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History of the Huichols and Pesticides Project At the beginning of the 1980s, "unusual" diseases began to be detected among patients at the Casa de Salud Huichola (Huichol House of Health) in Guadalajara, Jalisco. This institution was created by people who care about the Huichol people with the purpose of providing primary health care. These patients shared one common characteristic: they had all worked in the tobacco fields of Nayarit and had been exposed to dangerous chemical substances such as agricultural pesticides. After a number of exploratory visits to the TABAMEX plantations in Nayarit (at that time, a government-owned company), petitions were directed to those responsible. We requested a sustained encounter with the company and solicited a change of technology and better living conditions for its workers. There was no immediate response. Around 1985, the deplorable working conditions began to be documented (through testimonies and photographs...). The University of Guadalajara joined the efforts and approached TABAMEX offering to develop research for analyzing the problem and plan options to solve it. Unfortunately, by the end of the 1980s, TABAMEX entered into a process of privatization in order to be sold. The new owners showed even less interest in the working conditions of the migrant workers and their families (their day laborers), principally Huichol, Cora, Tepehuano and Mexicanero Indians and some poor mestizos mainly from the states of Nayarit, Jalisco and Zacatecas. The next step was filming the video Huicholes y Plaguicidas completed and shown for the first time in 1994. Thereafter, an intense period of work began, showing the video and distributing copies in indigenous communities, schools, universities, TV stations, festivals and international video competitions... The immediate response of health and labor authorities was to disqualify the video. In response, the Huichol and Pesticides Project decided to carry out the epidemiological study Plaguicidas, tabaco y salud: el caso de los jornaleros huicholes, jornaleros mestizos y ejidatarios en Nayarit, México (Pesticides, tobacco and health: The case of the Huichol workers, mestizo workers and public landowners in Nayarit, Mexico). A pioneer work in Mexico and Latin America, it was accomplished through great effort and with the collaboration of diverse institutions, and was published in 2002.
During all these years, the Huichol and Pesticides Project has participated in numerous encounters in indigenous communities, in meetings on the labor situation of migrant workers, in health and ecology forums... In their concern for informing indigenous peoples about the characteristics of pesticides, project members have developed a variety of materials (spots and radio segments, a Human Rights booklet and a Human Rights Workshops for agriculture workers, etc.) and have translated the video, the radio segments and Human Rights booklet into 12 indigenous Mexican languages.
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