EL PASO (By
Wade Goodwyn, NPR)
October 13, 2009
― In Texas and across the
Southwest, Hispanic farmers have been
fighting the Agriculture Department for
close to a decade.
The farmers say the department's Farm
Services Agency discriminated against
them — denying or delaying loans, and
refusing to investigate when they cried
foul.
The government settled a similar
complaint brought by African-American
farmers for $1 billion. And while the
claims of discrimination and other
factors are almost identical, the
Hispanic farmers have gotten nothing.
'Always No'
Noe Obregon, 47, looks exactly like the
South Texas farmer he's been all his
life: cowboy hat, blue denim shirt,
jeans and cowboy boots. Obregon says
in the 1970s, '80s and '90s, it
didn't matter what you looked like or
how good of a farmer you were. If you
were Hispanic in Texas, getting a farm
loan from the USDA was like the quest
for the Holy Grail.
"I would go and apply, and it would take
about two to three weeks," says Obregon.
"Then they would turn me down, say it
was a high risk crop or different
reasons. But it was always, 'No.' Then I
would appeal, and it would take 90 to
120 days, and by then my planting season
was over."
Instead of getting his loan in the
spring, Obregon says his money would
come in November. He would use the late
arriving loan to get his family through
the winter, and then he'd apply earlier
the next year.
But Obregon learned it didn't matter how
early he applied. While his white
neighbors got their loans in February
and planted and raised crops, Obregon
seethed and his debt mounted. By 1990,
he owed the government $150,000, and the
USDA moved to foreclose on his farm. He
says it was the same with nearly every
Hispanic farmer in the county.
"They were either foreclosed, or they'd
take their lands, put them up for
auction, and Anglos bought them because
they had the finances and they had the
way to buy them," he says.
'No Help For Them'
Down the road from Obregon's farm,
65-year-old Modesta Salazar tells the
same story.
"They would give the loans late when the
Anglos were already raising their
crops," Salazar says.
Salazar and her
brother Modesto Rodriguez grew up on the
523-acre farm.
As some scraggly cows gather around her,
Salazar looks out over her 500 acres of
mesquite scrub, tumbleweeds, ruined
barbed wire fencing — what's left of the
family farm. For more than 30 years,
this was a vast expanse of cotton, maize
and vegetables, with hundreds of horses
and cattle. Now it's mostly brush.
Salazar says the farmers who sat on the
local USDA loan board were made up of
the most prosperous farmers in the
county. She says these men gave the
government loans to other white farmers
— the people they'd gone to school with
and known all their lives — while
Hispanic farmers slowly went broke.
"All the farmers, from Cotulla, from
Bigfoot, Devine, from everywhere — all
the farmers were in the same situation;
no help for them," she says.
A Long History Of Discrimination
Both Obregon and Salazar's families
filed discrimination complaints with the
USDA, but say they never heard anything
back. The agency refuses to comment
about specific cases.
But if you're expecting the Agriculture
Department to issue an indignant
rebuttal to the overall accusation that
it discriminated for decades, you're
going to be disappointed.
In 1997, then-Agriculture Secretary Dan
Glickman testified before Congress and
conceded a long history of
discrimination in the loan program. He
talked about "good people who lost their
family land, not because of a bad crop,
not because of a flood, but because of
the color of their skin."
"Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack often
talks about how the department is known
in some quarters as 'The Last
Plantation.' That's a reputation that's
unfortunate and one we intend to fix,"
says Justin Dejong, Vilsack's spokesman.
"By empowering the Office of Civil
Rights at the USDA, Secretary Vilsack is
laying the foundation for people to be
treated better in the future."
No Class Action
Soon after President Reagan took office
in the early 1980s, the USDA's civil
rights division was quietly dismantled.
Nevertheless, the agency continued to
tell farmers that if they felt they
weren't getting loans because of their
color or gender, they should file a
complaint.
Like his sister, Jesus Rodriguez laments
the loss of their family farm.
But for the next 14 years, those
complaints were put into an empty
government office and never
investigated. By the 1990s, black
farmers filed a lawsuit — Pigford v.
Glickman. Because the USDA failed to
investigate years of discrimination
complaints, U.S. District Judge Paul
Friedman certified the black farmers'
case as a class action. And with that
ruling, rather than risk a trial, the
federal government settled with 15,000
black farmers for $1 billion.
The next year, Hispanic farmers filed
their lawsuit. And although their
discrimination complaints had been
thrown into the same empty USDA office,
the judge in their case decided the
Hispanic farmers would not be allowed to
sue as a class.
The federal government has opposed them
in court for the past nine years.
Matthew Miller, spokesman for the
Justice Department, is forthright about
the government's reasoning.
"Unlike in the Pigford case, the court
has rejected the plaintiff's request for
class certification," he says. "Which
means their claims will all be litigated
on an individual basis. Because of that,
because of the judge's ruling, we will
not be able to negotiate a class wide
settlement."
It's the same response from the USDA.
The government is open to settling
individual claims on a case-by-case
basis, but unlike the black farmers,
there will be no settlement as a group
for Hispanics.
A Bitter Disappointment
This response — that it's not the
principle of the thing but the legal
ruling that matters most — outrages the
Hispanic farmers. What's made them even
more furious is within months after
taking office, President Obama decided
the $1 billion the government has
already given to the black farmers is
insufficient, and he's requesting an
additional $1.25 billion for them.
It's been a bitter disappointment to the
Hispanic farmers who fought the Bush
Justice Department for eight years. They
thought it was going be different after
Obama was elected.
"It makes no sense legally, morally or
even politically to treat these farmers
the way they have thus far been
treated," says Stephen Hill, lead
counsel for the Hispanic farmers. "The
claims are exactly the same as the
claims as the black farmers, and they're
entitled to the same recompense for
their injuries."
Lawyers for the Hispanic farmers have
filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme
Court asking the court to review the
court's ruling that the Hispanic farmers
can't sue as a class.
In spite of the settlement with the
black farmers and the USDA's public
admissions of guilt, no USDA employee
has ever been fired, demoted or
reprimanded, according to the USDA.
In fact, lawyers for the farmers say
some of the worst discriminators in the
Agriculture Department have been
promoted.
