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Portugal: The Hard Way to France

3 minute read
TIME

Under the false bottom of a rattling old truck sprawls the little group of terrified men wedged head by foot, unable to move, forbidden to speak, scarcely able to breathe. Inches below, the well-worn tires jounce over a foreign road. Inches above, the cargo of pigs and sheep shifts nervously with every bounce, their hooves clattering on the floor, their droppings seeping through it.

There are easier ways to get from Portugal to France, but none more popular—or expensive. The truck is the next-to-last leg of a sordid underground railroad traveled every month by some 2,500 Portuguese peasants being smuggled into France to look for work. The price of a one-way ticket: between $350 and $600.

The Pinch. To the camponês, no price is too steep to escape the misery of his own backward land, where full-time jobs are scarce and wage scales a fraction of those in France. Since 1959, nearly 150,000 peasants have emigrated to France—most of them illegally. The majority live in squalor in such growing slum areas as the Melun shantytown on the outskirts of Paris. Faithfully, they send large parts of their paychecks home: last year their remittances added nearly $40 million to Dictator Antonio Salazar’s economy.

But to Portugal, the cash is hardly worth the loss in manpower. Whole villages have been left without able-bodied men, large tracts of farm land are lying idle, and the Portuguese press has begun to warn that tens of thousands of marriageable women face futures of spinsterhood. Salazar hoped to stem the tide last year by allowing a limited number of laborers to emigrate to France legally. Some 20,000 applicants left under the new labor scheme; but nearly 30,000 others took the illegal road with the smugglers.

The Mountains. As described by Portuguese peasants who have made it, the journey to France is both circuitous and cruel. Once he has paid the local smuggling agent for his passage, the peasant is sent to a mountain hideout near the Spanish border, where he joins a group of 15 or 20 others and is turned over to a guide. Traveling for two frigid nights, they scramble over secret mountain trails into Spain, carrying their belongings with them. A vegetable truck drives them some 300 miles to an isolated ranch in the Pyrenees above San Sebastian. From there, it is a four-night trek down the Pyrenees into the flatlands of southern France, where they are packed into the false-bottomed trucks. Once out of range of French border police, the escapees are sent to Paris or Lyon by train.

The French, their sense of dignity offended by these nēgriers modernes (modern slave traders), have been trying to close down the underground railroad ever since it began. They have arrested 220 minor passeurs, and recently picked up a man they believe is one of the leaders of the ring. Last week the French police began a major offensive: from the Interior Ministry came orders to throw all available men into border patrols and road checks throughout southwestern France. “One can only condemn these smugglers,” said an outraged French official. “It is an occupation for men who have lost their sense of morality. They abuse the poorest people in Europe.”

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