SAN CRISTOBAL, Mexico — The family of Mexico's president-elect illegally used children — workers say as young as 11 — to work on its ranch and at its freezing plant, giving Vicente Fox's administration its first scandal even before he takes office.
The children had been working on the ranch for years until a Mexican newspaper reported on the underage workers several weeks ago. The family promptly fired all its underage workers — with no severance.
The scandal has failed to flare too large, partly because child labor is so common in Mexico and because the children were paid nearly twice the minimum wage, a tidy sum in the poor countryside.
Legally, no Mexican under 18 — 16 under certain strict conditions — can work. But children often leave school early to take jobs, especially in the countryside. The Fox family businesses are in a rural part of central Guanajuato state.
Cristobal Fox, the president-elect's brother, admitted that the family's freezing plant hired underage workers but said they were never under 15. He conceded that contractors had brought children as young as 13 to work at the ranch.
Vicente Fox — who was elected July 2 as the first president since 1929 not with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party — vowed to improve the economy after he takes office Dec. 1 so that children no longer have to work. But he distanced himself from the family business.
"This isn't my problem," he said. "This is a problem of others with the name Fox."
Cristobal Fox said his brother Jose administers the San Cristobal ranch and that in 1998 Vicente began separating himself from the family businesses.
"Vicente has a small property called The Cattle Ranch of San Cristobal, which has 20 cows," Cristobal Fox said. "In the freezing plant, we employ 16-year-olds and up. Some between 15 and 16 years old who finished primary school and had their parents' permission."
There are no allegations of child labor on Vicente Fox's ranch, and his family says he is no longer a co-owner of the family ranch and plant.
After the newspaper Reforma reported that the San Cristobal ranch, 220 miles northwest of Mexico City, employed children, the last two underage workers — Brenda, 12, and Adriana, 15 — were told to leave.
"They fired us without telling us that there was a problem with the owner because we were underage or that we had to be 18 years old to return to work," Adriana said. "It isn't fair."
Working from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday to Saturday, Adriana and Brenda — who wouldn't give their last names for fear of retribution — earned $7 a day picking potatoes, corn, peas, broccoli and squash for export to the United States, Japan and China.
Their situation as working children wasn't unusual, though their pay — nearly twice the minimum wage — was high by Mexican rural standards.
Workers at the Fox family businesses said 34 children were hired this year to work at the companies, the youngest of them 11 years old. They wouldn't give their names for fear of losing their jobs.
"We're talking about a violation of their rights," said Jorge Valencia, president of the Mexican Collective to Support Children. "The best-known and most-accepted proposals go in the direction of ending these situations and advancing toward the eradication of child labor."
According to the National Institute of Geographic Statistics, 4.5 million children under 14 — 12 percent of the child population — have jobs in Mexico.
Nearly 1 million work in the countryside, where the practice has often been accepted as a way for parents to pass agricultural skills on to their children.
But some officials say children in Guanajuato are helping solve labor shortages caused by migration to the United States or to factories in cities.
Before dawn along the highways near Leon, Guanajuato's largest city, children wait to climb into the back of passing trucks taking workers to the fields.
In the darkness, Armando Navarro, 13, waits with a plastic bag filled with a lunch of two tacos and a soft drink. For two years, he has spent his school vacations working at nearby ranches, including San Cristobal, earning $12 a day carrying a 66-pound bag of potatoes.
"We are among the poorest here," said his mother, Hilaria, in a house without electricity or water — and with few prospects for her five children. "I hope that they all at least finish primary school," she said.
Armando's salary — and that of his father and 17-year-old brother — supports the children, their paternal grandparents and their mother. Each of the two sons earns more than double the $5 a day their father makes clearing garbage from irrigation canals.
"There aren't unions. There isn't anything. They don't have protection," said Armando's grandfather, Manuel Navarro. "To survive, we keep arriving at the same solution: work."
Brenda and Adriana are at home now, but soon they will find other jobs.
"What we had went down the tubes because they took away our work, which was the best we had," Adriana said. "Although it only paid a little, it was OK there."