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Online petition asking for a new trial at:
<http://kola-hq.hypermart.net/actcaro.htm>
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The FERNANDO EROS CARO Case
PART 5 - BACKGROUND

PESTICIDES

Fernando Jr.'s life was spent in vast agricultural fields
owned by distant growers and worked by thousands of
Mexican Americans like he and his family. From his conception,
he was exposed to poisonous pesticides used in stockyards
and fields. He played in the poisoned dust of the desert valley,
he drank and swam in the toxic, untreated water from its miles
of irrigation ditches, and he breathed the noxious dust and
gasses day and night in his home. His father brought home
the toxins on his clothes and on his hands. His mother states
that as a very young child, Fernando ate handsful of dirt saturated
with pesticides. No one knew or thought that this central part of
their life and their work was devastating, even deadly. As a child
laborer, he moved from field to field and from task to task. He
worked in the fields, with various crops, breathing in and absorbing
through his skin a long list of damaging chemicals.

Fernando Eros Caro was so immersed in these deadly toxins
that his schoolmates remember his coming to school smelling
of pesticides. As a teenager, he began each day at 4:00 a.m. to
work as many hours as possible before school. He went to the
fields where he served as flagman, perhaps the most dangerous
and vulnerable position in field agriculture for exposure to
neurotoxins. Day after day, month after month, the child dutifully
took his flag and marched to assigned areas of the fields and
waved his colored flags to signal crop dusters where to dump
their loads of pesticides.

Fernando noticed that his crew boss and the pilot, both of
whom were white, always covered their hands and wore protective
face masks when they watched him mix bags of pesticides before
they took the airplane and dumped the poisons from the sky onto
the fields, using this teenage boy as their spraying target. Despite
his deference to his overseers, Fernando eventually approached
them and requested a face mask for himself. The crew boss
scoffed at this request, and denied it.
 
 

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