Braceros Demand Lost Legacy

Like the ghosts of a bygone epoch in U.S.-Mexican relations, wizened farm workers are stepping forward to demand that Mexican officials explain what became of millions of dollars that were set aside from their earnings as field hands in the United States half a century ago.

Former farm laborers, many now in their 70s, have shown up at meetings in Mexico and Southern California and fired off angry letters. Hundreds turned out to march here in the Mexican capital last week. They are seeking what they estimate to be $150 million that was to have been held in a Mexican farm bank under the so-called bracero program.

The farm bank no longer exists, and Mexican officials insist that they can find no trace of the savings. The fund was established under terms of a World War II-era treaty that sent as many as 2.5 million Mexicans into U.S. fields until the program ended in 1964 because of a host of abuses suffered by the laborers.

The Mexican government has further riled the workers and their advocates by requiring that individual claims be presented at the nation’s current farm bank. But only 13 branches nationwide have been designated to accept the inquiries.

The aging former laborers, many of whom only recently learned they were owed money, express betrayal.

“I didn’t get five cents. Nothing,” grumbled Floriberto Ventura Canales, 80, who traveled here last week with about 300 other former braceros to find out what became of the money. Ventura said he made many trips to work in the United States during those years, starting in 1947 with a stint picking oranges and lemons in Santa Paula. “We want the funds that we earned. I must have some money saved up for all the time I was there.”

The unusual cause, promoted by activists in both countries, has popped into public view at a key moment: Presidential campaigns are underway on both sides of the border and there are fresh discussions of the need for a renewed guest-worker program to meet U.S. labor shortages. While opponents of a new bracero program cite the missing funds as evidence of the weaknesses of such programs, some Mexican officials suspect those raising the savings issue have a political agenda.

“Why didn’t they make a claim after five years, or 10 years, or 15 or 20 years?” asked Alejandro Romero Gudino, who heads the legal department of Mexico’s National Bank of Rural Credit, or Banrural, the federally run farm-credit bank. “It’s extraordinarily strange.”

The bracero program, established under a 1942 agreement between the United States and Mexico, supplied desperately needed fruit and vegetable pickers and railroad workers as Americans left their jobs to fight in World War II. The temporary visas allowed the braceros, whose name stems from the Spanish word for arms, to earn wages in the United States several times higher than those available in Mexico.

Included in the treaty was creation of the savings fund--under which 10% of a laborer’s pay was to be deducted by employers and transferred through the U.S. government to the Mexican bank--so workers would have money socked away to buy farm implements upon their return to Mexico.

Organizers of the current farm workers campaign contend that most braceros, rural dwellers without schooling, were unaware their contracts provided for such deductions. Only a tiny percentage of the laborers reclaimed the savings, according to Ventura Gutierrez, an organizer in the Coachella Valley who has been active in the campaign to recover the money.

The issue cropped up after labor activists began visiting Mexican towns to advise aging migrant workers on how to apply for Social Security benefits earned in the United States. Some former braceros, clutching old copies of their work contracts, inquired instead about the savings deductions. Organizers were puzzled by the queries until Gutierrez checked an Internet Web site containing the text of the original bracero accord.

Locating the savings fund has proved more of a mystery.

While many of the former migrants safeguarded their documents, the Mexican government apparently did not. The bank designated to receive the deductions, the National Bank of Agricultural Credit, later changed names and eventually was merged with two other government-run banks in 1975 to form Banrural. Searches of the new bank’s files have turned up no mention of a savings fund, and officials say they are barred by law from searching individual accounts without permission from the holders.

“We haven’t found, as a fund, anything. There is no farm workers’ savings fund in Banrural,” said Romero, the bank’s legal director.

Bank officials suggest that the funds may have been withdrawn by the farm workers as intended years ago. But there is no proof of that either. Authorities said the savings program was dropped from the binational pact in 1949, though advocates question whether it was ended in practice.

Advocates for the workers suggest that the money was diverted to government agricultural projects such as irrigation canals and dams. They are suspicious of the official explanations.

“We don’t think Banrural has done a serious investigation,” said Aaron Cabanas, national president of the Union of Mexican Farmers and Emigrants, based in the state of Guanajuato. “If [the money] was used for another government program, tell us.”

Cabanas, whose father was a bracero in Texas, said he has held meetings all over Mexico, registering about 20,000 former braceros or relatives. “I haven’t come across more than 10 people who received their money,” he said.

A former agrarian reform official who once studied the bracero program said the money went toward farm infrastructure in northwest Mexico. “I remember bank authorities saying the money would be better invested in the northwest in agricultural projects,” said Carlota Botey, who was part of a federal interagency review team in 1974 and is now a Mexico City official.

Last week, ex-laborers from central and southern Mexico marched--some limping, others leaning on canes--through the streets here to the Foreign Ministry, the agency that negotiated the bracero treaty and safeguards Mexican citizens abroad. Some had ridden 11 hours by bus from rural villages, toting documents creased and feathery with age. Memories were spotty. Aims were not.

“How much money would they have deducted? A lot. That’s what we are trying to get back,” asserted 85-year-old Mariano Morales Vasquez, who followed the crop harvests on the West Coast from 1942 to 1945. Morales thinks he knows where the savings are. “They’re here,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the Foreign Ministry building.

The Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the case, referring the matter to Banrural. But in a meeting with a union delegation, officials pledged to research the fund’s history and try to unsnarl the matter, Cabanas said.

The Mexican labor activists, who have the support of a federal senator from the country’s left-leaning opposition party, deny that their campaign is an effort to embarrass the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party before next year’s presidential election. They said they have sought backing from all three major Mexican parties.

Analysts in the United States say fresh discussion of old troubles may influence the debate over a new guest-worker program, which opponents view as exploitative.

Arizona Gov. Jane Dee Hull, a Republican, has called for allowing more migrants to cross legally into the United States for temporary jobs in such industries as agriculture, construction and hotels that are strapped for workers. Officials from the two countries have begun talking in the most tentative terms about a new guest-labor program.

Erasmo Gamboa, a historian at the University of Washington in Seattle who has researched the bracero savings program, said the problem should be resolved while the former workers are still alive.

“There is no question this generation is owed,” said Gamboa. “Time does not absolve an obligation.”