Federal Agents Investigate Sugar Exporter Over Allegations of Forced Labor

[Judi Lynn]

OCTOBER 20, 2023

Authors:

Sandy Tolan
GRANTEE

Michael Montgomery
GRANTEE

The Americans pulling into the luxury Caribbean resort town of Juan Dolio could have easily passed as tourists. Dressed in jeans and tennis shoes, they set up at a hotel overlooking the Dominican Republic’s southern coast. But the group, which included law enforcement officers from the US Department of Homeland Security, wasn’t traveling to enjoy the area’s world-class golf courses and palm-studded white sand beaches.

Trained to target and dismantle terrorist groups and transnational drug cartels, the special agents from Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, were probing something very different: working conditions at the Central Romana Corp., a major exporter of sugar to the United States, whose top executive is Alfonso Fanjul, a billionaire Florida businessman.

The inquiry could represent a breakthrough in criminal accountability for labor exploitation.

The agents spent days last March secretly interviewing Haitian cane cutters, who were shuttled to the hotel from Central Romana’s sprawling nearby 240,000-acre plantation, where many workers, along with their families, live in ramshackle camps known as bateyes.

In November, months before the HSI agents’ arrival, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) blocked imports of Central Romana sugar—which averaged about a quarter-billion pounds a year—after finding evidence of forced labor among its Haitian cane cutters.

More:
https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/federal-agents-investigate-sugar-exporter-over-allegations-forced-labor



This generation of the sugar barons of Fanjul moved to Florida because of the revolution. They established themselves immediately as owners of a sugar plantation in Florida, and got in deep trouble after years of chicanery and lost a class action suit brought by the wildly abused workers.

The one on the left in the photo of Alfonso, Alfie, and the other is Pepe. Pepe always generously supports right-wing US politicians, and Alfie pays campaign contributions to Democrats.

Outstanding in their field. Right!



Look, ma! Inducted into the Florida Hall of Fame! Wow!





The involuntarily late Jeffrey Epstein and Pepe Fanjul

ETC.