Structural Violence and Orange Trucks

Word of the Day:
las naranjeras- orange orchards

On Saturday evening, 6 orange pickers from Rio San Juan (day laborers) are killed when the truck (a modified cattle car) they are riding to return from work crashes and overturns, the fault of a drunk driver traveling at an excessive velocity. Those killed are students, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers. They are entangled in all the usual webs of human belonging, and their sudden departure leaves these webs in tattered. 6 children without a mother. Parents without a son. A 10th grade student who went to pick oranges for a day to get money for the school's sports day, and doesn't return because that is the cruelty of random chance, someone else's bad decision making colliding with vehicles.

Their deaths seem to be more than a tragedy, somehow a violation of human rights, but what name by which to call this injustice? There is no code that precisely pins down what caused this. Most simply, they are poor and they would not have died in this way had they been rich. It is the handless violence that makes people work as day laborers for low wages in the hot sun, that denies them the right to travel safely, that denies them control over their destination, literally and figuratively.

Their deaths strike me as somehow different and more unjust than a regular accident because they are caused by something more sinister and deeper and without readily available remedy, in the same way that the thousands of children who die of gun violence in America differ from school shootings, in its quotidianness, and the daily indignities proceeding. And yet it is so wrong to try and tally up pain,  because everyone suffers and grieves and to pretend otherwise is to perpetuate another injustice to victims, to reduce them to statistics, rhetoric, media frenzy, instead of real lives. As does the word victims. How easily language fails us.

Really, I'm left with no response more sophisticated or articulate than to say "this is not fair." It becomes easier to see why people here pepper their speech with expressions like "Si Dios quiere", if God wills it. Because what else can be done but wait?