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These stories are presented in their original form and are intended to provide a snapshot of history as the moments occurred.
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Im very sad. I lose my eating appetite. I lose my sleep. They are building up an empire on slavery, on stealing, on fish(ing) out, on massive environmental destruction for a plate of seafood.
Susi Pudjiastuti, Fisheries Minister, Indonesia.
Table of Contents
PREFACE
For hundreds of slaves, Benjina was the end of the world.
The remote Indonesian island village was cut off for several months a year due to stormy seas. There were no roads or telephone service and just a few hours of electricity a day.
The Burmese fishermen who docked here spent months at sea, pulling up monstrous nets and sorting seafood around the clock. But the relief they felt after touching land was quickly replaced by desperation. They were trapped, held captive by Thai boat captains working for large fishing companies. Some men were locked in a cage for simply asking to go home. Others who managed to run away were stuck on the island, living off the land for a decade or longer. And just off a beach, a jungle-covered graveyard was crammed with the corpses of friends and strangers buried under false names.
When AP reporters first arrived in Benjina in late November 2014, informing the men we were there to tell their stories, they couldn't believe it. A few wiped away tears as they spoke. Some chased after us on dusty paths, shoving pieces of paper into our hands with the names and addresses of their parents in Myanmar.
"Please," they begged. "Just tell them we're alive.
The long, sometimes dangerous, journey of telling the story of Southeast Asian men held captive on fishing trawlers began in late 2013.
Human trafficking in the global seafood industry had been written about anecdotally, but Associated Press reporters Robin McDowell and Margie Mason were determined to connect the dots in a way that would make the world finally take notice.
Their best bet, they decided, would be to link slave-caught fish to American dinner tables and name names. At the start, sources told them it would be next to impossible. The industry was huge, and its practices murky. Fish was transferred between boats at sea. Documentation on land was often done improperly. And tainted and clean seafood was mixed together at huge export markets.
Nearly a year into their investigation, they caught a major break. A source pointed them to eastern Indonesia, where they discovered a slave island.
AP reporter Robin McDowell
At great risk, McDowell, with the help of Burmese reporter Esther Htusan, filmed a man in a cage, and others pleading for help over the side of their giant trawler. The two also watched as fish was loaded onto a giant refrigerated cargo ship, and then tracked it by satellite to a Thai harbor. They were there with Mason to meet it in trucks, following the catch over several nights through the seedy, mafia-run streets. California-based reporter Martha Mendoza then joined forces to complete the four-woman team, eventually linking the seafood directly to U.S. supermarket chains and retailers, including Wal-Mart and Kroger.
The story captured worldwide attention. It led to governmental and corporate action. More importantly, it resulted in one of the biggest rescues of modern-day fishing slaves, with more than 2,000 men from four countries being identified and repatriated, some returning to homes they hadn't seen in 20 years.
This is their story.
THE INVESTIGATION BEGINS: MASON AND MCDOWELL
Mason and McDowell spent nearly a year assessing the local seafood industry before locating Benjina. Their account:
Thailand is the world's third-largest seafood exporter, earning $7 billion annually. With a major shortage of workers willing to take the dangerous jobs, the business runs off of poor people from within the country, along with illegal migrants from neighboring Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos who are issued fake seafarer documents.
In the last decade, with depleting fish stocks at home, Thai boats started moving farther and farther from shore into foreign waters. After learning from a source that the number of Burmese fishermen stranded in Indonesia had been steadily rising over the past few years, we decided that was the place to look. We spent months scouring the Internet, poring through academic papers, networking and quietly reporting behind the scenes.
Our big break came when Jakarta-based Mason was told that stories of abuse were starting to filter in from the little-known island village of Benjina in the eastern part of the country. But because no outsiders had visited, it was impossible to know just how bad it was.
We got to work, finding two recent escapees and analyzing satellite imagery of a factory with dozens of fishing trawlers lined up like matchsticks in its harbor. McDowell headed to the scene.
ON THE GROUND: MCDOWELL TRAVELS TO BENJINA
With preliminary research in hand, McDowell travelled 24 hours from her base in Yangon, Myanmar to the island village of Benjina with a team of reporters. Heres her account of that first trip:
When we arrived in Benjina, as a news organization, we had to register with police, saying we were doing a generic story on fishing. Four government minders were assigned to escort us wherever we went.
That made reporting difficult, but not impossible. While AP photographer Dita Alangkara and videographer Fadlan Syam toured an Indonesian-Thai fishing company with officials, I broke away. I thought the waterside brothels would be the best place to start looking for migrant fishermen, and I was right: The prostitutes said all of their customers were from the factory. Most were Burmese, spending the little money they were given every time they docked on booze and women.
Next, a local boatman named Eddy agreed to take me to coastal villages dotting the island so I could talk to fisherman who had escaped abusive conditions on ships or were abandoned by their captains. Again, most were Burmese. Though some were now married to local women and had children, all desperately wanted to go home. But with no form of identification, they were stuck. As illegal migrants, they knew if they went to authorities they could be arrested and thrown in jail. So they remained on the island, some for more than a decade.
"It feels like the end of the world," said Hla Phyo, who had been away from Myanmar for more than six years.
The men talked about conditions on the boats, the type of fish they caught and friends who had died in accidents or from illnesses. But I dont speak Burmese, and the interviews were conducted in broken Indonesian not an ideal situation. Eddy stepped in with a suggestion.
