“My pregnancy was so normal,” Eugenia Mejias’ gaze is steady, “they didn’t even do an ultrasound test. Two or three days after the birth, I found out something was terribly wrong.” Her third child was born with a brain swollen and damaged by excess water retention, deformed hands and feet and an exposed and twisted spine.
The endless rows of trees burdened with fuzzing peaches and blushing apples and the swollen clusters of grapes make Chile’s Central Valley, one of the world’s most important fruit producers, look like paradise. But for those who live here, the uncontrolled use of pesticides is turning their dreams into nightmares of deformed and dying babies, babies that must be carried to term even when they have no brains and no chance of survival.
Dr. Victoria Mella, an obstetrician with the Regional Hospital in Rancagua, a city in the heart of the fruit-growing Sixth Region, raised the alarm in November 1992 when she completed a study of 10,000 live births in the region, comparing figures for 1975-1977, before the fruit industry took off, to those for 1988-1990, when the industry was booming.
Although she found a lower rate of the birth defects typical in most Chilean hospitals (dislocated hips, extra fingers, etc.), she discovered three times as many babies born without brains or with the exposed and twisted spines and the water-retention in the brain that Mejias’ child has.
Looking more closely, Mella found that most of the parents worked in the export fruit industry and that the rise in birth defects coincided with an increase in Chilean imports of pesticides from $4 million to $38 million. About 60 percent of those pesticides are applied in the fields around Rancagua.
Three years after the initial outcry over Mella’s study, little has changed. A conspiracy of silence has buried followup studies in drawers and cost some diligent government officials their jobs.
One public servant told me, off the record, for fear of being fired: “There’s so much resistance to anything that might affect production in the export sector. There’s no political will to act, no one to turn to.”
In the early 1980s, under the regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the export fruit industry was the first sign that Chile’s neo-liberal economic model might take off after two massive failures. These failures had sent the country’s foreign debt soaring and the gross domestic product plunging by 14 percent, the worst drop on a continent staggering under world recession.
Today, five years after an elected government took over, the $1 billion fruit industry employs about 250,000 of Chile’s 800,000 farm workers in the fields, while another 100,000 work in the packing plants. But the industry is in crisis. Indebtedness, a strong peso against a quivering dollar and the uneven quality of Chilean fruit have reduced windfall profits.
The industry, 60 percent of which is controlled by six companies, including Dole, Standard Trading, Unifrutti and a Chilean firm, faces an increasingly competitive world market. Desperate to eliminate the fruit fly to gain access to Asian markets, some companies have conducted massive aerial sprayings of pesticides over whole regions.
In 1994, the Ministry of Agriculture sprayed Santiago, the nation’s capital, during the busiest time of day with no warnings to safeguard pregnant women and children. Officials used Malathion, a controversial pesticide associated with birth defects in Chile and abroad. Battles over spraying have led health officials to resign in protest, while agriculture ministry inspectors argue the pesticides are safe.
Chile uses some 1,460 pesticides, with 350 main active ingredients, among them are Lindano, an insecticide banned in the United States; the weedkiller Paraquat, which contains dioxin; and the insecticide Parathion, a highly toxic organic phosphate whose use in the U.S. is restricted to specially trained handlers.
Methyl bromide is sprayed into fumigation chambers to prepare grapes for export. The gas disseminates and there is little danger for foreign consumers. But workers often enter the chambers before the gas has properly dissipated. Sometimes dormitories or schools are located dangerously near, and some children have been intoxicated or died from the gas.
The U.S. is Chile’s biggest market, and some physicians point out the irony: Methyl bromide is banned in the U.S. but required for produce being shipped there.
For the fruit workers, a 1993 law pushed through by the Women’s Ministry changed things in theory but not in practice.
“Women working in the fields or the packing plants have little information about the hazards of the pesticides they’re working with,” says Alicia Munoz, of the Women’s Department of the National Farmworkers Commission, the national organization of farmworkers.
“They don’t wear protective clothing. They stand in the fields when airplanes or tractors go by spraying the fruit. Many men work as fumigators from the age of 16 on. When they can’t have children, they think it’s simply God’s will.”
The military regime eliminated therapeutic abortion, even in the case of women carrying babies with no hope of survival after birth, turning the estimated 150,000 women who abort annually into criminals, pursued and prosecuted by the law. The regime’s rule of terror eliminated the once-powerful unions that struggled for land reform and civil rights in the countryside during the 1960s.
Fear of losing their jobs still keeps most from protesting, says Maria Elena Rozas of Renace, an environmental group that has been monitoring the problem.
“The fruit workers are mostly young people with no political experience, not much education, constantly moving from one place to another. If they say anything, they end up on blacklists that are passed on from one region to the next.”
“This whole issue has been kept very quiet,” says Dr. Marisa Matamala, of Comusams, a non-government organization that offers training to women farmworkers.
“We’re looking for ways to join forces, but the fruit workers aren’t very organized. Because of their double workload, their sector remains the most manipulated within the company.”
Comusams, the Colectivo de Mujeres, Salud y Medicina Social, specializes in the issues of reproductive and occupational health. With funding from Global Fund for Women and the UN’s Population Fund, Comusams has carried out training in rural areas near Santiago, but an attempt to create a foundation to assist mothers of children with birth defects failed because of lack of funding.
“We need to democratize knowledge about health,” says Matamala, “so that women can take control. There’s a great deal of damage being done in the fruit fields, and it’s not clear what that will be in the long term.”
Comusams, Renace, the farmworkers commission and a long list of non-governmental organizations have been struggling to get action from the government to prevent the fruit workers’ exposure to improperly handled pesticides and to protect consumers. A study of tomatoes and peaches, carried out by the government’s consumer service, Sernac, discovered residues from 14 pesticides. Mella says that 60 percent of the pesticides used on wheat crops wind up in the bread Chileans devour with such gusto at every meal.
In the meantime, Mejias and women like her are left alone to face the complications of raising families that include a severely handicapped child, with no support from the industry that once employed them.
