Special report: Company stores leave farmworkers trapped by debt

Los Angeles Times

Dear Readers:In 1910, when Mexicans launched their revolution, a major grievance involved the company store, which kept the working poor enslaved to a plantation economy.

Today, the Los Angeles Times reveals that this vestige of an oppressive past remains a fixture of Mexican agriculture, including export mega-farms that supply tomatoes, cucumbers and other produce to American consumers.Read: Company stores trap Mexican farmworkers in cycle of debt

Workers at camps are held in a kind of indentured servitude thanks to the low pay and high prices. Desperate workers scale barbed wire at night to escape their debts. Please read the story

by Times writer Richard Marosi and see the pictures by Don Bartletti.

The piece on company stores is the third in our “Product of Mexico” series. Our first installment told readers about unbearable conditions at labor camps operated by Mexican mega-farms. Our second offered an inside look at Bioparques, one of Mexico’s biggest tomato exporters and a supplier to Wal-Mart.

Our reporters’ expose of the company store left me thinking of Faulkner’s line about history: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Davan Maharaj, Editor

P.S. Don’t miss the faces of farmworkers captured by the Times photojournalist Don Bartletti as he traveled across nine Mexican states.