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With
Juan Jesús Castellón
Pellas Group displays a
shameful insensitivity
ANAIRC’s protest in
Managua moves into its second month
Despite
their illness, the former sugarcane workers affected by Chronic Renal
Failure (CRF) and the widows grouped in ANAIRC are bravely enduring the
daily hardships of living in the makeshift campsite where they hung
their hammocks over a month ago to stage a protest, confident that
sooner or later the Pellas Group will have to abandon its shamefully
insensitive attitude.
So far,
three workers have had to abandon the struggle due to health
complications that required constant medical attention and made their
removal from the campsite necessary. The risk of camping outdoors, with
no sanitation or running water, was just too great. But for every
individual that has to leave there are dozens ready to take their place
and join the struggle, which in the past week has gained intensity, with
new demonstrations in front of the company’s offices in Edificio
Pellas.
As
demonstrators in the ANAIRC campsite gather, join in discussions,
plan the details of the following day’s protest and begin lighting fires
to prepare Nicaragua’s traditional gallopinto1
for
dinner, Juan Jesús Castellón sits on his hammock, sheltering his
head from the blazing sun under a black plastic tarpaulin.
I come
up to him and we start talking. He tells me how he became ill and how he
started participating in this struggle.
“I
began working at Ingenio San Antonio when I was still a
chavalo (young boy). I was only 15 and started out cutting cane. It
was very tough and I did it for five years. I went out to the fields at
5:30 a.m. and had to work all day until I reached the target, which was
100 meters of cane. I couldn’t leave before I cut that much, and often
had to stay on until 5 or 6 p.m.
The
ground I worked on was covered with ashes, because the fields are burnt
before the cane is cut. The heat was unbearable, but it was even worse
because we didn’t have adequate gear to protect us from the sun. We
didn’t have enough drinking water because what we could bring from home
was too little, so we had to drink water from the rivers near the fields
or from the wells in the mill, which were polluted, but we didn’t know
it then.”
Workers
are paid by ton of sugarcane cut and a man working at his hardest can
cut 7 or 8 tons in a long day’s work. According to Castellón, the
company is currently paying 60 cents of a dollar per ton. As several
studies have revealed, working long days in such harsh conditions and
over extended periods of time, under the blazing sun and with severe
water deprivation, it is almost impossible for a worker’s kidneys not to
be affected.
“And
now –he goes on– workers have to face yet another violation of their
rights, which is the presence of contractors. The company has
practically left wage and benefit payments in their hands, and they
often cheat us, reducing the value of our social security contributions,
or keeping them directly for themselves,” Castellón says.
Poisoned with agrotoxic chemicals
After
five years on the fields, he was moved to the herbicide department,
where he began spraying agrotoxic substances and was poisoned twice with
chemicals.
“The
first time was when they sent the youngest workers to try out a new mix
of herbicides, and 15 of us ended up in the hospital. I was spraying the
product and I started coughing really hard and couldn’t stop. That was
when I saw the first boy fall to the ground, and when I tried to leave
the cane field I fainted. What they told us at the hospital was that we
hadn’t washed our hands after handling the herbicide and we’d touched
our food when we ate. But we knew that was a lie. The real problem was
that we were spraying chemicals without any protection at all,”
Castellón says.
Juan
Jesús
had to
stay in the hospital for a week, and when he went back to work he was
told to apply fertilizer while he recovered. But after only a week he
was back spraying the same herbicide, and he was poisoned again.
In the
end, they transferred him to a mechanical department, where he felt
better, and was sure the worst had passed. He worked there for ten
years, but his illness had set in and progressed without him realizing
it.
“In
1999 I became so ill I had to stay in bed. I couldn’t even move. But
when I went in for a medical examination they didn’t tell me what was
really wrong. They lied to me and said I had back problems. As we were
all becoming aware of CRF, I had the test done in another
laboratory, and it came back with a 4.3 mg/dl level of creatinine.”
As
always happens in such cases, the company simply got rid of Juan
Jesús. After 25 years of hard work they told him he wasn’t fit to
work anymore and that he should apply for a pension with the Social
Security agency.
He
didn’t give up and continued to look for work, but it was hard. He did a
number of odd jobs until his body gave up on him. Today he lives on his
pension, barely getting by.
His
creatinine level is now 3.5 mg/dl, three times the level considered
safe for men, and his kidneys have started to shrink.
Despite
his condition, Juan Jesús is convinced that they are going
to win their struggle to obtain compensation for the damage they have
suffered. “I’ve seen so many people die over the past few years. All the
men who used to work with me cutting cane are gone. They’re all dead and
it’s for them as much as for us that we’re here today,” he says.
“The
help we’ve received from the IUF, the Italy-Nicaragua
Association and from the many people that are supporting us in the
country is important to us. We know we’re going to fight to the end. Our
struggle is above all for our families, because our days are numbered,”
he concludes.
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