Agriprocessors Raid Shatters Dreams in Guatemalan Village
By Summer Harlow
Tue. Dec 23, 2008
San José Calderas, Guatemala — While working 15-hour days, six days a week at a kosher meatpacking plant in Iowa where machines could chop off a finger at any moment, Marco Tulio relied on one thing to keep going: thoughts of his Guatemalan hometown of San José Calderas.
He pictured his wife and children moving into a new four-room home made of adobe, on a street where real houses of brick or cement were slowly but surely replacing the one-room shacks of sheet metal and bamboo. He pictured his son in school, with money to buy his uniform and all the books and supplies he needed. He took comfort knowing that if his aging parents got sick, they would have money to see a doctor.
He thought of all the new tienditas, or little stores, that had sprung up in town, selling cookies and sugar and dishes and toys, items that his fellow townspeople had never been able to afford.
But Tulio, 42, never imagined that when he returned home he would find, rather than the growing and prospering village he had left behind, half-built homes where construction had been halted, overstocked stores empty of shoppers and children — including his 17-year-old son — roaming the streets because they had to quit school.
For more than a decade, Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa, acted as this dusty village’s guardian, patron and largest employer, but in the months since a May immigration raid and the arrest of Tulio and nearly 300 other undocumented Guatemalan workers, the kosher meat company now is proving to be the undoing of San José Calderas.
“This is what deportation has done,” said Tulio, who was deported October 12 with more than 100 other Agriprocessors workers, all handcuffed at the wrists and ankles for the plane ride to Guatemala City. “It’s a disaster for the village. It’s gone down since the raid. All the houses people were building have stopped, so there are these unfinished houses everywhere. How can you live like that?”
An estimated two-thirds of the 300 undocumented Agriprocessors workers deported to Guatemala in the past two months are from the municipality of San Andrés Itzapa, which includes Tulio’s village of San José Calderas. Officials say this town has become emblematic of the economic and social crises that the record-high deportations to Guatemala are provoking in this Central American nation of roughly 13 million people.
http://www.forward.com/articles/14768/
