Fourteen people were found dead in the Arizona desert in early June, after one of the party's survivors flagged down a federal immigration officer to beg for water.
The group was composed of illegals--Mexican citizens crossing into the US illegally to work...
...six of those fourteen dead were coffee farmers from Veracruz state. Farmers who left their prime coffee growing land to look for work because, at a record low of 56 cents per pound on the export market, it costs more to grow the coffee than a farmer can get...
There's a coffee glut on the world market. Overproduction fueled by mechanized, chemical, monoculture agribusiness. The coffee corporations consolidate and extinguish small farms and the local biodiversity under the same unrolling carpet. Tree-filled, plant and animal rich, small coffee farms are replaced with the sterile sunblasted monotony of the factory farm. Communities and their local economies are disrupted. Farmers are displaced. We pay ever more tax dollars to increase "enforcement" and "interdiction" at the border. And the price of a shot of espresso keeps going up....
(Re earlier thread on world bank funding and coffee production, pasted below:)
<<"In the late 1980s, opposition from the Reagan administration forced the collapse of the International Coffee Agreement...After the pact ended in 1989 and the market was deregulated, prices plummeted.
At the same time, the World Bank and its cousin, the Asian Development Bank, gave generous loans to Vietnam to plant huge amounts of low-quality robusta coffee - in line with international lending institutions' mandate to stimulate low-cost production and end market inefficiencies.
The strategy succeeded with a vengeance, as Vietnam went from being one of the world's smallest coffee producers to being second-largest..."
(So here we have the World Bank making loans to produce more of a crop of which there was already a glut.) "Vietnam has become a successful producer," said Don Mitchell, principal economist at the World Bank...."
Although Mitchell acknowledges the damage to nations that cannot compete with Vietnam's $1-per-day labor costs or Brazil's mechanized plantations - such as Guatemala, with its $3-per-day minimum wage - he said the losers must switch to farming other crops.">>>