Ecuador apologizes to farm workers deemed to live like slaves

A antheral successful Ecuador holds up a garment with the slogan 'Furukawa, ne'er again,' alluding to a Japanese textile steadfast recovered to person abused its workers. Photo: Galo Paguay / AFP
Source: AFP

Ecuador's authorities apologized Saturday to immoderate 300 people who worked arsenic farmers for a Japanese textile steadfast successful conditions which a tribunal likened to modern-day slavery.

These radical worked connected plantations that produced abaca, a fibre utilized successful textiles and the car industry.

As of 2021, Furukawa's plantations for abaca covered astir 23,000 hectares dispersed implicit 3 provinces connected the Pacific coast, wherever the bulk of the colonisation is Black.

Some workers gave commencement to children successful unsanitary and overcrowded camps, portion others were denied due aesculapian attraction aft work-related injuries, according to grounds fixed astatine a quality league successful Quito backmost successful December.

That period the Constitutional Court ordered Furukawa to wage $120,000 to each of 342 victims -- a full of astir $41 million. The institution was besides ordered to marque a nationalist apology to them. It has not complied with either order.

The tribunal said that implicit the people of 5 years Furukawa had radical surviving successful conditions of modern-day slavery successful its abaca fields.

It besides ordered the authorities to apologize to the workers, and that is what happened Saturday.

The institution violated "national and planetary regulations that affected, successful essence, quality dignity," Labor Minister Ivonne Nunez said.

She said "the state, done the assorted ministries, arsenic the condemnation explains, turned a deaf ear" to the plight of the abused workers.

Nunez spoke astatine a ceremonial with different authorities ministers astatine Quito's Independence Plaza, arsenic ex-Furukawa workers chanted slogans specified arsenic "reparations, reparations" and "modern slavery, ne'er again."

After the tribunal ruling, Furukawa said it does not person the money to wage the damages ordered by the tribunal and called them disproportionate.

Back successful December, astatine a gathering astatine a quality rights group's headquarters, plantation workers told fearfulness stories of their lives raising abaca.

"We person been confronting the monster that is Furukawa," Segundo Ordonez, a 59-year-old farmer, said astatine the meeting.

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Source: AFP