Payments to Braceros

Hundreds of elderly men in straw hats and elderly women in shawls waited last week to register for their bracero benefits.

One of them, Jose Dolores Rocha Moran, said he already had plans of what to do with the money.

“I will pay for my funeral,” he said. “I am 84 and I can’t do anything anymore, especially since they operated on my heart last year. I live with one of my sons, and I don’t want him to have to pay so much to bury me.”

Rocha leaned on a cane, others pushed walkers, and at least one man was hooked to an oxygen tank.

Back in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, they toiled the fields in the United States under the bracero program. The Mexican men were originally contracted to replace American farmhands deployed during World War II. Eventually, 2.5 million Mexicans participated in the program. Most of those still alive today live in poverty in Mexico and the United States.

The Mexican government announced last year that it would give former braceros, their widows or their children a one-time payment of about $3,500 per bracero.

The government opened registration offices in several states. In Chihuahua, it is in Chihuahua City, a four-hour trip for the many braceros who live in El Paso and Juárez.

Thanks to lobbying from community organizers such as Carlos Marentes, director of the Bracero Project in El Paso, government officials opened registration desks in Juárez this week in a municipal theater.

Genaro Ernesto Almeida Perez, the government representative who organized the special Juárez registration, said volunteers registered 300 former braceros and family members on the first day last week.

These men and women, if their applications are approved, will receive the payment through the mail. So far, 38 former braceros out of 11,000 who have registered in Chihuahua City have been pai.

After decades of waiting and years of protests, former “bracero” guest workers who labored in the United States between the 1942 and 1964 will get a one-time payment of about $3,500, the Mexican government announced last Fall.

The payment was described as “insulting” by activists who have mounted a years-long campaign on behalf of the aging former workers, some of whom had pension funds deducted from their paychecks but never saw the money.

“This is very little, it’s insulting that they are offering so little,” said Rafael Garcia, a member of Braceroproa, a group that has pressed the workers’ demands. He said the payment should not be less than $9,175.

Assistant Interior Secretary Felipe Gonzalez brushed off those criticisms, and suggested that some activists were angry because they could no longer profit from representing the demands of the former braceros.

“They’re going to get angry because their little business deal is going to end, for those that making a living off these organizations,” Gonzalez said.

A year ago, Mexico’s Congress approved a $27 million fund to partially compensate the bracero workers; while it was viewed as a step forward, activists also complained the rules governing the fund will block payments to many who should receive them.

Activists and the increasingly elderly former workers held marches, protests and even briefly seized the ranch of President Vicente Fox’s family in the central state of Guanajuato to demand compensation.

Each former worker will have up to four months to claim the one-time payment, by submitting pay stubs, work visas, labor contracts or other supporting documents.

Surviving spouses or children can collect the payment for former workers who have already died, by presenting the same documents.

About 10 percent of the Bracero’s paychecks were withheld for savings and pension funds that were supposed to be paid in Mexico, as an incentive for migrants to return home. The money disappeared, and a government investigation found no trace of it.

The Bracero program brought Mexicans to the United States as temporary workers – largely in agriculture – to fill a labor shortage originally created by World War II.

Source: El Paso Times, Feb. 1, 2006

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