Lucas Benitez was born to a big family in the rural highlands of Guerrero, Mexico. Raised in a cramped house with dirt floors, he migrated with his older brother at the age of 17 to Immokalee, Florida, where he worked in the tomato fields. Lucas expected to find hard work at the end of his journey, his young life as a rural farmer in Mexico prepared him for that. But what he didn’t expect to find was the brutal and humiliating working conditions that were typical in Immokalee’s vast farm fields in the 1990s, including a suffocating climate of intimidation and violence. Those abuses prompted him to act, and eventually to help found the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.
Since it was founded in 1993, the CIW has used a range of strategies to raise awareness about working conditions for farmworkers and to advocate for their basic human rights – and in the most extreme cases, to play a critical role in the investigation and prosecution of slave labor operations – ultimately creating its cornerstone program, the Fair Food Program.
In the video below, Lucas talks about the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ transformation from fighting for the bare minimum – and a modest wage increase – to developing a program that harnesses the purchasing power of some of the world’s largest corporations to ensure that the most egregious human rights violations – like modern-day slavery – do not occur on Fair Food Program farms. It’s what we call “The Power of Prevention”:
Fair Food Program donors Travis McConnell, Cheryl Queen, Brent Probinsky, Mary P. Pautz, Heal the Planet Foundation, and an anonymous donor have issued a challenge to Fair Food Nation: If 300 individuals make a gift this week (regardless of the gift size) they will give $30,000 to the Fair Food Program. Make a gift to unlock $30,000 to the program that prevents modern-day slavery, sexual assault, child labor, and physical abuses in the fields. Be a human rights defender today!