| |
Chapter 7
|
| |
|
|
|
In my vagabond years in the 70's the attorney general charged
plantation owners in Florida with practicing slavery.
|
| |
|
|
|
But apart from a few, who were imprisoned for chaining workers,
prosecution of such slave owners stopped under Reagan and Bush.
|
| |
|
|
| |
Here they work, in heat, dust and soot with
razor-sharp machetes. Fingers and toes are often chopped off.
|
| |
|
|
| |
After an exhausting day's
work the men are driven in trucks like cattle to camps often enclosed by barbed
wire and "No Trespassing" signs.
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Just before my visit two such trucks tipped
over, killing one and injuring 125. Instead of receiving compensation, the men
were fired. Inside the camps, with often over 100 to a room, only one dared
talk with me, hidden in a bathroom, as they are immediately fired for talking
to whites.
|
| |
|
|
| |
Though these slave camps are owned by Gulf & Western, the real slave
holder is the government and the taxpayers, who pay up to half the operating
cost to avoid cheap imported sugar.
|
| |
|
|
| |
Today I find even more slave camps and often bring
shocked white students with me to visit them - some only a few hours drive from
the nation's capital.
|
| |
|
|
| |
When I brought a well-known Danish author with me she wrote a
harrowing account about how government sponsored oppression had not ended with
the fall of communism.
|
| |
|
|
| |
One blood-stained black hitchhiker I picked up one night had been
so terribly beaten up by the guards as he tried to flee one of the camps that I
had to treat his wounds.
|
| |
|
|
| |
He told me about another worker whose legs were crushed by the guards
after an escape attempt and who ended up leaving on crutches.
|
| |
|
|
| |
"Welcome back to the free world", I said. But he shook his head as he was on his way up to the camps in
North Carolina. Voting with his feet was not a real option for him - confined to
a gulag camp system by American voters - and non-voters - who simply don't care
any more.
|
| |
|
|
| |
After an exhausting work day the workers are driven like cattle
back to a barbed wire slave camp, where more than a hundred often are packed in
each room. Not even the big TV-networks managed to get into these camps.
|
| |
|
|
| |
| |
|
| |