Traveling modern-day slavery museum will stop in Fort Walton Beach (PHOTOS)

FORT WALTON BEACH — Nights were spent locked inside the back of a cargo truck. During the day, over a dozen farm workers were beaten, physically restrained and forced to pick tomatoes in the fields in South Florida.

This occurred not hundreds of years ago, but in 2008.

Though slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, seven people have been found guilty of keeping farm workers as modern-day slaves in Florida since 1997. The most recent case involved the cargo truck.

On Monday, a truck fashioned after the one used to enslave farm workers will arrive at the Fort Walton Beach Library as part of a traveling museum from Immokalee. The truck will be in the library’s parking lot from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday.

The exhibit highlights how, where and why forced labor still exists in the United States.

“Slavery isn’t just something from the past, but is something that is woven in to the fabric of Florida agriculture,” Cruz Salucio said through a translator. Salucio works with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a farm worker rights organization that built the museum and has also uncovered, infiltrated and helped the federal government prosecute cases of modern-day slavery in Florida.

“While all of us eat, many of us don’t realize the conditions from which our food is produced,” he said. “Our hope is that we can use this to awaken people to the realities of those who harvest our fruit and vegetables and show that the agricultural industry still needs dramatic change.”

People visiting the museum can walk inside the truck to view court documents, photographs and replicas of chains used to restrain workers.

On a stop on the tour last year, workers who had been enslaved in cargo trucks visited the museum, Salucio said.

He said the workers told museum visitors “This is true. This is how it was.”

They added an additional detail: Their captors would take away their shoes at night so they could not escape through the thick woods.

Outside the museum several stand-alone panels chronicle the history of slavery in this country.

“The people who have been doing farm work has changed over time from enslaved Africans to poor blacks and poor whites to today, where the majority is Latino immigrants like myself, but the conditions have stayed roughly the same,” Salucio said.

Those conditions may be changing after workers signed a landmark agreement earlier this year with local tomato growers and some of the biggest tomato buyers, including fast-food giants McDonald’s, Burger King and Taco Bell.

The growers and buyers agreed to a penny-per-pound increase in pay for tomato pickers.

Farm workers are some of the lowest-paid laborers in the country. They and domestic workers are also excluded from federal laws that offer workplace protections for laborers.

The agreement establishes a code of conduct that growers must adhere to. If abuses are found in the fields, workers can now report them to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers or to the growers without retribution.

If work crew leaders don’t rectify the abuses, then they are eliminated from the agreement and will lose business with any buyers that have signed on, including the four largest fast-food chains, the three largest food service providers and Whole Foods grocery stores.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers focused their strategy on pressuring major corporations to compel the growers they buy from to change their labor practices.

“Our campaign for fair food focuses on corporations that buy these tomatoes because they are the ones who profit more than anyone off our suffering,” Salucio said. “But also, they have the most influence to change the situation — more than government, more than laws. Sometimes laws exist, but they are broken nonetheless. These corporations can actually put a stop to it regardless of whether there are laws or not.”

Salucio said it has proved to be a winning strategy and that workers already are seeing positive changes in the fields.