Bracero Rights Activist Says He Was Kidnapped in Mexico

An organizer for aging Mexican laborers who are trying to recoup millions of dollars they claim is owed them by the Mexican government said Tuesday that he was recently the target of a violent kidnapping in Mexico City.

At a small news conference on Olvera Street in Los Angeles, longtime labor leader Ventura Gutierrez alleged that he and a female colleague were abducted by Mexican federal agents April 11, interrogated for about 45 minutes, then suddenly released after Gutierrez revealed that he is a U.S. citizen.

His story about the kidnapping could not be independently confirmed.

In Mexico City, a U.S. Embassy spokesman said American officials took note of his alleged mistreatment when Gutierrez presented himself at the U.S. Consulate there. The spokesman said the United States had not issued a formal protest in the case--despite a report to the contrary in La Cronica, a Mexico City newspaper--but was asking Mexican officials for information.

The Mexican consul general in Los Angeles was not available for comment Tuesday, a spokeswoman said.

For the past year, Gutierrez, who has dual citizenship and makes his home in the Coachella Valley, has waged a campaign on behalf of the about 2 million Mexicans who came to the United States during and after World War II to provide labor on farms and railroads as part of the so-called bracero system.

Under the program, 10% of the braceros’ earnings were set aside and held in Mexico’s National Bank of Agricultural Credit. The bank no longer exists, and Mexican officials insist that they can find no trace of the savings.

Beginning March 1, Gutierrez spearheaded a march from his home state of Michoacan to Mexico City, where protesters demonstrated in front of the foreign ministry April 6 and later staged a sit-in at the corporate offices of Banrural, the federally run farm-credit bank.

On April 11, two people posing as reporters for a Mexican newspaper asked to conduct an interview with Gutierrez and Emma Valdovinos, a campaign organizer, on their taxi ride to the airport, where Valdovinos was to catch a Chicago-bound flight, Gutierrez said.

“All of a sudden, the traffic stops,” he said. “We were surrounded by 14 or 16 vehicles. One got in front of the taxi, one on [each] side, one on the back.”

Gutierrez said that when ordered from the car, he resisted--even breaking loose from his captors at one point--but was eventually subdued and forced face-down into the back seat of a sport utility vehicle.

According to Gutierrez, he and Valdovinos were placed in separate vehicles and driven around for the next 45 minutes. “They were asking intimidating questions--how many kids I had, their names, where they lived, where my parents lived, what my relationship was with Emma, with the other leaders of the [campaign],” Gutierrez said.

After they learned he was a U.S. citizen, Gutierrez said, “all of a sudden the cell phones started ringing all over the place, and one of them said, ‘Plans have changed.’ ”

Shortly thereafter, Gutierrez alleged, he and Valdovinos were dropped off at the federal attorney general’s office, which administers the federal police. Then, just as quickly as they had materialized, the agents disappeared, Gutierrez said, and both he and Valdovinos were asked to sign affidavits saying they presented themselves voluntarily.

The bracero program, which ended in 1964, was established under an agreement signed by the United States and Mexico in 1942. It granted temporary visas to about 2 million Mexicans, and money deducted from their earnings was transferred through the U.S. government to the Mexican bank to be used to buy farm equipment upon their return to Mexico. But the bank later changed names and was eventually merged with two other government-run banks in 1975 to form Banrural. Mexican officials have said they do not know what happened to the money.

Gutierrez has formed an alliance called Braceroproa and is involved in continuing negotiations to resolve the dispute. On April 10, he said, government representatives offered to grant medical coverage to braceros under Mexico’s social security system, but that proposal was rejected.

Gutierrez, whose grandmother was a bracero worker on the railroads in Chicago, believes that as many as 1 million of the so-called “guest workers,” many now in their 70s, are still alive.

“Ultimately we’d like to see our grandfathers, our grandmothers--who are widows of those individuals that were braceros--or their beneficiaries, in most cases children, receive a material and economic benefit from these savings funds,” he said.

Times staff writer James F. Smith contributed to this story from Mexico City.