Jackson Leads Pesticide Protest March : Poison Suspected of Causing Cancer Deaths Among Children

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, hoping that his cause will live even after his history-making presidential quest comes to a close, led about 1,000 marchers Saturday through this small Central Valley farming community where pesticides are suspected of causing cancer deaths among children.

Tuesday’s round of primaries, including California’s, is virtually certain to mark the end of Jackson’s presidential race. His dramatic and emotional march through modest, primarily Latino neighborhoods in McFarland amounted to a reprise for the Jackson campaign, an opportunity to sound the themes that have carried the candidate far beyond all but one of his Democratic rivals.

Jackson talked about the town’s environmental crisis. But he also spoke of economic justice, of giving power to those who have never known it, of improving working conditions and--perhaps most central to his appeal--of finding “common ground” among people who have focused in the past on their differences.

‘We’re Reaching Out’

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Violence anywhere is a threat to peace everywhere,” Jackson said in a rally after the march. “We who eat from this valley are not separated from those who work in this valley. . . . We’re not finger-pointing. We’re embracing. We’re reaching out.”

Since 1975, California and Kern County officials have documented 12 incidents of cancer and six cancer deaths among McFarland’s children, which is about four times what would normally be expected in this community of less than 6,500. Most of the cases were among children whose fathers worked in the surrounding farm fields.

Some local residents say the actual number of cases has been even higher, and they suspect the cause is the agricultural pesticides. State and local authorities are studying the problem, and have conceded that some of the cases could be linked to the chemicals.

Assemblyman Tom Bates (D-Oakland), co-chairman of Jackson’s California campaign, likened McFarland to “the canary in the mine. It’s telling us something very profound. It’s not just happening in this one community. It’s all over the nation.”

As 29-year-old truck driver Lindolfo Martinez marched Saturday with his wife and two small sons, he spoke of his fear that something in the community is killing its children.

Selling his home and moving is not an option, because “our house doesn’t have any value,” he said. “Nobody wants to buy in McFarland any more.

“We can’t just take off and leave. We’ve got to have help here,” Martinez said.

Jackson offered hope of a solution, he said. “Right now, I think he’s a hero.”

But to others, Jackson was just someone else running for office. One woman, who refused to be identified, watched the spectacle with interest, but skepticism. “It’s political,” she said. “Let’s see if he’ll come back later (after the election) and prove he means this.”

Command of Spotlight

Jackson again demonstrated that his string of recent losses at the polls to the Democrats’ front-runner, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, has not altered his ability to command the spotlight. Along with dozens of celebrities and activists from around the state, he led a trail of national and California news media representatives.

Nor has he lost his touch for finding the dramatic twist.

Debbie Shick, a local farmer, had not planned to march when she attended a meeting with Jackson earlier in the day, but said: “He convinced me that is isn’t a march against anything. It’s a march for something.”

Shick found herself on the front line, with Jackson and United Farm Workers President Cesar Chavez, whose union she said she is “totally opposed to.”

“I’m marching alongside Cesar Chavez in hopes that our goal is the same,” she said, seeming somewhat uncomfortable nonetheless.

Gang Members March

Among the marchers was a small contingent of the Los Angeles gang members with whom Jackson had met earlier in the week. The candidate explained that he had invited the young men to vent their frustrations in “meaningful activity.” Jackson added that he also plans for a group of gang members to relinquish their guns today in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the slaying of another presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy.

The celebrities joining in included Bonnie Raitt, Ned Beatty, Margot Kidder, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Kim Fields and Carl Weathers, whose movie title “Action Jackson” has become one of the candidate’s slogans.

McFarland and several nearby communities have struggled for years to uncover the cause behind their high rate of childhood cancer, low birth weights and infant deaths. Both the state and county have studied the problems, provided more funds to deal with them, but cannot explain them.

Jackson proposed some immediate steps--a health clinic, for example, so the poor could afford to seek medical help at the first sign of disease. He also urged that growers be required to keep records of the chemicals they use, and that no pesticides be allowed on the market until they are proved safe.

Until the mystery in McFarland is solved, however, the tensions and suspicion within the community seem certain to deepen. What the Jackson campaign had scheduled as a media briefing disintegrated into a shouting match, when community activists began accusing each other of misrepresenting statistics.

Some also mistrust the involvement of the United Farm Workers in linking the problems to working conditions. They say the union is exploiting the death of children in hopes of adding force to its three-year-old grape boycott.

And some do not rule out the possibility that the deaths are merely a statistical fluke. They note that the children have been diagnosed with nine different types of cancer, which suggests that there is more than one cause.

Sandra McFarland, a lifelong McFarland resident and 35-year-old mother of four, does not blame the pesticides, even though her teen-age sister’s leukemia death in 1975 is one of the statistics being cited by the state.

She noted that her family has a history of cancer, and said: “It’s hard for me to jump up and down, and say that the town is killing everybody.

“We don’t need politics here,” McFarland said. “We need money; we need health care; we need education.”