Congratulations go out to NPR/WGCU’s Eileen Kelley and Andrea Melendez who recently received the Florida Association of Broadcast Journalists’ prestigious 2023 award for best political reporting for their coverage of the CIW’s March for Farmworker Freedom!

Kelley: “They came to America in search of a better life. The work in the agricultural fields of Florida they knew would be tough. But it was much worse than that. And so they spoke out during a 50-mile march.”

In the pre-dawn hours of March 14 of last year, over 100 farmworkers and their allies packed their bags, left their homes, and made their way to the small, agricultural community of Pahokee, Florida, for Day 1 of the 5-day, 50-mile March to Build a New World. 

There, outside a forced labor camp surrounded by barbed, NPR local member station’s Eileen Kelley and Andrea Melendez met and spoke with those who were preparing to march. 

With the labor camp as the launch point for their historic march, the marchers set off and were soon enveloped in sprawling sugarcane fields as far as the eye could see.  Kelley and Melendez accompanied the marchers on that first day and captured the spectacular action with beautiful visuals and moving text and testimonials from the marchers. The goal of the long trek was to celebrate the Fair Food Program’s unparalleled success in transforming the agricultural industry, and to call on those corporate holdouts — Kroger, Wendy’s, and Publix chief among them — to finally join the Presidential Medal-winning program and help expand the FFP’s proven human rights protections to thousands of more farmworkers in their supply chains.

For their tireless efforts and incisive reporting of our historic march for farmworker freedom, Kelley and Melendez won the Florida Association of Broadcast Journalists’ prestigious 2023 award for best political reporting! We know you will join us in congratulating them both for this great achievement!

To commemorate this award, we are sharing their coverage of last year’s march. To see the full coverage, including spectacular audio and wonderful photos we unfortunately cannot re-share, click here for the day 1 recap and here for the final day article.

Kelley and Melendez have been thoughtfully covering the Immokalee community and CIW for many years. For more of their coverage of the CIW, check out their article on the 2024 Farmworker Freedom Festival, as well as the FFP’s expansion both domestic and international. 

Here below is an excerpt from the Day 1 article, and be sure to check out the full coverage on the CIW's site.

Enjoy! 

Over 100 start march across Florida to protest modern slavery in the agricultural fields

By Eileen Kelley and Andrea Melendez/WGCU Investigative Team

Current and former farmworkers, allies and religious leaders are marching across a large swath of Florida.

They are calling on retail food giants like Wendy’s, Publix and Kroger to join the Fair Food Program, a human-rights initiative that many of their competitors joined over a decade ago.

Some 100 people headed off Tuesday, marching in pairs along rural roads in the south-central Florida agricultural town in Pahokee.

Over several days, these mostly current or former farmworkers as well as their families, will continue to push east, carrying banners calling for human rights, until they reach the island of Palm Beach.

There’s a reason the Coalition of Immokalee Workers picked these starting and end points.

In late December, Bladimir Moreno, the owner of Los Villatoros Harvesting, a labor contract company, was sentenced to nine years in federal prison for federal racketeering and operating a forced labor camp in Pahokee.

Workers were denied promised wages, held at gun point and kept behind barbed-wire fences at night. Two men did escape in the trunk of a vehicle and raced south to Immokalee, a place once well-known for decades to be Ground Zero for modern slavery.

But a movement that began in 1993 with the creation of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has nearly eradicated these harsh labor camps where migrant workers come in search of an opportunity to feed to families back home.

The workers held demonstrations and hunger strikes to draw attention to inhumane conditions in the tomato fields. But more, organizers say, was needed.

In 2010, the workers’ group created the Fair Food Program.

Coalition of Immokalee Workers
110 S 2nd St
Immokalee, FL 34142
United States

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