SlaveryMap

Camarillo, California, United States

Mauro Casares Edwin M. Ives, Dolly Ives, Griffith-Ives Co., former ranch employees Parmjit Singh, Rony havive, Alvaro Ruiz, Najuum Issac, Pedro and David Pinzon "The violations Ed has admitted making . . . were commonplace in agriculture during the 1980s," the report says. "His sins were the sins of an entire industry." He recruited Zapotec and Mixtec laborers from the rural mountaintops of southern Mexico, smuggling them into the country and allegedly imprisoning them behind locked gates and high fences at his 50-acre Somis compound and forced the to work for 1$ an hour Prosecutors charge that Ives enslaved hundreds of workers at his compound between 1984 and 1990, first by forbidding them to leave until smuggling fees were paid and then by threatening to turn them in to immigration agents if they fled. More than 100 workers have testified or declared in statements that they lived in slave-like conditions at Ives' Somis ranch. Though slavery charges were dropped in a plea bargain last year, prosecutors have continued to argue that Ives virtually imprisoned laborers recruited from rural Mexican villages during the 1980s, forcing them to work for sub-minimum wages and to buy the necessities of life at inflated prices from a company store. charged with enslaving more than 100 undocumented workers from Mexico and forcing them to work long hours at menial wages. Lured by promises of good pay, the Mexicans were smuggled into the United States, then were kept at a 50-acre ranch until they could pay off a $435 smuggling fee, according to a federal grand jury indictment issued Tuesday they worked from 3:30AM to 8:00 PM

Location
United States · Camarillo, California · 1990 (location generalized to protect survivors)
Response & intervention
The U.S. Border Patrol and state and federal labor agencies Department of Labor Assistant U.S. Atty. Carol L. Gillam Tom O'Brien Deputy State Labor Commissioner department of labor A Ventura County flower rancher charged with enslaving hundreds of Mexican laborers has agreed to plead guilty to corporate racketeering and to pay about $1.5 million in back wages to former workers The company's organized-crime conviction would be the first in a civil rights case Marco Antonio Abarca, a California Rural Legal Assistance lawyer U.S. District Judge Consuelo B. Marshall "It was slave labor," said 49-year-old worker, who said he worked at the ranch for three weeks last November before escaping under a 7-foot barbed-wire fence and fleeing at night through a deep ravine. DARYL KELLEY, TIMES STAFF WRITER & Tracey Kaplan http://articles.latimes.com/1990-04-15/news/mn-1978_1_ventura-county http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:wimmZEHx6QkJ:articles.latimes.com/1992-09-29/news/mn-322_1_haitian-workers+La+Times+1990+Edwin+M.+Ives&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a http://articles.latimes.com/1993-09-13/local/me-34765_1_farm-workers http://articles.latimes.com/1990-06-20 /local/me-50_1_district-attorney http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/28/us/5-charged-with-enslaving-mexican-workers.html http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P2-8176370.html

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