When Eril Andrade left the small village of Sur Linabuan, I was healthy and hoped to earn enough in a fishing boat on the high seas in order to replace the roof had leaks in the house of his mother.
Several months later, his body was sent home in a coffin. He was out of one eye and the pancreas, and covered with cuts and bruises, which the autopsy report concluded were caused before his death.
Andrade, 31, who died in February 2011, and nearly a dozen other men in his village were recruited by an illegal "crew recruitment agency" deceived with false double promises the salary they earned and then sent to a apartment in Singapore, where they were locked up for weeks, according to interviews and legal depositions conducted by local prosecutors.
Once boarded, the men faced days of 20 hours work and brutal physical attacks, only to return home without pay and deeply indebted in thousands of dollars due to initial costs, say the promoters.
"These are lies and deception on earth after beatings and death at sea, or shame and debt when the men return home," said Shelley Thio, a member of the board of Transient Workers Count Too (Temporary Workers also They), a group defense of migrant workers in Singapore. "And the crew recruitment agencies are responsible for it."
The Step Up Marine Enterprise, a company based in Singapore who recruited Andrade and other villagers, has a well documented history of problems, according to an examination of court records, police reports and police processes in Singapore and the Philippines. In episodes over two decades, the company was linked to human trafficking, severe physical violence, negligence, fraudulent recruitment and non-payment of hundreds of sailors in India, Indonesia, Mauritius, the Philippines and Tanzania.
Still, its owners largely escaped unpunished. Last year, for example, prosecutors opened the biggest human trafficking case in Cambodia's history, involving more than 1,000 fishermen, but did not have jurisdiction to indict the Step Up for recruiting them. In 2001, the Philippine Supreme Court harshly rebuked Step Up and a partner company in Manila by systematically deceive men, sending consciously to abusive employers and deceiving, but the owners of Step Up did not face any penalty.
The Philippine authorities have charged 11 people connected to the Step Up for human trafficking and the illegal recruitment of Andrade and other Filipinos. But only one person, supposedly a guilty low-level, was arrested and will probably be judged: Celia Robelo, 46, who faces a potential life sentence for what prosecutors say was a recruitment effort in which obtained at most $ 20 (about US $ 76) in commissions.
The story of Andrade was raised through interviews with family members, other sailors recruited in their village or nearby, police, lawyers and aid workers in Jakarta, Manila and Singapore. It highlights-debt tools, deception, fear, violence, shame and familiares- ties used to recruit men, arrest them and leave them in the sea, sometimes for years, under adverse conditions.
In mid-2010, Andrade was getting impatient. He studied criminology in college in hopes of becoming a police officer, unaware that there was a minimum requirement of 1.60 meters height. He had five centimeters less. Your job as a night watchman at a hospital paid less than US $ 0.50 (R $ 1.90) per hour.
When a cousin told him about a possible job at sea, Andrade saw it as a chance to travel the world and earn enough money to help his family. He was introduced to Robelo, who prosecutors say was the local recruiter of Step Up. She said the wage was $ 500 (about R $ 1,900) per month, plus an allowance of $ 50 ( approximately R $ 190), said his brother and his mother to the police.
Andrade gave about $ 200 (about R $ 760) for "processing fees" and left for Manila. He paid more than US $ 318 (about US $ 1,208) before flying to Singapore in September 2010. A company representative received at the airport and took him to the office of Step Up, in the Chinatown district of Singapore.
If Andrade experience was similar to other Filipino men interviewed by "The New York Times," he must have said that there was a mistake: his salary would be less than half of what had been promised. And after multiple deductions, the monthly salary of $ 200 would shrink even more.
Half a dozen other men from the village of Andrade, who prosecutors said were also recruited by Step Up, recalled in interviews that the paperwork went flying into a whirlwind of quick calculations and unfamiliar terms ("passport confiscation," "fees" , "parallel gains").
First, they were required to sign a contract, they said, that generally stipulated a binding commitment of three years, with no overtime pay, no sick leave, days of working 18 to 20 hours, weeks of six days work and monthly deductions of $ 50 in food, in addition to the captains full freedom to transfer the crew to other ships. Salaries would be paid not monthly to the families of workers, but only after the contract ends, a practice that is illegal in registered agencies.
Standing on a wooden boat 10 meters on a recent night, about 65 kilometers from the coast of the Philippines, Condrad Bonihit, a friend of Andrade, explained why the poor villagers seduced by illegal agencies crew recruitment.
"It takes money to make money," Bonihit said. To get jobs legally it takes a course at an accredited technical school which can cost about $ 4000 (about R $ 15,200), he said, much more than most villagers can afford. And the wages offered by Step Up are often nearly twice what men earn by an accredited company.
At sea, however, the reality is different from the promises on land, Bonihit said, adding that lasted 10 months in the job he got through the Step Up. When the weekly beatings in crew became too much to bear, he abandoned his ship in harbor . With the help of missionaries, he flew back home, he said.
"You proud of," he said about his experience, "back and ashamed."
The Andrade's relatives say they have lost contact with him shortly after received his final text message.
After Andrade died, representatives of Step Up and Hung Fei Fishery Company, the owner of the fishing boat Taiwanese in which he worked, offered to pay to his family about $ 5000 (about US $ 19,000), according to a letter 2012 of the Philippine Embassy in Singapore. The family refused, instead beseeching a complaint against the Step Up in November 2011 with the Ministry of Labour Singapore. The ministry and the human anti-trafficking task force government officials said last month that are waiting for the formal request of the Philippine government before investigating.
Police and prosecutors in the province of Andrade, Aklan, expressed frustration with what they see as the lack of response from the federal authorities in Manila. Celso J. Hernandez Jr., a Filipina Administration lawyer Jobs Abroad, the agency responsible for protecting Filipino workers sent abroad, said he had no record of the death of Andrade or the Step Up. "Illegal recruitment agencies crew are invisible to us, "he said. The human anti-trafficking task force in the Philippines did not respond to requests for comment.
Police and Taiwanese fishing authorities said they had no records have questioned Shao Chin Chung, the captain of the ship Andrade, about his death. The ship, Hung Yu 212, was cited for illegal fishing in 2000, 2011 and 2012, according to the committees that regulate tuna fishing in the Indian and Atlantic oceans. A secretary Fei Hung Fishery Company, headquartered in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, recently said that the owner was traveling and was not available to answer questions. Efforts to interview other crew members were unsuccessful.
On April 6, 2011, the corpse of Andrade came to Singapore in Hung Yu 212. Dr. Wee Keng Poh, the coroner's Health Sciences Authority of Singapore conducted an autopsy six days later. He concluded that the cause of death was acute myocarditis, inflammatory heart disease. His report gave few details.
The body was then sent to the Philippines, where Dr.. Noel Martinez -o coroner's provincial- capital conducted a second autopsy. He disagreed with the first, instead citing heart attack as the cause of death. The Martinez autopsy also showed extensive bruising and unexplained cuts, caused before death, forehead, upper and lower lips, nose, right breast and right armpit Andrade.
Shaking his head, Emmanuel Concepcion, a friend of Andrade, said he knows what conditions are like in fishing vessels who spend long periods at sea and doubts that Andrade died of natural causes. After being recruited by Step Up, Concepcion also worked in a Taiwanese ship tuna fishing in the South Atlantic, but abandoned the work after the cook with a knife killed the captain, who routinely beat the crew.
When asked what he thought would be the most likely cause of death of his friend, Concepcion said simply: "Violence".
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