In the early hours of November 24, 1982, I gave birth to my son, Simón Santana Farías, at the Clínicas University Teaching Hospital.

His father Ronald and I decided to name him Simón, as a tribute to Simón Riquelo, one of the babies kidnapped during Uruguay’s dictatorship.

Simón went to Public Elementary School No. 166, in the Workers’ Neighborhood of Peñarol, and then to Public High School No. 9 in the adjacent neighborhood of Colón. He grew up like any other ordinary kid in Montevideo, but was fortunate enough to have traveled a lot during his childhood, as his participation in a Puppet Theatre group took him across the country and to Brazil and Argentina with his parents and brother.

As a teenager, Simón studied computer maintenance and repair, a trade he later perfected in Curitiba, Brazil, where we lived for some time.

When he started looking for work, like many young people, he had to cover a lot of ground and send out many job applications before he landed his first job, washing windows for a services company. After returning to our country and working for some time in the same place, in January 2008 he was happy to be hired by the company Bimbo, where he performed cleaning tasks in the Maintenance Department.

Simón was a regular young man who liked music (popular bands like “No te va a gustar,” “Bajo Fondo,” “Omar,” and “La Bersuit”). He had no vices and wasn’t much into sports. His passion was his computer, which he had put together himself with components he’d bought gradually, paying them with the small loans he was able to obtain. That was how he lived: peacefully, working, spending time with his loved ones, his nephew, his grandparents and his cousins, and every month, when he received his salary, after he paid his bills, he liked to treat his brother and himself to something special.

He dreamed of having his own house someday, of sharing it with a special girl with whom he would settle down and raise a family. He also hoped to finish school and go to the university to study psychology, a subject that he was really interested in. Simón was a very good observer of human behavior, and like any other Uruguayan his age, he had those great dreams, however modest they may seem. And I speak in the past tense because last September 3, at the young age of 25, as he was working on a routine task at Bimbo, he suffered an accident that abruptly ended all the dreams he had and the life he had barely begun to live.

For some, Simón may be just another number in the statistics of deaths caused by unsafe working conditions, but we don’t want him to be forgotten, we don’t want his death to have been in vain, and we want to raise awareness among workers.

We cannot allow these large transnational corporations to continue treating us as cheap labor. Human lives are apparently worthless to them. We ask that the relevant authorities demand that these companies implement strict safety measures, which, together with training, will reduce labor risks to a minimum. We demand justice, so that these tragedies will not happen ever again.

No more young people need to die before we become aware of this situation.

Let us take a stand against near-slavery conditions at work, let us demand dignity and respect. We are human beings and we deserve to be treated as such.

Let us not forget Simón, who lost his life in an accident that could have easily been prevented..

Alicia Farías

Montevideo, November 2008