Belching Out the Devil (17 page)

 

 

I
t's early morning and it's hot. Long palm leaves lollop over the country lane, dark and shiny in the warm coastal mist. Few appear to be about at this hour, save the odd delivery van for the hotels or night watchman finishing a shift. But along one otherwise deserted stretch of road, a small gaggle of elderly Miami joggers wearily pounds its way up the incline. They comprise mainly of women, with one gasping male in their company. Their lungs are greedy for air, their heartbeat races, though they do not. You can practically see Death on their shoulder, taunting cynically, ‘Whoa there, this one's a quick one!' You may well ask how I know they are from Miami? Well, it's a series of deductions. Firstly when Salvadorean women get old, they don't jog, they sit. They sit on benches, on rugs in the streets, in doorways, by churches and always in
the shade. But jogging, no. Clue number two is the brightly coloured wrist and headbands, which just seem to scream the words ‘Florida Retirement Community'. However, the final give away is their security guard. Striding lightly behind them is a Salvadorean man in his mid thirties, wearing a brown company shirt and matching baseball hat. He has a massive pump action shotgun, hanging from a strap around his neck while one hand holds the handle and his forefinger rests over the trigger guard. There can't be many people in this area other than Miami tourists who'd have armed security accompany them for a jog. Though in all honesty I'm not sure if he was there to protect them or to step in at the first sign of a coronary and administer the mercy shot.

 

I pass them in a van driving from a place called La Libertad on the El Salvador coast. It's a popular holiday haunt where the waves pull in large groups of surfers and the beaches are big enough for everyone else to avoid them. My destination is north to the Department of Sonsonate and its eponymous main city. This city is essentially one long high street packed with car-repair workshops, fast-food bars and strip joints. However, it is the journey to the city that takes us through sugar cane country. The place is packed with plantations. The sugar is why I am here - sugar and children.

 

Sugar comes second to water as the main ingredient in a can of Coca-Cola, and with nearly eight teaspoons in each 330ml can,
²
the sugar gives the water a good run for its money. It is sugar that has left a bitter aftertaste for the company in El Salvador, as the sugar Coke uses is tainted with child labour.

 

In 2004 Human Rights Watch (HRW), an NGO with considerable experience documenting and campaigning in the area of child soldiers and child labour produced a report
criticising Coca-Cola for not doing enough to prevent child labour in its supply chain. The report, ‘Turning a Blind Eye, Hazardous Child Labor in El Salvador's Sugarcane Cultivation' said:

Not surprisingly Coca-Cola was not pleased to have such practices associated with its products. They get in enough trouble over their drinks being too sugary for kids, without the public finding out that children are helping to supply the sugar in the first place.

 

Surely for Coke there are two essential questions: if there is child labour in the supply chain for our drinks, are we content for that to be the case or are we not? And if we are not, what are we going to do about it?

 

Coke says ‘any child labour allegation is a very serious issue that we fully investigate'.
⁴
But they were less adamant when
they said to the
Washington Post
that their ability ‘to assist in addressing these fundamental issues of tradition and norm that surround rural poverty is limited.'
⁵
It is an interesting use of the word ‘tradition' in relation to child labour. To my mind traditions should be warm and pleasant things - brass bands and summer fetes, rather than stuffing kids up chimneys. It is also historically and morally flimsy to defer to tradition, tradition is subject to change. After all, slavery was traditional, as was burning witches, indeed child labour in America was traditional; some even eulogised its beneficial nature, like Coca-Cola's first proprietor Asa Chandler who said, ‘The most beautiful sight that we see is the child at labour. As early as he may get at labour, the more beautiful, the more useful does his life get to be.'
⁶

On a more positive note The Coca-Cola Company inspected the sugar mill Central Izalco, stating that ‘we again verified that it [the refinery] and its supplying mill had sound policies against employing underage youth.'
⁸
Laudable as this inspection is, there was never any allegation that the mill employed child labour, HRW doesn't say the problem lies in the sugar refinery, but rather it says child labour is rampant in the harvesting on the plantations. It often helps in an investigation to look in the right place and the right place in this instance is in the fields.

 

It can't be that difficult to check for child labour, all you have to do find the fields, turn up and look. And that is exactly what I am going to try and do: turn up and look for child labour. I'm making a programme for Channel 4 and I want to find out if, three years after the report, child labour is still in Coke's supply chain and if it is, how commonplace is it?

The crew is international, coming from the States, New Zealand and El Salvador and we have to gain entry to the plantations, film what is going on and hope the gang masters don't get too angry when we arrive unannounced. The challenge to find a way on to the fields proves to be more difficult than we thought as most of the plantations lie behind a curtain of trees and villages unseen from the road. Which is why Armando, our Salvadorean translator and driver, has taken to stopping at roadside stalls and quizzing locals as to where the crops are being harvested. The first attempt is unsuccessful, as is the second and the third too. Asking folk at random if they can help us in our search yields but one fact, which is this: the phrase, ‘We're looking for working children' just sounds bad in any language.

 

David the American cameraman curtly says, ‘Someone has got to know what the score is. Pull up and ask again.'

‘I'll ask we need to be more direct.' I'm worried that Armando might just be a tad too polite to his fellow countrymen and women.

 

So I lean out of the front window at the next stall. Two old men in buttoned-up shirts and leather strap sandals stand staring at the empty road. They appear as if their whole purpose in life is just to stand there and collect furrows on their faces. And they are not doing too badly at it. I ask, in my admittedly imperfect Spanish and with help from the others, if the good gentlemen might know of any plantations cutting today that have a reputation for employing child labour?

 

They both shake their heads with one slow and barely discernible twist of the neck.

‘
Gracias, señor
,' I say, turning back inside the van. ‘Let's try again at the next stall, Armando.'

 

He swings the van off the dirt and back on to the tarmac, leaving the men to continue the wrinkle harvest. We drive in silence for a minute before Armando nonchalantly says, ‘You are aware that you just told those people that we were ‘hunting' children.'

‘What?'

‘You said to them ‘we are hunting down children, can you help us?”

‘Oh God…'

 

My head hits my hands. Here we are trying to investigate one of the blights of the developing world and I have made us look like the Child Catcher in
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
.

There is one place we know for sure will be harvesting today, as we visited it last night to watch the foreman burn the crop ready for harvest. The sugar grows higher than a man and close together too, with big dry leaves and debris bunched in with the cane, making the job of harvesting all the more difficult. The simplest method of clearing this is set it alight.

 

The foreman is a young guy with not an ounce of fat on him and a metal plate over his front teeth. Last night he was happy for us to film the burning and even introduced his wife and child who have wandered over to watch the palavar of a film crew. He used a long dry leaf as a taper, lit it, inserted it deep into the detritus that litters the forest of tall cane, then stepped back. The flames jumped ten feet high with a low rushing rumble and a loud cackle that sounded as if the fire were chewing through the field. Left in its wake was black and dry earth and the prized cane, burnt on the edges, still hot to touch, scorched but standing in the drifting smoke ready for the next day.

 

The foreman had not expected to see us this morning and he does not smile this time. He just nods and snorts before turning his back and getting on with his work. Filming the burning is one thing but now there are children working in the fields and he is deeply suspicious of our presence.

‘
Hola, bueneos días
,' I call, cheerfully and ineptly.

 

But he just looks blankly and continues grabbing the long cane with one hand and swinging the machete with the other. In a single motion he chops the stalk at the base, twists it free, cuts off the shoot end, clipping the remaining leaves and throwing the cane at a pile, where it lands with a rustle.

Nearby is a ten-year-old boy with his father who's cutting the cane. The boy's name is Jonathan, this is his first year working on the sugar cane harvest, he tells me. His job is to collect and stack the cane.

‘You've come to earn some money?' I ask Jonathan.

 

He laughs and so does his dad. This work is piecework so a family needs as many helping hands as possible to earn a wage. Jonathan is one of the 25,000 child ‘helpers'.

 

The kids are uneasy with our presence, so after a quick chat there is little need for us to stay and even less of an invitation to do so. But our first search has found two children working on a small six-acre site. If we are to find if the practice is commonplace or not we will need to look in other locations.