The Pineros: Going home

Stories by Tom Knudson and Hector Amezcua -- The Sacramento Bee
Published Tuesday, November 15, 2005 -- 3 of 3 parts

Macario Martín Ordóñez, 70, grieves in March at the grave of his son, Alberto Martín Calmo, near the village of Todos Santos, Guatemala. His son was one of five forest workers killed a year earlier in a van crash on a mountain road in Washington. The father's own resting place is already built alongside his son's. Sacramento Bee/Hector Amezcua

In the impoverished Guatemala border town of La Mesilla, 15-year old Santa Pablo Bautista failed to heed her father's pleas to stay home on their tiny hillside farm.

Juan Carlos Rios, 22, was equally dismissive when his mother begged him not to leave Jerez, Mexico.

Born into poverty, both felt the tug of money to be made in El Norte.

Two months after arriving to harvest brush in Washington state, Santa Pablo lay in a hospital with a fractured arm, broken jaw and cuts across her face. Days after taking a job as a tree planter in Oregon, Juan Carlos Rios returned home in a casket.

Forest work has always been dangerous. But Juan Carlos was not killed, nor Santa Pablo injured, in the woods. Instead, disaster struck on the highway - on long-distance, pre-dawn commutes in unsafe, unstable vans that tumbled and veered out-of-control on windy mountain roads.

The number one cause of death among pineros - Latino forest workers - is not the slip of a chain saw or the falling trees known as widow-makers. It is van accidents. And unlike most highway tragedies, the crashes that claim migrant lives are not born of chance alone.

They are the byproducts of fatigue, poorly maintained vehicles, ineffective state and federal laws, inexperienced drivers and poverty-stricken workers hungry for jobs.

"When you add everything up, it's a formula for disaster," said Robert Perez, a Fresno lawyer who has represented scores of Latino laborers hurt and killed in van accidents.

All told, 21 pineros are known to have died in van accidents over just the last three years: 14 in Maine, five in Washington and two in Oregon. But those numbers don't begin to measure the pain: across Guatemala and Honduras, at least 15 women have lost their partners and 69 children no longer have their fathers.

Sixty-nine children in Guatemala and Honduras have been left without fathers following the deaths of pineros in van accidents. Learn more about some of them in this gallery. Sacramento Bee/Hector Amezcua

Six years ago, the deaths of 13 San Joaquin Valley farmworkers in a van crash prompted California legislators to pass the nation's toughest migrant vehicle safety law. The law made seat belts compulsory for everyone riding in vans carrying nine or more passengers and required that bench seats be bolted to the floor. It mandated that vans be inspected and certified safe yearly and that drivers pass a driver-training course for multi-passenger vans.

Other states have not been so vigilant. In Oregon and Washington, for example, migrant labor law does not require annual vehicle inspections or a special test for drivers who transport migrant workers in vans.

"California has done it," said Matthew Geyman, a Seattle attorney representing the families of four forest workers from Guatemala who died in the 2004 van crash in Washington. "We could use California as a model. It would save lives."

Related Graphic

Vehicle inspections

But even California's tough law goes only so far. Last year, 1,300 migrant worker vans were pulled over by the California Highway Patrol and 2,882 citations were issued, up 150 percent from 2002. And many violations go undetected.

"I don't want to put the finger on nobody because I'm in this business. But I see a lot of contractors with vans with no certification, nothing," said Raul Acevedo, a supervisor for Central Valley Forestry, a reforestation contractor based in Exeter.

"Why do I have to spend so much money myself fixing my vans...and why don't (other) guys?" Acevedo asked. "It's not fair. I wish somebody could do something."

At the federal level, the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act requires that vans pass a safety test for such things as brakes, wipers and mirrors. But unlike California's law, it does not mandate that every passenger have a seat belt. And inspections are rare.

"This is a national problem and one which calls for a national solution," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who plans to reintroduce legislation, modeled on California's law, requiring seat belts for all migrant workers riding in vans.

Related Information

Deaths on the roads: A summary of van accidents

"Migrant workers should not have to put their lives at risk just to travel to their job site," she said.

Feinstein first tried to pass such a law in 2000, following the San Joaquin Valley tragedy, but her effort failed after farm interests objected to the cost of retrofitting older vans with seat belts.

Unlike California's law, the existing federal migrant worker statute does not require drivers to take and pass a special safe-driving course for multi-passenger vans. Instead, it requires only that they pass a physical exam.

"A physical is fine and well and dandy. But it doesn't have anything to do with safety," said Martin Desmond, former executive director of the Northwest Reforestation Contractors Association. "It is just sort of a meaningless exercise."

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The road has long been a risky place for farmworkers. But over the past two decades, as Latinos have moved rapidly into the forest work force, timber country highways have turned deadly, too.

"Most of the liability in our industry is on the transportation side," said Robert "Wade" Zaharie, an Idaho reforestation contractor who employs Latino crews and requires all workers - not just drivers - to attend a defensive driving class.

"We're telling (employees) if they ever observe that a foreman is not driving safely, let the office know immediately," Zaharie said. "You just can't afford that liability."

Zaharie blamed the problem on bad habits learned south of the border. "Unfortunately, we're dying for people that have more common sense in our industry," he said "If you follow this back into Mexico, or any of your Latin countries, there are tons of accidents down there. They don't have as dear a respect for life, in general."

The life of Alberto Martín Calmo is remembered every day in his parents' adobe home in the hardscrabble hills outside the village of Todos Santos in northern Guatemala. His grave is a mile or so away - on a scenic knoll in a neighborhood of pines. A picture of his body in a casket hangs near the front door.

"I look at that picture and I cry," said his mother, 60-year-old Luisa Calmo Ramírez. "All I do is cry."

Related Document

Click image to see police report from March 27, 2004 van accident that killed five forest workers in Washington.

Her 31-year-old son died in the van accident in Washington in March 2004. Today, Luisa and her 70-year-old husband, Macario Martín Ordóñez, are raising three of their son's children - ages 8, 10 and 12. In the months after their father's death, the children seemed not to comprehend the loss.

"They would ask me, 'When is papa coming home?'" said Luisa. As she spoke, she hovered over a wood fire on the dirt floor of her living room, cooking tortillas for the family.

"I would tell them: 'Please be quiet. He'll come back someday.' But of course he won't," she said, speaking in her native Mam language and struggling to hold back tears.

Her dead son's wife stayed in the United States with two younger children - leaving the rest to her and Macario.

"I am old and it is hard to work," Macario said one windy afternoon this spring. "My son used to send home money. He was taking care of us. Now there is nothing."

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All highway travel is dangerous. But for the pineros, it is a roller-coaster ride. Mountain roads twist, dip, climb and corkscrew. Often the weather is hostile.

Fatigue compounds the risk. Crews routinely work six days a week, sometimes seven. Just getting to work is an ordeal. Commutes of 100 miles are not unusual, beginning before dawn and dragging on for hours. The three fatal forest labor crashes all happened in the early morning: at 6:08 a.m. in Oregon, 6:45 a.m. in Washington and 7:55 a.m. in Maine.

Forest Service work notes reflect that peril, too: "Contractor arrived at 7 a.m. They still haven't found a place to stay. ... It takes them four hours driving time each way," wrote Karen Bell, a contract inspector on the Sierra National Forest in 2003.

"Reforestation workers don't get paid for travel time," said Dan Robertson, president of the Northwest Reforestation Contractors Association. "So in order to get in an eight-hour day, they get up at four in the morning."

In many cases, the biggest safety hazard is the vehicle itself. Just ask Rose Marie Ramey, the owner of Ramey's Broken Arrow Cabins and RVs in north-central Idaho.

This summer and fall, Ramey rented cabins to a crew of 17 pineros thinning trees under a government contract on the Salmon-Challis National Forest.

Their clothes were ragged. Their tools were worn. But it was the vans that Ramey found frightening. They were cluttered with gas cans, chain saws, machetes, oil and cooking gear. And there were so few seats some workers sat on the floor.

Residents of the scenic mountain town of Gibbonsville sprang into action. Some contributed clothes. Mike McLain, a river guide, built a metal roof rack for the gear. And Ramey's son got workers up off the floor. "He went down to the junkyard and bought seats for them," Ramey said.

"To me, it was unnerving," she said. "And dangerous."

And it can be deadly.

Around 3 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 3, 2005, a van pulled up at an apartment complex in Salem, Ore. Inside, Francisco Sánchez Rios and his cousin Juan Carlos were waiting - eager to begin new jobs as tree planters. They stepped out into the darkness and hopped in the vehicle: a silver 2002 Ford E350 with a bald left rear tire.

Three hours and 150 miles later, on an icy stretch of road near the coast, Francisco felt the van veer to the right. "We were skidding," he said. As the van plunged off the road, the driver screamed.

Pinned beneath the overturned vehicle, Francisco remembers crying out: "Juan! Where are you?" In the darkness, Francisco said he heard a reply from his cousin: "Please help me." Then, on the wet ground along the right side of the vehicle, Rios died of massive chest and abdominal injuries, just three days shy of his 23rd birthday.

An Oregon State Police investigator later found that three factors had contributed to the crash: poor driving, icy conditions and the bald tire that failed to grip the road.

The tire "was worn down to the cords in areas throughout the circumference. ... The spare tire was located and found to be inflated, having more than adequate tread depth," the inspector wrote in his report.

"The night before we had dinner together," said Juan Carlos' sister, Lorena Rodarte Rios, of Salem, choked by grief a week after the accident. "He was very happy because the job was going to pay well, around $10 an hour. It was his dream to provide for his mother in Mexico. He was his mother's right hand."

In a dry, dusty neighborhood in Jerez, Mexico - southwest of Zacatecas - Rios' mother, Nicolasa, took the news hard. For days, she cried. When her son's body arrived on Saturday, Jan. 15, Nicolasa was stricken with anguish - too stunned to even attend a wake in the carport outside her home.

Finally, as mourners wailed and a hearse arrived Sunday to take Juan Carlos' body to church for a funeral Mass, Nicolasa stepped outside to say goodbye. She leaned over the coffin and rubbed her son's face, gently at first, then more forcefully.

"Please let me go with him," she sobbed, inconsolably.

"I am going crazy!" she screamed. "Let me go with him!"

As her older son, Javier, struggled to pull her away, Nicolasa tugged desperately at the coffin, then let go, wobbled a few steps and fainted.

Related Audio

Listen to the choir singing at the funeral mass for Juan Carlos Rios in Jerez, Mexico.

Listen to a traditional Mexican "banda" playing during the procession for Juan Carlos Rios' funeral, from the church to the cemetery.

Juan Carlos Rios was hired to plant trees on property owned by Menasha Forest Products Corp., a major U.S. timber firm. But Menasha maintains it bears no responsibility for the death because it, in turn, hired a labor contractor to plant the trees and transport the workers.

"It was not our vehicle. They were not our employees. They were contract employees," said Barbara Bauder, director of human resources and community relations for Menasha in the Oregon coastal community of North Bend.

"It was a tragedy," Bauder added. "But since it wasn't people we knew and they really weren't from our area, it didn't hit quite so close to home."

In August, the U.S. Department of Labor agreed with Menasha's assessment of blame. It fined the timber company's contractor - BP Reforestation - $3,000, saying it failed to provide safe transportation. The contracting company has appealed the fine and did not return calls from The Bee.

At Menasha, Bauder said she was not aware the tree-planting contractor had been fined. "They had worked for us for about 12 years, and we expect they will bid on jobs again this winter," she said. But, she added, "It certainly doesn't make us happy they were driving with a bald tire."

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Federal law requires that any drivers who transport workers be designated as foremen by the contractor and be authorized to drive by the Department of Labor. But that law is routinely ignored.

The driver of the Oregon van - who also died in the crash - was not authorized. Nor were two van drivers on a job visited by The Bee last month on the Bitterroot National Forest in Montana. One had only a Mexican driver's license.

The older van being used on that job was a nightmarish sight. Electrical wires snaked out from inside the passenger door. The driver's door and window were lashed together with rope. Across the West, forest worker vans often are in such sorry shape they are known throughout the industry as "crummies."

Document excerpt

Diary of Madelon Caren, U.S. Forest Service inspector

JUNE 13, 2003 - CLEARWATER NATIONAL FOREST

The crew van leaked a large pool of oil or fluid when we stopped at the gate, and was smoking badly. Jaime [the foreman] said he had told Heber [contractor Heber Matute] he's been having transmission problems but Heber said to keep driving it. Guess we'll see how far he gets later today - it is Friday the 13th!

See the actual document

The gray-and-white crummy in Montana was owned by Universal Forestry of Orofino, Idaho. And its passengers were worried. "You've got to do like the Flintstones to make the brakes work," said Tomás Quezada, lifting his knees and slamming both feet down to mimic the braking style of Fred Flintstone, the cartoon character.

Forest Service documents show federal officials are aware of migrant worker transportation hazards - and sometimes take steps to shield themselves from responsibility.

"(Driver) was back from town but did not get parts he needed to repair the van," wrote Jerry Branning, a Forest Service contract inspector on a Universal Forestry job in the mountains of Idaho in 2002.

"He needs brake pads for front," Branning added. "He will drive it to (town) slowly and carefully with minimum brake use."

A year later, when Branning gave Universal workers a short ride to a hard-to-reach job site in his government truck, he was reprimanded by Forest Service contracting officer Terri Ott. "We cannot assume responsibility and liability for transporting contractor personnel," Ott wrote in a memo obtained through the federal Freedom of Information Act. "This behavior ... is unacceptable."

Ott declined to elaborate. But her boss - Larry Dawson, supervisor of the Clearwater National Forest - said she made the right call.

"I couldn't say it any better," Dawson said. "Ms. Ott was ensuring that (Branning) was not providing any more assistance or any less assistance than is required in the contract. That's the way we operate."

But migrant advocates say such a hands-off approach to transportation only serves to compound the already substantial dangers pineros face.

"It is worse than tragic that so many of them lose their lives just getting to these jobs - it is shameful," said Rebecca Smith, an attorney with the National Employment Law Project in Olympia, Wash. "We need to do everything that we can to ensure their transportation and workplace safety."

Even well-maintained forest worker vans can be risky, especially when they're fully loaded. This year, the National Highway Transportation Safety Board put out a safety advisory, warning drivers that a fully loaded 15-passenger van is far more likely to roll over than a lightly loaded one because of its higher center of gravity.

Related Graphic

Click image to learn more about vans used to transport forest workers

The advisory does not mention the added factor of big metal roof racks - popular on many forest worker vans - that when loaded with gas cans, water coolers, jugs of oil, chain saws and hand tools can make the vans rock like ships at sea.

"With the rack, you can feel the van leaning one way, and then another, even at a safe speed," said Manuel Burac, a foreman and driver for Universal Forestry. "Personally, I prefer trailers because you have more stability on curves."

And no study has examined the most common factor in forest worker van accidents: exhaustion.

In the pre-dawn darkness, a Dodge van crowded with forest workers crept south out of Shelton, Wash., in March 2004. Its destination: a brush-picking job in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest 100 miles away.

Inside, 15-year-old Santa Pablo Bautista - thin as a marsh reed and saddled with debt - sat behind the driver, sleeping. Like all 10 passengers, she was not wearing a seat belt. In the back, three co-workers huddled together on a bench seat that had no seat belts and was not even bolted to the floor.

The brush they all were harvesting that Saturday, known as salal, is the mainstay of Washington's $236 million floral greens industry. Waxy and wilt-resistant, salal branches - or "tips," as they are known - are bunched around orchids, roses and other flowers in bouquets and floral arrangements sold around the world.

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Related Story

Edilberto Morales Luis, at his Guatemala home in March, was the only survivor of a van crash that killed 14 forest workers in Maine in September 2002. Sacramento Bee/Hector Amezcua

Voices: 'I fought to get them out of there. I couldn't'

Uneasy is how Edilberto Morales Luis remembers feeling as the van in which he was riding barreled down a dirt road in Maine's north woods, heading to a tree-thinning job.

The driver was in a hurry to cover the 90-mile commute, Morales said, eager to make up for time lost to rain the day before. Most of the 14 passengers from Guatemala and Honduras were dozing. As the pines flew by, Morales called out to the driver.

"I told him: 'Why don't you drive a little bit slower?'" Morales said earlier this year. Tires were a concern, too. "We were always having to buy new tires," he said. "One of the tires on the van was a little bit bad."

A co-worker teased him about being afraid. After all, everyone was anxious to get to work. It was Sept. 12, the thinning season was winding down and with it their opportunity to earn money. Officially, they were getting $10 an hour from Evergreen Forestry - an Idaho contractor. But after deductions for the rental van, gas and other items, their paychecks had shrunk.

The workers grumbled about it, Morales recalled this spring on his father's ranch in northern Guatemala. "But we couldn't complain because none of us spoke English," he said.

Despite Morales' warning, the van driver raced through the forest at speeds up to 70 mph, an investigation would later show. Coming around a curve, the driver spotted a one-lane wooden bridge with no guardrail coming up fast. As the van sped across the bridge, it fishtailed, struck a metal curb, rolled over and landed upside down in the Allagash River.

In the next few, frantic moments, 14 pineros, including the driver, drowned. Only Morales lived. "The only thing I remember is the van flipped into the river," he said. "I fought to get them out of there. But I couldn't."

Stunned and chilled, Morales swam to shore. He looked around for his co-workers but saw only blood coming to the water's surface.

Half an hour later, a truck drove by with two people inside. Using gestures because he did not speak English, Morales told them what had happened. The driver waded into the water toward the van but relayed back that everyone was already dead.

The 2002 crash was the worst motor vehicle accident in Maine history. Three years later, lawyers, regulators and politicians still are sorting out who was to blame.

The U.S. Department of Labor targeted Evergreen Forestry Services, which has a record of labor and transportation violations dating to the 1980s, and fined it $17,000 - $1,000 for each dead worker, $1,000 for Morales and $2,000 for failing to register the van or the driver under the Migrant Seasonal Worker Protection Act. The company has appealed.

Lawyers for Morales, the 13 dead workers, their 11 wives and 57 children sued DaimlerChrysler Corp. and Thrifty Rent-A-Car in 2004, alleging the van was by its nature a rollover threat. The companies, in response, blamed the driver. The suit, filed in Oklahoma, is nearing settlement.

Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, singled out van makers. She championed a bill, signed into federal law this year, that requires 15-passenger vans to be tested yearly for their ability to resist rollovers as part of the government's vehicle safety program.

But Greg Reed, a soft-spoken friend of one of the victims and a migrant worker advocate in Maine, said government lethargy, callous contractors, timber industry indifference and grinding poverty will continue to drive workers to take risks, deep in the forests.

"There still isn't any real federal or state oversight," he said this fall. "They say they're out here, but that is a bunch of BS. They are not around."

"When something like this happens to farmworkers in Florida, federal agents are all over it," Reed said. "But that's not true for forest workers. Forest workers are really quite invisible."

- Tom Knudson

 

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The van climbed east on Highway 12, winding through the Cascades between Mount Rainer and Mount St. Helens. Outside, the sky was turning gray. Like Santa Pablo, most of the passengers were asleep. And as the wheels hummed on the pavement, the driver also was weary from long hours in the woods and behind the wheel.

It was Saturday. But Santa Pablo had little choice but to work. In Guatemala, her family had paid a smuggler 16,000 quetzales - $2,031 U.S. dollars - to sneak her into Mexico and transport her to the U.S. border. In Washington, Alberto Martín Calmo - who was sitting one seat away from Santa in the van - had paid $2,500 to another coyote to get her across the U.S. border and to the Pacific Northwest.

Santa's motivation was simple. "She was a little girl, but she made a decision to help me," said her father, Cipriano Pablo Jerónimo, a coffee farmer who earns about $40 a month and volunteers for a nearby Catholic church. "She said: 'Look Dad, I want to go so I can help you support the church.'"

Near the small town of Morton, the van drifted into the westbound lane. Up ahead, a Ford pickup was approaching fast. In the chaos of mangled metal and shattered glass that followed, three brush-pickers died almost immediately, including one riding on the unbolted bench seat. Two more succumbed later at the hospital. Santa Pablo - all 4 feet 4 inches and 100 pounds of her - was thrown from the van and lay in a bloody heap along the road.

She was flown to Emanuel Children's Hospital in Portland, treated for lacerations to her face and head, a broken jaw, fractured arm and nose. One year later, she sat on a rumpled couch in a rundown apartment in a rundown section of Shelton.

"This was a big tragedy for us," she said. "Everybody in that van was from the same village."

Santa Pablo knew she was going back to work, even though she remained in pain and faced the prospect of more cosmetic surgery. "Before I used to feel good. And nothing hurt," she said. "I was happy. Now everything has changed."

In April, two investigators for the Washington Department of Labor and Industries sat down with Pablo, trying to sort out who was responsible for the crash - the driver or a floral greens packing company?

"Did you have to sign some kind of paper before you started working?" they asked.

"No, none," Pablo replied.

"Did they explain to you how to do your job?"

"Well, no."

"You gave the brush daily to the driver?"

"Yes, daily."

"Whom did the driver turn the brush over to?"

"Well, that I don't know."

Unable to find a paper or human trail to a company, the agency determined that the driver, Cornelio Matias-Pablo, was in business for himself. But Cornelio - who died in the crash, too - had no workers' compensation insurance. So the state of Washington is paying death benefits to five children in Guatemala and two in the United States, and medical bills for Santa Pablo and four other survivors, all still in the United States. The tab has reached around $1 million.

"It's unrealistic to expect someone like Cornelio, who was an undocumented Guatemalan, to comply with minimum wage laws, worker safety laws, worker compensation insurance laws and vehicle safety laws," said Matthew Geyman, the Seattle lawyer representing the families of dead crash victims.

Related Document

Click image to see police report from Sept. 12, 2002 van accident in Maine.

"To me, it seems like we should say to this (floral greens) industry that is making millions of dollars off these workers: 'Why don't you do something to make this a safer industry?' " Geyman said.

The Washington Department of Labor and Industries is moving in that direction. Since 2003, as part of a stepped-up enforcement campaign, it has audited 25 floral greens packing companies. In 17 cases, the department determined the packing companies were, in fact, employers of pickers and other workers - and it assessed them $86,261 in workers' compensation insurance premiums.

But while the department goes about its work, the pickers are still riding to remote job sites in rickety, unsafe vans. Last spring, Santa Pablo was once again among them.

After commuting an hour or so to work, she cut brush from 8:30 to around 4:30, thrashing through thick, wet stands of salal, stopping here and there to slice off the nicest-looking branches with a clawlike cutting tool known as a ring. She gathered the branches into bundles, bound them together with rope, hoisted them on her back, stooped over and trudged down a hill to a dirt road and the van.

Thousands of miles away from home, 16-year-old Santa Pablo reaches for salal brush in early February on private timber land near Shelton, Wash. Sacramento Bee/Hector Amezcua

At the end of the day, a foreman gathered up her brush - and that of other pickers - to sell to a packing company. The pickers were paid by the bundle. The only woman on the crew and not as strong or as quick as other workers, Santa Pablo's cut was just $23 - the equivalent of $2.87 an hour. That's well below both the federal minimum wage ($5.15 an hour) and the Washington state minimum wage ($7.35 an hour) - and a violation of federal and state law.

Santa Pablo would like to go home, to return to her parents' small ranch outside the indigenous Mam village of Todos Santos in the deep green hills of Guatemala. But she can't. She is a prisoner to debt as well as danger.

"I think about the accident," she said. "I don't understand why this happened to me. And it makes me sad."

About the writer:

• The Bee's Tom Knudson can be reached at (530) 582-5336 or tknudson@sacbee.com.