Last month 27 farmworkers were beheaded in Guatemala's northern Petén province by a Mexican gang.Central America's leaders and their foreign allies are now trying to catch up.
But Rob Williams, the director of the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project (which represents farmworkers in court), considers those numbers grossly misleading because they rely on self-reporting.
He estimates that more than 90% of farmworkers are sin papeles (without papers), just as the Vegas are.The devil's workFarm work has, for most crops, become no easier since Steinbeck's day.
There are many cases of birth defects and cancer in the families of farmworkers.
Undocumented farmworkers have to drive long distances, but they don't have driving licences.
But they made demands that seem bizarre to farmworkers, such as high pay, health and pension benefits, relocation allowances and other things associated with normal American jobs.
In 2008 Maria Isavel Vasquez Jiminez, a 17-year-old Mexican girl who was pregnant, collapsed while picking grapes and died two days later.Hungry amid foodAs Tom Joad in Steinbeck's novel discovered, many farmworkers, even as they spend their waking hours picking food for others, can barely afford to eat.
Nonetheless, after police and soldiers killed seven of the hacienda's striking farmworkers in 2004, the government took a second look at the 1989 agreement.
They would also slowly replace a scheme that covers seasonal farmworkers in the south with a new nationwide one.
Its operatives sabotaged UFW recruitment drives by telling farmworkers they would be much better off in a tough professional union like theirs.Nonetheless Chávez left a significant legacy which is insufficiently acknowledged by Mr Bardacke.
Church leaders claimed that many local people were sympathetic to the itinerant farmworkers, but there is also evidence that plenty were engaged in systematic harassment.
