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The slave camps

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.

  

  
  

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