Workers’ Futures Blooming After Payments of Fine Against Rancher : Economy: From Ventura to Mexico, checks help pay bills and pave dreams for laborers at infamous Somis flower facility.

For many hard years, Juan Santiago Chavez trekked north to California each spring to grub money to feed his family and to save so he could one day build a fine house in the tiny mountaintop village where he was born.

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But now he works only part time, sleeps in a new two-story concrete home that is among the largest around and still can hardly believe the turn of events that brought him $35,000 last year.

That is a fortune by the standards of his 1,300-person pueblo of adobe huts and goat herds, where Indian farmers coax corn and beans from rocky soil above a rain forest in southern Mexico.

“I’m very happy,” Santiago, 42, said last week, speaking from a communal telephone in San Ana Yareni, a hardscrabble village in his native state of Oaxaca.

For Santiago and about 100 other mountain villagers, long days of toil and depravation on a notorious Ventura County flower ranch during the 1980s finally have been rewarded.

“I believe that this money we received is justice,” Santiago said through an interpreter. “I worked many hours and did not get enough pay.”

After final payments over the next month, authorities will have distributed $1.5 million in back wages and civil awards to about 210 former employees of rancher Edwin M. Ives.

Ives, 58, a Los Angeles resident who became wealthy growing ornamental leaves and flowers, gained international notoriety in 1990, when prosecutors charged him in what they described as the most far-reaching slavery case ever filed by the United States.

Although a federal judge found no evidence of slavery, Ives eventually pleaded guilty to corporate racketeering and to numerous labor and immigration violations for smuggling illegal immigrants to his Somis compound and paying them sub-minimum wages.

Ives still runs his ranch by day--a concession made by the judge to save jobs. But he also spends his nights at a Los Angeles halfway house, completing a one-year sentence. He will serve another two years of detention at his Fairfax District home under electronic surveillance.

“There was a time when he thought he would lose the business, but things have gotten beyond that and are going pretty well now,” said lawyer Stephen B. Sadowsky, who represented Ives. The rancher himself declined comment.

The last payments to Ives’ ex-employees next month--from a fund representing the largest fine ever levied in a U.S. immigration case--will sever the Mexican workers’ ties to a foreign government they never really believed would come through for them.

“I’m surprised how everything ended up,” said Filadelfo Ruiz, 27, today a grocer in Santa Ana Yareni, but an Ives laborer from 1986 to ’87. “Here in Mexico, there is not that type of justice.”

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The payments, ranging from $2,000 to about $35,000 for some workers who were also part of a civil lawsuit, are windfalls that have already changed lives.

Former Ives laborers--both in rural Mexico and Ventura County--said in interviews that ranch employees spent the checks to buy land, build or remodel houses, start small businesses, assist their families or buy vehicles. Others stashed the cash in savings accounts.

In one case, 20 Oaxacans whose homes are near a forest pooled their awards to start a furniture factory that now sells chairs, tables and school desks regionwide.

In Ventura County, Esequiel Ascencio Aguirre, 23, a cook at two Camarillo restaurants, used his small award to invest in his future.

“I bought land in Jalisco, in the little ranch town where my parents live,” he said. “Now I want to build a house on my property.”

And after working double shifts for much of the time since he left the Ives compound five years ago, Ascencio says he has saved enough to move home, marry, and open a small store, perhaps by the end of the year.

“Most of them have invested their money in a good way,” said Irma Avila of California Rural Legal Assistance in Oxnard, which won the civil suit for 29 workers and has helped federal authorities distribute back wages from the criminal case.

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Carol Gillam, a former federal lawyer who prosecuted Ives, said that others speculated the money would be spent and forgotten, but she was sure it would not.

“These people are so cautious and conservative,” she said of the villagers. “And they knew there would never be another time in their lives when they have so much money. I know it’s very important to them to leave a legacy for their children.”

The Ives payments, in fact, have taken on an importance in Mexico beyond any imagined by the authorities in this country.

When a federal delegation flew to Oaxaca last year to distribute about 100 checks worth nearly $1 million to the residents of Santa Ana Yareni and the neighboring pueblo of San Ysidro Aloapan, the nation responded with extensive television and front-page newspaper coverage.

And in a ceremony at the governor’s palace, Gillam and the Oaxacan chief executive took turns handing checks to the peasant workers and their families.

“This was a tremendous thing for the whole state of Oaxaca,” she said. “The money alone was expected to be a boost to the local economy. And they did view it as an extremely significant event in showing the cooperation of the two countries.”

After the ceremony, village families offered their thanks.

“A lot of them embraced me and they cried,” Gillam said. “They said they never thought they would live to see the money.”

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The average check of about $7,000 represented three years’ pay for the typical villager and is enough to build a modest house.

One laborer told Gillam that he had already bid on a plot of land in the capital city of Oaxaca. He hoped to build a new house and move his daughters, so they could continue their education beyond the pueblo’s lone elementary school.

At the back of the palace hall sat bankers who had agreed to deposit the workers’ checks without set-up fees and to issue ATM cards on the spot, so the villagers would not be prey to bandits on their three-hour drive home.

Three months earlier, Oxnard poverty lawyers had handed out civil lawsuit awards to a dozen of their clients who lived in the two Oaxacan villages.

“It was the weirdest thing,” recalled former CRLA lawyer Marco Antonio Abarca. “The bank was filled with middle-class mestizos and upper-class people, and they see these Indians walk in with these fantastic checks in dollars. I think we got the help of the bank president.”

The payments also seemed to have had a healing effect among the so-called “cloud people” of Santa Ana Yareni and San Ysidro, where large extended families have lived communally for generations, always sharing in good fortune and bad times.

The Ives case had split both pueblos down the middle. Cousin denounced cousin.

On one side, dozens of workers stood ready to testify that the rancher had virtually imprisoned them, while an equal number considered Ives a fair employer who had offered them work year after year when no one else would.

Each side accused the other of being influenced by the money they could gain either from Ives or from the authorities prosecuting him.

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Residents from both villages said last week that the polarization largely evaporated with distributions of the checks last year.

“When they delivered the checks in Oaxaca, I spoke to some of the villagers who supported Ives,” said Ricardo Perez Alavez, a San Ysidro resident who sued the rancher. “They said, ‘We supported the owner, but we still get the money same as you.’ So the town has changed to the point where it is the same as before. They don’t talk about it anymore.”

Residents of Santa Ana Yareni tell much the same story. But Fernando Melos, an anthropologist for Mexico’s National Indigenous Institute, said the schism still interferes with traditional village life to some degree.

“Some of the people who were pro-employer still criticize people who did the claims against him,” Melos said, “because they cannot go back to the ranch again. They received money, but they know this money is not permanent income.”

The open flare-ups no longer occur, he said, because neutral family members have worked at maintaining a peace and fostering the cooperative efforts that had always marked village life.

Despite lingering resentment, the effects of Ives’ $1.5 million can be seen all around the two mountaintop villages.

Dozens of residents have planted more crops, added a room or two to their homes and, in the case of grocer Ruiz, bought a new Ford pickup.

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But it was Santiago who benefited most. He shared in the proceeds of the civil lawsuit, about $250,000 divided 29 ways. And he also got $23,500 from the Department of Labor in back wages, the largest award because he worked longer for Ives than any other claimant.

“I kept coming because there was not enough work in my town, and I needed the work,” he said.

After building one of just three two-story homes in his village, Santiago deposited $20,000 in a Oaxacan bank. He says his family can live on the interest and the stipend he is paid by the regional government as a part-time forest ranger.

He plans to return to the United States next year to look for work. But he said the acute financial pressures of the past are gone.

“It has been good, because I don’t have the same problem as before,” he said. “I don’t have the same pressure to work so much.”

Ives employees who stayed in Ventura County, with its steep living costs, have seen their awards eaten away much more quickly. Still, several said they managed to save some of the money.

“I sent the money to my mother in Morelia to fix her house,” said Alfonso Peralta, 25, manager of a garage door company who lives on a pleasant Port Hueneme street.

Pedro Alavez Cruz, 27, a landscaper since leaving Ives’ ranch, exists frugally in a tattered one-room apartment in Ventura’s Avenue area.

“I got my money put away,” he said. One day he may move back to Oaxaca and build a house. For now, his extravagance is a small car a little better than his old one.

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Even Serafin Carrillo, 60, disabled for three years and struggling to make ends meet for his wife and a teen-age daughter in Oxnard’s La Colonia, said his checks paid a stack of debts and provided a nest egg for his daughter in Los Angeles.

“I bought a car,” he said. “But eventually I had to sell the car to pay the rent.” Motioning toward buckets filled with laundry, he said: “Now I don’t even have the money to wash my clothes.”

Those who have pondered the dispersal of the huge Ives fine--both here and in Mexico--wonder out loud about its long-range impact.

Anthropologist Melos said improvements in the mountain villages are obvious.

“They have been able to improve their housing conditions and have money for their primary needs,” he said. “But I don’t think this is something permanent.”

Lawyer Gillam said the payments are important for reasons beyond money, and beyond the lessons they may have taught abusive farm owners.

“It mattered. It mattered a lot. It’s not just a matter of dollars,” she insisted. “From the very beginning these guys talked rather eloquently of recapturing their sense of dignity. And this helped them do that.”

Staff photographer Carlos Chavez contributed to this story.