Big Fish Audio - Escape Modern Pop Amp; Edm

[Karleen Chura]

Youcan search the entire Mediterranean coastline for the best rustic village, surrounded by vineyards and steeped in tradition, and not find a more rewarding escape than tiny Vernazza, my favorite of the five villages that make up Italy's Cinque Terre.

The Cinque Terre is a quintet of villages clinging to a bit of rugged coastline between Genoa and Pisa. Long cut off from the modern world, this remote stretch of the Italian Riviera only became easily accessible with the coming of the train.

Vernazza's one street connects the harbor with the train station before melting into the vineyards. Like veins on a grape leaf, paths and stairways reach from the main street up into this watercolor huddle of houses that eventually dissolve into the vines high above. A rainbow of laundry flaps as if to keep the flies off the stout grandmothers who clog ancient doorways.

The humble town gathers around its pebbled cove, where well-worn locals enjoy some shade on benches and tourists sunbathe on the rocks. In summer, the beach becomes a soccer ground, where teams comprised of local bar- and restaurant-workers provide late-night entertainment.

While Vernazza's fishing fleet is now down to just a couple of boats, locals are still more likely to own a boat than a car. Boats are tethered to buoys, except in winter or when the red storm flag indicates rough seas. In that case they're pulled up onto the little harborfront square, usually reserved for restaurant tables.

In front of the church, a mini piazza decorated with a river-rock mosaic is a popular hangout. It's where the town's old ladies soak up the day's last bit of sun and kids enjoy a rare patch of level ball field.

Ian Urbina: I've been reading countless reports: Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Red Cross. You know, reports based on interviews of escaped and returned deckhands on vessels that were notorious for using captive labor, often called sea slaves.

Ian Urbina: To the extent that there was any coverage of this in journalism, in reports, it had always been done on land, you know, interviewing deckhands that escaped and were back on shore. No journalists had made it out onto these vessels to witness the conditions directly. So, it just seemed like if we were going to do a service to this topic, that I really had to get out there to actually see it with my own eyes.

Ian Urbina: I'd gone to Songkhla, Thailand because it's a place where there were a lot of these bigger ships that tend to go farther from shore. And my hope was to get out far from shore to see this reality, this type of boat, the sea slave vessel, of which there were said to be hundreds, if not thousands in the South China Sea.

Ian Urbina: The Thai fleet is woefully under mechanized and sort of pre-modern, and it relies on cheap, unpaid, undocumented, migrant workers to do what machines should do. So, you know, these 100 ton nets normally would be pulled out of the water with help from machines. But in this case, these 40 guys on board manually pull the nets out of the water. And that's just insane. It doesn't even seem that it could be possible. And yet they make it possible through this chanting, this singing that they do to ensure that they're all on the same beat and pulling at the same moment. And when you get 40 guys pulling at the same moment, it's a lot of force. And it was just, it was this almost like industrial ballet I was witnessing. It was the most bizarre and other worldly moment.

Ian Urbina: One of the things that hit me hardest was the realization that some of these boys were the exact same age as my own son. You know, at that point, my son was 14, and that just, I kept thinking about what this existence was like for someone that young.

Ian Urbina The problem of sea slavery is a global problem. You find it off the coast of the Falkland Islands. You find it in New Zealand waters. You find it off the coast of West and East Africa. But nowhere is it more intense than on the South China Sea and quite especially in the Thai fleet.

Broadcaster #3: Thailand is the world's third largest exporter of fish and a major supplier to the United States. Its fleet of boats and trawlers is massive, but it's also chronically short of workers, and human traffickers are sending unwilling migrants to work on Thai boats.

Ian Urbina: Thailand is a middle class country with one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world. What you also have in Thailand is various neighbors that are distinctly poor and war torn. So in Laos and Cambodia and Myanmar, you have unusual poverty and unusual levels of volatility. And so the combination of those factors is a perfect storm whereby you have massive numbers of cheap undocumented migrant workers flowing into the country.

Deckhand #5 Translation: The money that I made from work at the time was not enough to support the family. So, I thought that if I would go to work on the boat as my friend recommended, I might make more money and I would have excess money for savings.

Deckhand #6 Translation: The trafficker charged 3000 Baht. I borrowed the money for my mother. I was supposed to settle the debt when I got to work. I will pay my debt, the money that I borrow for my mother.

Ian Urbina: You talk with enough of these workers, and the patterns become clear. I heard over and over again of these manning agencies, which are essentially just human trafficking companies, bringing the men and boys in. Often they're housed in rooms above karaoke bars. And in Thailand, these karaoke bars double as brothels.

Ian Urbina: These are kind of naive villagers who don't even speak the local language. And so many of them assumed that their tab was on the house, right? Quite to the contrary. You know, these guys would wake up the next day and realize that they had just put themselves way deeper in debt by having a couple of drinks, you know, the night before. And that debt was then used to leverage them further into this debt bondage.

Deckhand #8 Translation: I was sitting at a karaoke bar. I was looking for a girl to hang out with. Honestly, I was looking for a prostitute. I saw a woman's face. A girl I bought. I don't know who she is. That's the last thing I remember.

Deckhand #9 Translation: When I woke up, I felt the bedroom shake. So we now signs of water. I was already on the boat. For the next one to two months, we were at sea and would never see land. We could not do anything. Even if we wanted to flee, how would we do that?

Ian Urbina: At its core, debt bondage is a system whereby people work to pay off debt that they incurred. And it used to be the norm. You know, until modern laws banished it in most developed countries. In the trafficking version of it, where you're transporting workers from one location to another, it's a sort of travel now, pay later scheme.

Daniel Murphy: So I've spoken to survivors of trafficking in forced labor situations who thought they were going to work in palm oil plantations, metal factories, electronics factories, seafood processing plants. It's a pretty common technique employed by unscrupulous recruiters when they're struggling to meet the labor demands of fishing vessel operators. And this is in a context where there's a persistent and significant labor deficit in the Thai fishing sector to the tune of 20 to 50,000 workers. That's the shortage, the labor shortage. So in that context, vessel operators are desperate for workers.

Daniel Murphy: Thailand underwent a rapid expansion of industry in the late seventies and throughout the eighties. And what you start to see is large scale labor migration from neighboring countries, which provided Thailand with a plentiful ready supply of cheap, precarious, migrant labor that could fulfill the need to produce at volume at relatively low cost. What that rapid expansion of industrial fishing capacity translated into was a very precipitous decline in fish stocks in local waters.

Ian Urbina: You send the fishing boats really far from shore and you tell them to stay out there, you know, keep fishing, and you then rely on motherships, which are these big cargo vessels. And those mother ships bring men, fuel, supplies out to the fishing fields. They take the fish off the fishing boats, put them in cold storage, they unload whatever else onto the boats, and that has created a distinctly vulnerable situation for the workers, because they might stay out there for two, three years on end if the boat is in good shape. They might rotate the captain out, but the crews stay on there for insane amounts of time, and that's just crushingly brutal from a physical and mental health point of view. And it also just lends itself to even worse abuses because they're so far from shore that, you know, people can disappear. Inspectors have no chance of getting out there and seeing what's going on. And furthermore, the only guys who will ever take that job, who would ever consider doing that are ones who are extremely desperate or they've been trafficked and they don't have a choice.

Unknown Deckhand Translation: I had a sense of despair because the work requires to always remain on the water, not the land. I had a sense that I would stay there at least 5 to 10 years before settling back to the land.

Daniel Murphy: These people haven't even seen the sea before. They've got no idea what it's like working in fishing. They've got no idea what it's like being at sea. You're suffering a real extreme degree of isolation. And what that means is it creates this emotional, psychological dependency, almost a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, in the tight, claustrophobic confines of a boat at sea for long periods of time where deckhands and crew, it's much easier for them to become very compliant. And the ability of captains to manipulate and deceive crew in that context becomes really strong.

Ian Urbina: I think it's really important if you're going to be a good journalist to really, genuinely and honestly try to understand the perspective even of folks that you fundamentally disagree with. And so, you know, murderous, beating captains are a worthy target for that ambition. And so, I spent a lot of time really trying to talk with them and get their take on these things. And what I learned was, number one, their view is that debt bondage is a perfectly legitimate, contractual setup whereby all sorts of people who otherwise couldn't access this line of work can because they take a loan just like you or me from a bank. But that loan comes from a manning agency or comes from a labor broker, i.e. a trafficker. They then get access to this opportunity by taking that loan. Then the captain buys the loan. And so now, from the captain's point of view, they've paid for something and they are owed it. And if the laborer leaves without holding up their end of the bargain, then from the captain's perspective, that's theft.

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