By Christine Evans
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Thursday, February 17, 2005

IMMOKALEE — Ethel Kennedy put on her Reeboks, grabbed her sun hat and left behind her comfortable rental digs in Palm Beach on Wednesday to stomp around this poor farmworkers' town and investigate for herself the way people live when they earn 45 cents a bucket picking tomatoes.

It was not a comfortable trip — bumping down dirt roads and visiting farmworker hovels — and she was glad of it. She did not come out to drink sweet tea and put her feet up.

She came to see the worst of the worst, at least, she said, as much as can be seen in a day, and she was successful. From her passenger-seat perch in a large van filled with a few old friends, two journalists and a handful of human rights advocates, she peered down long rows of vegetables, watching the workers bend and lean and run like ants to fill their crates and buckets.

"What a tough life!" she said. "I mean, God, to get up at 4 in the morning and drive to the fields and then maybe get work or maybe not. And the living conditions! Like a barrio! You would hope that's not what the United States is about."

Her guide for the day was a soft-spoken but exceedingly determined human rights advocate named Lucas Benitez, who started picking in the fields at 17 and now fights for farmworker rights with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a grass-roots organization. Benitez took the 76-year-old Kennedy to the workers.

Carefully, she climbed the rickety steps to a threadbare two-bedroom that was home to eight men. Two of them, young tomato pickers from Guatemala, sat on the extra bed that filled the living room and answered her questions with the help of a translator.

Truth be told, they did not know who she was.

Next, Benitez brought her, rather secretively, to the trailers where a few years ago workers were kept in slave-like conditions. Their captors went to prison, but now they are out, and Benitez, who said he was on the witness list in the case, did not care to see them. He jumped from his spot behind the wheel and lay down on the van floor.

Kennedy remained upright — and incredulous.

"This is unbelievable," she said.

A casual observer might wonder why the widow of Robert F. Kennedy would drive across the state to surround herself in poverty. She could, after all, be golfing.

Her husband, she recalled, was great friends with Cesar Chavez, the founder of the United Farmworkers of America. In 1968, Robert Kennedy flew to be with Chavez when he broke his famous 25-day fast to help grape workers.

"He was just home from the campaign trail and exhausted," his widow said. "But then the phone call came and he turned around, went up the hill and got on a plane to be with Cesar."

Now it is Ethel Kennedy who is engaged in the fight. She said she would lobby, if only informally, for the coalition's efforts to get the huge fast-food company Yum! Brands to pay a penny a pound more for its tomatoes. The increase, under an agreement, would be passed on to the workers who toil in the fields, but the matter so far stands at a stalemate.

Kennedy said she would like to talk to growers about that. Advocates, however, were unable to find any to meet with her Wednesday.

"Don't worry," she said. "I'll be back."

Dr and Mrs. Wang, Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy, and Lucas Benitez at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers headquarters.

Lucas Benitez and Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers headquarters.