, workers aren't always fearful. Guillen says the committee at Washington Bulb was angry at Lelo's detention and plans to organize their own march to protest. "Before the march in Delano," Pinal says, "many farmworkers asked me, 'Is it safe to do this?' Seven thousand answered yes and came." More marches are planned in other parts of the state.

In the end, a strong counterweight to fear of deportation or job loss is the anger many workers feel over the lack of recognition of the importance of their work, and the heavy demands it makes on them. Emma described to me the toll farm work takes on her. "In the oranges I have to climb ladders with a 40 or 50 pound bag on my shoulders," she said. "When I'm bunching carrots, I'm on my knees all day. Every season my body has to learn to adjust to the way my hands and back hurt. It can take an hour and a half to get to the field, and for all that the most I make is $700 a week. And last year 70 percent of the time I only got four hours of work a day because the company hired so many other people."

She resents growers and the government for threatening deportation instead of recognizing the value of her labor. "The company takes advantage of the fear [of deportation by paying] low wages, and sends us to meetings to tell us that the union is bad. We work in the heat and cold to put food on the table [in] this country, but they call us criminals. We need to lift up our voice."

photos from the edge 11 - FAYE OLLISON, PRESENTE!

photos from the edge 11 - FAYE OLLISON, PRESENTE!

Faye Ollison was 92 when she died last week.

It wasn't an easy death because not having money puts you at the mercy of a healthcare system where money is everything.  As her son Terance said over and over, "It's all just about the money."

Faye had health insurance, but it was United Healthcare, a plan she'd kept up from her time working at the UC Berkeley Rad Lab.  When she couldn't get out of bed at home, Terance took her to the hospital.  The nurses were great, but from the beginning the hospital wanted the bed back.  So first they put her on a list for hospice care.  When her doctor pointed out that they hadn't been feeding her, and she began to bounce back after eating a little, United Healthcare said she'd have to be moved to a skilled nursing facility.  The hospital was too expensive.  "But we know all about United Healthcare," her hospital caseworker told us.

The nursing facility was full of patients.  Terance had already had bad experiences with two other ones, from a crisis a year earlier.  "They're all understaffed," he said bitterly, "because money is the only thing that counts to the people that own them."  To United Healthcare too.  

Faye was holding on.  She'd recognize us and try to talk a little.  But eating was a problem.  Her hands, calloused from a lifetime at the lab and then cleaning houses, were too frozen to hold a fork.  A nurse's aide would help her, or Terance would bring a protein shake she could drink with a straw.  But then United said they were cutting off money for the nursing home, to force her into hospice care at home.
 
Terance and I cleaned a space for the bed in her cluttered apartment.  The patient transport van unloaded Faye on a gurney, and brought her in.  The hospice nurse was great, giving her the attention she didn't get in the weeks before.  But sleep had overtaken her.  The next morning Terance called:  "She's gone."  He was crying into the phone.  Another hospice nurse came out, changed her clothes and even got her agency to pay for the coffin.

Faye, who never had much love for funerals or memorials, told Terance she wanted to be buried without any ceremony, in a pine box.  And so she will be.

Faye Ollison was born in the countryside, outside of Gonzalez, Texas, a small town that used to be part of Mexico.   She grew up learning to cook Southern style, with a love of chile that never left her.  When we wanted her to eat in the nursing home, we brought her sausage covered in chile flakes, usually her favorite. 

Gonzalez was a slave county in a slave state, where 384 slaveholders owned 3,168 human beings in the year the Civil War started.  That history was still alive when Faye was growing up - her grandfather remembered his enslaved life.  In the 30s and 40s she went to segregated schools, which weren't desegregated until the mid-60s.  By then she'd long since left for California, a single mother with her son.  Over the years while Faye worked at the lab and cleaning jobs, Terance found work in the Pile Drivers Union, from which he retired.

My mother and Faye were good friends from the time I was a teenager.  When she was trying to get alcohol out of her life, my mom depended on that love and support Faye gave her.  Faye knew everyone in my family, and sent us all cards on every occasion, slipping into the envelope a cartoon from The Better Half, and always a 2-dollar bill.

It was hard the way Faye left this world.  It should have been kinder and more gentle.  Our country has so little respect for the old people who got us all here.  Now we're run by gangsters that Faye, always a radical and a real red in her heart, would call out by name. She knew who they all were, from first to last.

I'm sorry we didn't change the world in time for you to leave it, Faye.  But you would always say goodbye to us by calling out, "We just have to keep on going."

Faye Ollison, presente!

These photographs were taken with Faye's permission, and with the cooperation of her son Terance Reeves, who wants people to know about his mom and her last days.  The last two photos are one from a family album of Faye and Terance as a child, and the other taken on the occasion of Faye's retirement at the Rad Lab.
 

 

WHY IS THE WORLD BANK ATTACKING LAND REFORM IN THE PHILIPPINES?

WHY IS THE WORLD BANK ATTACKING LAND REFORM IN THE PHILIPPINES?
By David Bacon
Dollars and Sense, 3/15/25
https://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2025/0325bacon.html

A banana farmer pulls bunches of harvested bananas to the packing shed on the cable way.  This keeps the bunches from being harmed.


When the Peoples' Power movement brought down Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, land reform was one of its most important demands.  But even after Corazon Aquino had been elected President in the midst of great hopes for change, land reform was still only won at the cost of bloody struggle.  Frustrated at waiting for Aquino to act, ten thousand farmers marched on the Malacañang Palace, and twelve were shot down on the Mendiola Bridge.  

In the tense months that followed, a new constitution was adopted.  Article 13 stated that the purpose of land reform was the "just distribution" of agricultural lands "founded on the right of farmers and regular farmworkers, who are landless, to own directly or collectively the lands they till..." Aquino proclaimed Executive Order 229, a first step,, and Congress then passed the Republic Act No. 6657, the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).

In the years that followed, workers on the big plantations of bananas, pineapples, oil palms, sugar cane and rubber trees sought to become owners of the land where they'd been wage workers.  They transformed into cooperatives the militant unions they'd organized to wrest a decent living from foreign corporations or wealthy landowning families.  Workers were transformed into collective farmers on the plantations where they'd labored for generations.

Today, however, land reform is in danger, from a proposal called SPLIT - Support to Parcelization of Land for Individual Titling.  Parcelization means that commonly-held and collectively farmed lands are divided into individual tiny plots, which can then be sold.  It would make the operation of a large farm impossible.  "Selling of parcelized agrarian lands has been overtly or covertly taking place in many plantations," reports Koronado Apuzen, who helped organize banana coops in Mindanao in the early 1990s, and then established the Foundation for Agrarian Reform Cooperatives in Mindanao (FARMCOOP).  "Agrarian lands have been become the commodity of the realty market."

Support for SPLIT comes from the World Bank, which finances it.  Its proposed budget is $473 million, 78% of which comes from the Bank and 22% from the Philippine government.  The World Bank portion, $370 million, is a loan payable in 29-39.5 years.  This adds to the country's foreign debt of $139.64 billion.  The Philippines is the fifth largest borrower from the Bank, and in 2023 owed it $2.33 billion.  

Given that SPLIT represents a relatively small portion of the money lent by the Bank to the Philippines, its motivation seems more ideological than financial.  The Bank has a long history of pushing market-based proposals for land ownership and development.  Its statement on land policy says "Making land rights transferable allows the landless to access land through sales and rental markets or through public transfers, and further increases investment incentives."  It has provided financing, training and technical help to this end since the late 1960s.  Requests to the Bank for comment and interviews for this article were not answered.

 

Denmark Aguitas catches the bunnch of bananas on his shoulder as it's cut from the tree, and carries it to the cable way, on the DARBCO co-operative farm.

Yussi Titio washes bananas in the DARBCO co-op packing shed.


The Philippine government seems equally committed to this market orientation.  "The President wants it done immediately," according to a recent press statement.  Current president Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos, son of overthrown dictator Ferdinand Marcos, attended SPLIT land privatization ceremonies in four provinces, and according to DAR Undersecretary and SPLIT Project Implementation Officer Jesry T. Palmares, "he wants to feel and know that the agrarian reform that his father started succeed and be in place."   Last May the World Bank extended the implementation period to 2027.

The Philippines is a poor country - the source of migrant workers who travel the world to work because they can't make a living at home.  The cooperatives created an alternative to this forced displacement and migration.  One hundred and eight million Filipinos today inhabit a country of 115,000 square miles in over 7000 islands.  In 1991 there were over 11 million landless farming families, about 40% of the total agricultural population and a number that had more than doubled in 20 years.  Landless families today still number in the millions, while 52% of the country's farmland still belongs to 11% of all land owners, but CARP did make a dent in the concentration of agrarian land ownership..

The law was a complex compromise, and set up a process in which workers could petition to become owners of plantations that had belonged to corporations like Dole and Del Monte.  The government set aside a fund for compensating owners, and according to one study, after 12 years the Department of Agrarian Reform had redistributed 53.4 percent of the Philippines' total farmland, to 3.1 million rural poor households.

SPLIT is likely to allow corporations and elite families who lost land in the Philippine land reform to regain title if poor farmers begin selling small parcels carved from former cooperative lands.  Those companies never gave up their lands easily.  On Dole's former Mindanao banana plantations, banana farmer coops had to fight to make the promise of reform real.  Even after gaining title to the land, control still remained in the hands of the Dole Corporation subsidiary, Stanfilco.  Using its control of the plantation infrastructure, shipping and marketing, it imposed "onerous" contracts with prices so low that the workers-turned-farmers were even poorer than before.

In response, from December 1997 to February 1998 over 2000 members of four coops refused to pick bananas.  Jean Lacamento, now a board member of the Diamond Farms Agrarian Reform Beneficiary Multipurpose Cooperative (DARBMUPCO), remembers that "for three months we lived under the banana trees.  We knew we'd never get out of debt if we didn't win.  We couldn't feed our families or send our kids to the hospital when they were sick."

With support from international food unions and other activists, the coops won, first changing the terms of the "onerous" contracts.  Then they found another buyer willing to take their bananas to Asian markets in Japan, South Korea and elsewhere, the Italian firm Unifrutti, which paid a much higher price.

 

Eleuteria Chacon, chairwoman of the Checkered Farms co-op.

Koronado Apuzen, executive director of FARMCOOP, and former leader of the union for farm workers in Mindanao


The income of the cooperatives' families rose 126% in the first two years after the strike.  Eleuteria Chacon, head of the Checkered Farms Agrarian Reform Beneficiary Multipurpose Cooperative (CFARBEMPCO), says they were able to pay the amortization on their land and the old debts to Stanfilco in 18 years instead of their original 30 year term.  The movement to abrogate "onerous" contracts spread.  Six other coops of 400 small farmers also went on strike against Stanfilco and won.  The coops then set up a marketing arm, the Federation of ARB Banana-based Cooperatives of Davao (FEDCO) and by 2002 it had 16 member coops with 3,588 farmers owning 4,670 hectares of bananas.

Coops experimented with different forms of organization.  Some paid wages and a dividend based on the coop's income.  Others divided the planted areas equally, giving each farmer an income that depended on their productivity.  On the DARBMUPCO plantation, income for its 715 coop members rose from 3500 pesos/month after the strike to 20,000 pesos/month in 2004 (about 57 pesos to the U.S. dollar).  Apuzen and his coworkers organized FARMCOOP to provide technical assistance and marketing help.

"Our struggle began with the Peoples Power strike," remembers Esteban Cequiña at DARBMUPCO.  "We had no hospital or medicine and when our children got sick we had to go to the owners to beg for money.  I remember that I cried in front of the accountant."  
Adds Demetrio Patiño.  "We had to struggle to make ends meet before.  Now I own my own house, I have savings, and I have a car.  I used to get around on a bicycle.  We are still ordinary workers, but now we manage a multi-million dollar business."  

Sustaining a cooperative organization is not easy. Banana farmers send their kids to college, but having educated children creates problems when they're no longer interested in farming.  "I hope that 20 years from now our children will be running the coop," says manager Carmela Pedregosa.  In the meantime, if a member wants to leave, the coop will buy the land to make sure it stays in the coop.  As they get older, coop members rely more on hiring people, many of whom are family members, to do the work in the banana groves.  "Perhaps they will eventually become coop members themselves," Pedregosa says.

The banana coops in particular face another existential problem.  The spread of two fungus infestations, fusarium wilt and black sigatoka, is already affecting thousands of hectares. Banana cultivation as the coops practice it may no longer be sustainable.  Monocrop banana cultivation has a high environmental cost since it exhausts the soil quickly, requiring the application of chemical fungicides to control disease, and chemical fertilizer to keep the soil productive. According to Teodoro Tadtad, former manager of DARBMUPCO, "Now that lands are depleted, the challenge for us coop leaders is the improvement of our lands, the capability of the soil to produce."

Just a few years after getting rid of the "onerous" contracts, FARMCOOP began urging its member coops to begin exploring organic farming because of the rising issue of sustainability.  
According to Kahlil Apuzen-Ito, FARMCOOP's technical advisor, "We are responding to the challenging realities of rural underdevelopment in the backdrop of rapid environmental degradation."  FARMCOOP advocates "a land use and community building movement that strives to harmoniously integrate human dwellings, microclimate, annual and perennial plants, animals, soils and water into stable productive communities."

 

During the 1998 banana strike at Diamond Farms against Dole Corporation, the banana farmers were expelled from their homes and lived under tarps at the edge of the plantation


Facing these problems, however, agricultural coops have received very little help from the Philippine government.  In October, 2022, thirteen coops signed petitions to DAR Secretary Conrado Estrella, asking him to issue an order to protect the agrarian reform program, and in particular the plantation-base cooperatives.  "The right of ownership is not absolute," they stated. The purpose of the land reform mandated by the Constitution is "to promote social justice and to move our country to sound rural development and industrialization based on its fundamental principle that the land has a social function and land ownership has a social responsibility."

The Department of Agrarian Reform ignored the petitions and other protests.  In December, 2024, several coops and advocate organizations met with the World Bank SPLIT Project Team in Taguig City to urge it to drop its support for SPLIT.  They argued that the coops have been starved of government support, and that scarce resources should strengthen them rather than pulling them apart.  

Danny Carranza, Executive Director of KATARUNGAN - the Movement for Agrarian Reform and Social Justice, told the meeting that lack of support "is the main reason why a lot of farmers are discouraged to continue farming. They become bankrupt after devastation from typhoons or drought. And they do not receive support for them to recover and develop."

One coop, the BANASI Farmers Association, received its collective certificate of land ownership in 1997, but is still waiting for formal land titles, which prevents it from accessing financing and other services.  Randy Cirio, a young BANASI farmer and president of the National Confederation of Family Farmers Organizations (PAKISAMA), led a march in 2008 to the Malacañang Palace to reinforce their land reform claim, eventually leading the Supreme Court to award 123 hectares to the coop's members.  

"It took so long," Cirio told Bank representatives. "We marched 444 kilometers to Malacañang, just to fight for our right to land ... Now many developers are showing up to buy it. We fear we will lose all the hardships and sacrifices we made."

PAKISAMA national coordinator Raul Socrates Banzuela said SPLIT undermined the commitment of coop farmers to the land.  "The mentality is that we were not getting any support services, why should we keep [it]?  So we asked, does SPLIT have any components whatsoever that would ensure support services, [to help] farmers increase their productivity and their income?  But there were none."  Coops, he noted, only involved a quarter of the farmers who have claimed land, and they should be encouraged to organize.  "SPLIT, however, instead of supporting the coops, would lead to their dissolving," he warned.  "SPLIT is the nail that will be put into the coffin of the agrarian reform."

 

A worker harvests sugarcane on a plantation in Negros

A sugar worker on the steps of his home in Negros

Workers homes line the street in the company town of a sugar mill in Negros.

 

Officials from the Department of Agrarian Reform are intent on implementing the SPLIT program, rather than supporting cooperatives.  In some cases they have recruited people to claim land that has already been included in long-standing cooperatives.  This took place on the Checkered Farms coop, where according to Eleuteria Chacon, the department is pitting farmers against one another by bringing in new agrarian reform claimants.  "But we've owned the land for almost 20 years," she charged.

Alter Trade Foundation, Inc (ATFI), provides support for small cooperatives of sugar cane producers on Negros, an island in the Visayas.  Earl Parreno, its chairperson, described the 2003 organization of MIARBA, an organic grower.  While ATFI gave them help with training and access to capital, the government offered no assistance.  Instead, DAR suddenly announced it had to parcelize its land, and brought in land surveyors.  "These surveyors are actually surveyors for real estate companies, not for agriculture," he said.  "The technical staff of DAR do not have any knowledge of farming.  What does the World Bank hope to accomplish?"

A report by the Center for Economic and Social Rights and several other organizations, Resisting Agrarian Injustice, notes that the lands of some Negros sugar coops "were acquired through land occupation actions by the then-claimant farmworkers."  Negros has had a heavy presence of the Philippine military for several decades, and land struggles have been caught up in its counter-insurgency activity.  As a result, the report states, "All organizations reported military presence in all steps of the SPLIT process - even at the initial 'consultation meeting' held by DAR with affected ARBs [coop members who are agrarian reform beneficiaries], before any resistance to SPLIT had been expressed."

The report's investigators interviewed farmers on several cooperatives.  "All organizations interviewed reported that soldiers - sometimes accompanied by DAR and village officials, sometimes by themselves - had engaged in house-to-house visits to 'persuade' ARBs to abide by the SPLIT project."  

During the December meeting with World Bank representatives, one Bank staff person alleged that despite the coop protests, participation in SPLIT is voluntary.  One bank document states that "ARBs wishing to continue to farm their land in a communal manner can opt out of the parcelization process."  However, if any group of coop members want parcelization, the process will move forward even if others oppose it, and DAR will simply issue an order to enforce it.  In this environment in Negros, former plantation owners, including members of the Elezalde, Starke and Zayco families, have reasserted claims to land awarded to land reform beneficiaries.

 

 

Jane Algoso was 11 years old, in the sixth grade at the time of the strikes against Dole.  She cut the dead leaves from banana trees, working for two hours before school, four hours afterwards, and a full day on Saturday.  Child labor ended on the plantations that became co-ops.


In February four organizations representing 14,000 small farmers, agrarian reform beneficiaries, indigenous and marginalized rural people sent a letter to the World Bank charging that "those who stand to gain long-term from the SPLIT Project are land developers as well as corporate agri-and non-agribusiness conglomerates ... In addition, the context in which SPLIT is being implemented is one in which farmers have faced security risks." The letter requests the World Bank "to immediately freeze the SPLIT project funding while serious allegations are investigated ...The remaining project funds must not be disbursed without addressing these urgent issues that are upending thousands of livelihoods."

At the December meeting, FARMCOOP's Koronado Apuzen outlined the three basic changes in SPLIT advocated by its opponents.  "Agrarian reform must continue as a social program of the government. Lands [which have already been subject to parcelization] should be sold only to the cooperative, so that it will remain agrarian land."  Funds to pay for the land of coop members who want to sell out should come from the Land Bank of the Philippines, which should also provide money to the coops for research on disease control, farm inputs and credit for farm rehabilitation.  And instead of concentrating on land privatization, the DAR should give adequate support to the cooperatives, in collaboration with NGOs that are already providing it.

"SPLIT is not the answer to the problem of agrarian reform in the Philippines," Apuzen emphasized.  "It will kill agrarian reform."

 

Danilo Carillon was 16 years old, and stopped going to school five years before the picture was taken.  He earned 86 pesos per day (about $2) for bagging 160 bunches.  His plantation did not become a co-op during land reform.

 

Girley PIlones, 11 years old, flattened out plastic sheets used in growing bananas.  The sheets were coated with Lorsban, a pesticide used to kill insects on the banana trees.  Her plantation did not become a co-op during land reform.

photos from the edge 10 - MAGA MEANS MEXICANS AIN'T GOING ANYWHERE

photos from the edge 10
MAGA MEANS MEXICANS AIN'T GOING ANYWHERE
Mexican Communities in US Rise in Protest Against Trump's Deportation Threats
Photographs by David Bacon
Truthout, 3/3/25
https://truthout.org/articles/mexican-communities-in-us-rise-in-protest-against-trumps-deportation-threats/

It's been over a month since Donald Trump took power, after running a campaign soaked in anti-immigrant tirades and threats of mass deportation. The media have concentrated on these threats, but even progressive outlets paid little attention to the responses of the communities threatened. Yet marches and demonstrations have been widespread in Mexican communities.

These protests often take place not in urban centers, which typically receive more media attention, but in the Mexican barrios of the urban fringe. San Mateo is one - on the San Francisco Peninsula south of the city. Fort Bragg is another - a former mill and fishing town three hours north of San Francisco, where Mexican children are a majority in the small city's schools.

These are not the polite petitions of victims pleading for a softer repression. They are angry protests - people are out in the streets, not cowering behind closed doors. They carry signs with denunciations that declare "MAGA: Mexicans Ain't Going Anywhere!" or "I drink my horchata warm because Fuck ICE!"

Young Mexican women - some born here, some who came as children, and others who just arrived - carry U.S. flags, not out of false patriotism, but demanding recognition as an essential people, belonging to this country's fabric. The many, many Mexican flags have important meaning, and are no longer controversial as they were in the big marches of 2006. They speak of pride in Mexico as a country with a progressive government, in contrast to our reactionary one. They demand that the Mexican presence in this country be recognized as well, with rights and respect for Mexican people.

Not all the flags are Mexican or U.S., Hondurans carry their own, as do Salvadorans and Guatemalans. Some marchers wave the Philippines' flag with a similar message - recognition for a community with a century's history, starting with the imperial war that made their homeland a U.S. colony.

These marches with their flags and signs are harbingers of change. They're not yet as large as the protests that took place in 2006, with its millions in the streets. But they are growing. They are overwhelmingly organized and led by young people and women, and they deserve recognition.

The benefit of organized resistance goes beyond fighting immigration raids. The movements of immigrant workers, their families and their communities have historically fought for deeper social change, beyond deportation defense. They've shown great persistence and strategic vision, as they fought threats of deportation while imagining a future of greater equality, working-class rights and social solidarity. That vision is as necessary to defeating repression as action in the streets.

In the flow of people crossing the border, "we see our families and coworkers, while this system only sees money," says Rene Saucedo, an organizer for the Northern California Coalition for Just Immigration Reform, a grassroots immigrant rights organization that has organized marches and demonstrations supporting the Registry Bill. "So we have to fight for what we really need, and not just what we don't want."

Marchers carried signs promoting an alternative to deportation, the Registry Bill, HR 1511. This proposal would open legal status to an estimated 8 million people by allowing undocumented immigrants to apply for legal permanent residence. Some of the anti-deportation marchers were veterans of earlier marches last year and the year before, demanding the passage of this bill.

Stepping out is the precondition for mobilizing the support of a broader progressive community behind these protests. The photographs here can't possibly encompass all the marches or show every aspect of them. Their purpose is to make visible the crucial role of the Mexican community in inspiring a fightback to Trump fascism across the board. They show who's out there organizing and leading it. Their picket signs and flags graphically present their demands.

Because the new Trump regime is seizing the country's databases, and has sophisticated tools to track those it targets, there are no individual captions for these photographs and no naming of the individuals in them. They were taken in recent days in San Mateo and Fort Bragg, California.