The Homelands Blog

The high cost of sugar

Inside a house in a batey (work camp) owned by the Central Romana sugar company. Photo by Pedro Farias-Nardi.
Inside a house in a batey (work camp) owned by the Central Romana sugar company. Photo by Pedro Farias-Nardi.

In 1991, Homelands cofounders Sandy Tolan and Alan Weisman reported a story for the Vanishing Homelands series from the sugar plantations of the Dominican Republic. “Sugar and Sorrow in Hispaniola” documented the difficulties faced by Haitian migrant workers who lived in squalid state- and company-owned camps without sanitation or electricity. Many had been captured and transported there by human traffickers. They had no formal status and no access to health care or other protections.

For 30 years, Sandy was unable to get the story of one of those workers out of his mind. Lulu Pierre had been kidnaped as a teenager and forced to work in the cane fields. Desperately lonely, he had just quit when Sandy and Alan met him. Sandy decided to return to find out what had become of him.

He reports what he found in two powerful pieces of narrative journalism, both produced with Dominican journalist Euclides Cordero Nuel. One is “The Bitter Work Behind Sugar,” an hour-long episode of Reveal, the podcast and radio show produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting. The other is “The High Human Cost of America’s Sugar Habit,” an in-depth feature in Mother Jones. Both tell how the Central Romana Corporation, whose billionaire owners live in the United States, continues to exploit its workers despite its claims to the contrary.

“Sugar and Sorrow in Hispaniola” was featured in an NPR story in May 2021 as part of the network’s 50th anniversary celebration. A listener in Boston said he hadn’t expected to be so affected by the story, and he still remembered it 30 years later.

Cecilia Vaisman award winner announced

Angélica M. Casas

The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists will present Angélica M. Casas with the 2021 Cecilia Vaisman Award at a virtual ceremony and conversation on September 30, 2021, at 6:30 p.m. EDT. Please register here.

The award honors the legacy of Homelands co-founder Cecilia Vaisman, an extraordinary reporter, producer, and teacher who inspired countless students to pursue careers in audio and video journalism. Ceci died in 2015.

Here is Angélica’s bio courtesy of our friends at Medill:

Angélica M. Casas is a bilingual journalist telling visual stories for BBC News. She travels throughout the US and Latin America reporting on the effects of policy on underrepresented communities, the coronavirus pandemic, fronteras and immigration. As a “one-woman band,” she produces, films, animates, and edits her own videos and short documentaries. In front of the camera, you can catch her presenting explainer videos, hosting the BBC’s Facebook Watch show “Cut Through the Noise,” or reporting for World News America or World Service Radio.

Her English and Spanish work has also appeared in PBS Newshour, AJ+, KQED, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Antonio Express-News.

Following the searchers into the desert

Volunteers search for a missing person on Aug. 28, 2021, near Three Points, Arizona. Photo by Bear Guerra for BuzzFeed News.

In August, Homelands’ Bear Guerra accompanied volunteers with the group Aguilas del Desierto (Eagles of the Desert) as they searched for missing migrants in the desert near the Mexico-Arizona border. Nine of his photos appear in the BuzzFeed News article “We Know How They Suffer” by staff reporter Adolfo Flores.

Most of the Aguilas del Desierto volunteers themselves made the treacherous journey across the desert on their way to the United States. The group receives hundreds of calls per year from loved ones seeking help locating missing persons. So far in 2021, Flores reports, the Border Patrol has recovered more than 380 human remains in the desert and has made more than 10,000 rescues.

Guerra, a native of San Antonio who lives in Tucson, frequently covers border issues. In addition to his freelance work, he is also the photo editor of High Country News.

Update: Weisman case dismissed “without prejudice”

Minnesota’s 9th Judicial District Court has dismissed the criminal trespassing charge brought against Alan Weisman after Alan was arrested, strip-searched, and held in solitary confinement on June 7. He was in northern Minnesota to cover the protests against Enbridge Inc.’s Line 3 pipeline for a forthcoming book and for an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times.

The gross misdemeanor charge was dismissed “without prejudice,” which means that it can be refiled if the authorities decide to pursue it. Meanwhile, Alan’s attorney is exploring the possibility of filing a civil suit in federal court for illegal arrest, suppression of his First Amendment press freedom rights, and other violations.

“I’m enraged by the deliberate denial of my press freedom by a sheriff who knew exactly who I was,” Alan said. “Protecting writers and journalists to bear witness to their doings is crucial to our species’ future, and I’m grateful that Author’s Guild, PEN America, CPJ [Committee to Protect Journalists], and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press have proved stalwart.”

Alan was arrested by deputies of the Northern Lights Task Force, which is composed of sheriffs from 18 northern Minnesota counties and funded by Enbridge Inc. to protect its pipeline against protests.

For more information about the arrest and detention, read the CPJ’s detailed account of the incident.

Weisman: Pipeline offers stark choice

“To counter mounting climate catastrophes,” Alan Weisman writes in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, “tar sands must stay in the ground. Anything else risks incinerating our species’ future.”

Alan traveled to northern Minnesota in early June to cover protests against Enbridge Inc.’s Line 3 oil pipeline for the LA Times article and for a book he is writing on humanity’s best hopes for getting through the coming challenging decades.

The Line 3 pipeline is designed to carry crude oil extracted from western Canadian tar sands to a terminal on Lake Superior. Native American tribes have led the resistance to the project, which would cross more than 200 rivers and streams. Climate activists have argued that oil derived from tar sands is up to three times dirtier than conventional oil, and that burning it will make it impossible to achieve greenhouse gas reduction goals. Both groups have called on the Biden administration to halt the pipeline project.

On June 7, Alan was detained and strip-searched during a mass arrest by sheriff’s deputies and charged with gross misdemeanor trespassing. He faces a hearing on July 16. The Committee to Protect Journalists, Homelands Productions, and other organizations and colleagues have condemned the arrest and called for charges to be dropped.

You can read the entire op-ed here. If you encounter the LA Times’ paywall, try opening a Private, Incognito, or InPrivate window in your browser and pasting the link there.

Alan Weisman arrested while covering pipeline protest

Journalist, author, and Homelands cofounder Alan Weisman was arrested on June 7 while covering the Line 3 anti-pipeline protests in northern Minnesota. He was charged with gross misdemeanor trespassing and released after five hours. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called for an explanation of why Weisman was arrested while clearly working as a journalist.

“It is outrageous that officers from Minnesota’s Hubbard County Sheriff’s Department held journalist Alan Weisman in detention for hours, strip-searched him, and went through his equipment,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna, in New York.”

Weisman, who was working on an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times and collecting information for a book, was wearing two lanyards with press credentials when a sheriff’s deputy tapped him on the shoulder and said he was under arrest. “It was very clear that I was a journalist,” he told CPJ, saying that he had a notebook in his hand and was conducting interviews at the time. 

You can read CPJ’s alert here.

A reckoning in Gaza

“Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza, with its unconscionable numbers of civilian casualties, is proof of a bankrupt U.S. policy,” writes Sandy Tolan in the Daily Beast. To make progress toward a lasting peace, America “must confront the tragic mess it helped create, and abandon the foreign policy its own inaction undermined.”

Tolan is the author of two books about Palestine, The Lemon Tree and Children of the Stone. In an opinion piece published on the day Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire, he argues that America’s decades-long failure to hold Israel to account has destroyed any hope of a two-state solution. “Israelis, Palestinians and Americans must find the courage to build something new,” he writes.

You can read the entire piece here.

Thirty years later, this story still moves

In 1991, Homelands co-founders Sandy Tolan and Alan Weisman traveled to the Dominican Republic to report on Haitian sugar cane cutters working in near-slavery conditions on Dominican plantations. Their story, Sugar and Sorrow in Hispaniola, aired on NPR’s All Things Considered as part of the Vanishing Homelands series.

Listener Joel Abrams of Boston has never forgotten it. “If you had asked me was I interested in farm workers in Haiti, I would have said no,” he told NPR recently. “But I listened to this, and it really made me care about them and brought them to life as people for me and in a remarkable way.”

On May 5, All Things Considered aired excerpts from Sandy and Alan’s story as part of NPR’s 50th anniversary celebration. You can listen to it here. In a medium as evanescent as radio, it is beyond gratifying to know that the work lives on in people’s hearts.

Not only that — this particular story will have another afterlife. Sandy has been working on a podcast series about his search for Lulu Pierre, one of the cane cutters he and Alan met 30 years ago. He’s also producing a piece on Haitian cane cutters for Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. We’ll let you know when there’s something to listen to.

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