Western sheep ranchers depend on foreign herders, Tending ou
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_2811197
Tending our flocks
Western sheep ranchers depend on foreign herders
By Bruce Finley
Denver Post Staff Writer
Peruvian shepherd Pedro Hurtado wrestles a lamb next in line to be castrated north of Meeker. The work is in his blood: His father herded sheep in the Andes. But the pay is low: $700 a month. Some shepherds break their contracts and flee to cities to make more money. (Post / RJ Sangosti) click here for picture: http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_2811197
Yellowjacket Pass - Boots caked with manure, face spattered with blood, Peru vian shepherd Tomas Santa Maria corrals bleating lambs by the hundred in a green mountain pasture in northwest Colorado. He chases them as they dart beneath ewes, hoists them one by one and, holding their kicking legs, thrusts them forward belly-first for castration.
Following his native tradition, Santa Maria performs the castration with his teeth.
The sheep industry, a longtime mainstay of the Rocky Mountain West's economy, has come to depend on shepherds like Santa Maria, brought here from Andean countries under a guest worker program.
But now this program is threatened as many shepherds flee their flocks to work illegally in cities. Rough working conditions and low pay are partly to blame, shepherds and Peruvian government officials say. U.S. government enforcers are doing little to intervene.
In their pasture north of Meeker, Santa Maria, 47, and fellow Peruvians Pedro Hurtado, 40, and Toledo Echevarria, 49, say they love the work. Their fathers herded sheep in the Andes.
The ability of Peruvian shepherds to move sheep and protect them from coyotes and bears is uncanny, said Marita Landaveri, Peru's consul general in Denver. Once, on a visit to check up on shepherds, she watched one lying on his belly surrounded by dozens of sheep that were silent, seemingly mesmerized.
Yet shepherds who break their contracts and migrate to cities "earn more money," Santa Maria said. Echevarria's 21-year-old son, Sandro, left his job in Colorado this spring.
For now, Santa Maria, Echevarria and Hurtado have decided to stay despite some misgivings.
President Bush has proposed radically increasing American use of foreign guest workers. But the details of his plan aren't settled, including the extent to which foreign workers would be free to roam from job to job as immigrants traditionally have done.
Shepherds on contract
The government's existing H-2A guest worker program allows the hiring of foreign workers for agriculture jobs that American workers don't want. Under the program, ranchers in Colorado and other Western states have hired some 2,000 shepherds from Peru, Chile and Bolivia on renewable three- year contracts.
Many impoverished Inca families have benefited.
"My wife says, 'We need more money for the children,"' said Santa Maria, a landless father of five who speaks Quechua as well as Spanish.
Over the past few years, shepherds in the U.S. have grown hungry for higher-paying, easier work in cities.
Some 60 to 70 contract shepherds in Colorado and other Western states have abandoned their flocks, and ranchers who paid for recruiting, paperwork and airfare are out tens of thousands of dollars, said Dennis Richins, director of the Utah- based Western Range Association, which handles shepherd contracts for the Labor Department.
Ranchers call several times a week to report runaway shepherds, said Landaveri, the Peruvian consul general.
"We are trying to tell Peruvians that they have a contract and they should follow the contract," she said.
Under H-2A, shepherds are legally bound to one employer, and pay is set relatively low - $700 a month in Colorado, well below the minimum wage.
And, despite blue sky, sage- strewn mountainsides and songbirds, herding sheep is harsh by 21st-century standards. There is no running water or electricity in the camps. No days off. No emergency communications. No health insurance.
Since 2002, federal labor officials have investigated 39 cases of alleged mistreatment of shepherds in Colorado and other Western states, said Dolline Hatchett, a Department of Labor spokeswoman in Washington, D.C. She declined to give details.
Rural communities from Colorado to California count on a robust sheep industry, which generates $500 million a year from wool and meat sales. Colorado is a leading producer, but the number and size of ranches here and around the country have declined in the past decade.
If more herders leave, "more flocks and ranches will be lost" and foreign competitors will prevail, said Peter Orwick, director of the American Sheep Industry Association in Denver. Ranchers "can't replace these foreign herders from any other labor source," Orwick said. U.S. workers "are just not interested."
The solution, he said, is for immigration agents to "find contract violators and deport them" so that word gets around. Often, ranchers know where AWOL shepherds have gone.
But Department of Homeland Security officials in Washington say immigration agents haven't the time or resources to chase runaway guest workers.
AWOL from their flocks
Today, the U.S. government allows employers to bring in tens of thousands of guest workers under various programs. Just for agricultural work, Labor Department officials last year granted employer requests to hire 44,637 foreign laborers, including 1,690 shepherds, all on three-year H-2A contracts paying "prevailing wages" set by states.
That's on the legal side. Government surveys estimate that more than half the nation's 2.5 million agricultural workers, about 80 percent of them foreign-born, are in the country illegally. They're among 10.3 million illegal workers overall.
Critics say details of any new guest worker program must be hashed out carefully. The H-2A program, begun in 1957, lacks oversight, said Chris Schneider, executive director of California Legal Services, which tries to help migrants. "When you set up a program like this," Schneider said, "you are inviting exploitation."
Today, sheep ranchers are scrambling to round up replacement herders to lead sheep to high pastures.
North of Hayden, Brad Smith said he grew so frustrated after four Peruvians left his ranch this spring that he considered joining armed demonstrators along the U.S.-Mexico border urging better immigration enforcement.
He knows where the workers went in Wyoming, he said, yet immigration agents wouldn't detain them.
This year, a Wyoming rancher caught an AWOL shepherd herself and drove him to Homeland Security offices in Salt Lake City, he said. There, federal officials told her she could face kidnapping charges, Smith said.
Immigration officials declined to comment.
"If I don't work ..."
At Yellowjacket Pass, Peruvian shepherds help sustain a ranch run by Greek-American Nick Theos, 84, and his family.
Theos' family started as immigrants themselves. In 1921, when Theos' father, Angelo, arrived from Greece, he worked as a coal miner earning $2 a day. Then he persuaded a banker in Vernal, Utah, to loan him money to buy sheep.
A former state legislator and county Republican Party chief, Theos long has relied on new immigrants. He hired Martin Inda, 63, who moved to Colorado 40 years ago from Basque lands in Spain where work was scarce. Here, Inda rose to the position of foreman.
Inda spent a recent sunny morning docking lambs - removing tails and testicles.
Fluent in English and Spanish, Inda, like Santa Maria,takes pride in following traditional practices, biting off the testicles instead of using scissors because the old way is faster, he said.
Yet modern forces intrude. The pasture where he worked now costs $400 an acre, 10 times the cost of a few decades ago, because outside millionaires seeking ranches are driving up prices.
Theos said his family would never survive without access to public land run by the Bureau of Land Management to graze sheep. There's no younger generation poised to take over the operation. Theos' daughter Connie, 61, manages finances meticulously to make ends meet.
"We don't like to think about" what would happen if the Peruvian herders left, she said.
As Peruvian Pedro Hurtado herded sheep in a high rocky pasture recently, he said he saw little opportunity for advancement here. His dream, he said, is to afford sheep back in central Peru.
Here, he lives out of an 8-by- 14-foot metal camper built in the 1950s, parked on a mountainside where about 1,000 sheep graze.
Wind and snow blow in under the broken door. He burns wood to stay warm. There's no toilet, and he washes in a muddy creek where the sheep drink.
As a young man, Hurtado tried to avoid sheep, he said. He studied hard, but when he graduated from high school, his father couldn't afford college.
He was able to work for a decade in a warehouse as an accountant, processing crates of Coca-Cola. That supported his wife and their three daughters. Then sales plummeted as Peru's poverty spawned the Maoist Shining Path guerrilla uprising, and the warehouse closed.
He returned to herding and other odd jobs that earned about $200 a month - not enough. So he left his family and joined Santa Maria, his brother-in-law, here off Yellowjacket Pass.
The $700 or so Hurtado sends home each month pays for food, electricity and water for his family.
Sometimes bosses "say you are crazy, insult you. And I feel a little offended," Hurtado said.
On the other hand, leaving his flock to seek better work in a city feels too risky. "If the government catches you, you go back to Peru," Hurtado said.
As the sun sets and the moon rises outside, a cherished photo of his wife and daughters reminds him of what is at stake.
"My family depends on me," he said. "If I don't work, they have nothing."
Staff writer Bruce Finley can be reached at 303-820-1700 or bfinley@denverpost.com.
click here for picture: http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_2811197
Pedro Hurtado, 40, moves the sheep he guards into a new pasture in late May. Hurtado once did accounting work in a warehouse in his native Peru, but sales crashed amid a Maoist uprising. Now he is one of roughly 2,000 foreign shepherds in the West, working under contract for $700 a month. (Post / RJ Sangosti)
