When Eril Andrade left the small village of Linbuan Sur in the Philippines, he was healthy and hoping to earn enough on a fishing boat on the high seas to replace his mother’s leaky roof.
Seven months later, his body was sent home in a coffin. He was missing an eye and his pancreas, and covered in cuts and bruises, which an autopsy report concluded had been inflicted before death.
Andrade, 31, who died in February 2011, and nearly a dozen other men in his village had been recruited by an illegal “manning agency,” tricked with false promises of double the actual wages and then sent to an apartment in Singapore, where they were locked up for weeks, according to interviews and affidavits taken by local prosecutors.
Illustration: June Hsu
Once aboard, the men endured 20-hour workdays and brutal beatings, only to return home unpaid and deeply in debt from thousands of US dollars in upfront costs, prosecutors say.
“It is lies and cheating on land, then beatings and death at sea, then shame and debt when these men get home,” said Shelley Thio, a board member of Transient Workers Count Too, a migrant workers’ advocacy group in Singapore. “The manning agencies are what make it all possible.”
Step Up Marine Enterprise, the Singapore-based company that recruited Andrade and the other villagers, has a well-documented record of trouble, according to an examination of court records, police reports and case files in Singapore and the Philippines. In episodes dating back two decades, the company has been tied to trafficking, severe physical abuse, neglect, deceptive recruitment and failure to pay hundreds of seafarers in India, Indonesia, Mauritius, the Philippines and Tanzania.
Still, its owners have largely escaped accountability. Last year, for example, prosecutors opened the biggest trafficking case in Cambodian history, involving more than 1,000 fishermen, but had no jurisdiction to charge Step Up for recruiting them. In 2001, the Philippines Supreme Court harshly reprimanded Step Up and a partner company in Manila for systematically duping men, knowingly sending them to abusive employers and cheating them, but Step Up’s owners faced no penalties.
The Philippine authorities have charged 11 people tied to Step Up with trafficking and illegal recruitment of Andrade and others from the Philippines. However, only one person, allegedly a low-level culprit, has been arrested and is likely to be tried: Celia Robelo, 46, who faces a potential life sentence for what prosecutors say was a recruiting effort that earned her at most US$20 in commissions.
Andrade’s story was pieced together from interviews with his family, other seamen recruited in or near his village, police officers, lawyers and aid workers in Jakarta, Manila and Singapore. It highlights the tools — debt, trickery, fear, violence, shame and family ties — used to recruit men, entrap them and leave them at sea, sometimes for years under harsh conditions.
In summer 2010, Andrade was growing restless. He had studied criminology in college in hopes of becoming a police officer, not realizing that there was a minimum height requirement of 1.61m. He was 5cm shy. His night watchman job at a hospital paid less than US$0.50 per hour.
When a cousin told him about possible work at sea, Andrade saw it as a chance to tour the world while earning enough money to help his family. He was introduced to Robelo, who prosecutors say was the local Step Up recruiter. She said the pay was US$500 per month, in addition to a US$50 allowance, his brother and mother recounted to the police.
Andrade handed over about US$200 in “processing fees” and left for Manila. He paid US$318 more before flying to Singapore in September 2010. A company representative met him at the airport and took him to Step Up’s office in Singapore’s Chinatown district.
If Andrade’s experience was like those of the other Filipino men interviewed by the New York Times, he would have been told then that there had been a mistake: His pay would be less than half of what he had been expecting and, after multiple deductions, the US$200 monthly wage would shrink even more.
A half-dozen other men from Andrade’s village, who prosecutors said were also recruited by Step Up, recalled in interviews that the paperwork flew by in a whirlwind of fast-moving calculations and unfamiliar terms — “passport forfeiture,” “mandatory fees” and “sideline earnings.”
First, they were required to sign a contract that typically stipulated a three-year binding commitment, no overtime pay, no sick leave, 18-to-20-hour workdays, six-day workweeks and US$50 monthly food deductions, and that granted the captain’s full discretion to reassign crew members to other ships, they said. Wages were to be disbursed not monthly to the workers’ families, but only after completion of the contract, a practice that is illegal at registered agencies.
Standing on a 10.7m wooden boat late one recent night, about 64km from the Philippine shore, Condrad Bonihit, a friend of Andrade’s, explained why poor villagers gravitated to illegal manning agencies.
“It takes money to make money,” Bonihit said.
To get jobs legally requires coursework at an accredited trade school that can cost US$4,000 or so, he said, far more than most villagers can afford. The wages quoted by Step Up are often nearly double what the men might make through an accredited company.
At sea, though, the reality is different from the promises on land, Bonihit said, adding that he had lasted 10 months in the job he got through Step Up. When the once-a-week beatings of crew members became too much to bear, he left his ship in port. With help from missionaries, he flew home, he said.
“You go with pride, come back with shame,” he said of his experience.
Andrade’s relatives say they lost track of him shortly after receiving his final text message.
After Andrade died, officials from Step Up and Hung Fei Fishery Co, the owner of the Taiwanese fishing ship he had worked on, offered to pay his family about US$5,000, according to a 2012 letter from the Philippine embassy in Singapore. The family declined, instead filing a complaint against Step Up in November 2011 with Singapore’s Manpower Ministry. Officials at the ministry and on a government anti-trafficking task force last month said that they were waiting for a formal request from the Philippine government before investigating.
Police officials and prosecutors in Andrade’s province, Aklan, voiced frustration at what they said was a lack of response from the federal authorities in Manila. Celso Hernandez Jr, a lawyer with the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, the agency responsible for protecting Filipino workers sent abroad, said he had no records on Andrade’s death or on Step Up.
“The illegal manning agencies are invisible to us,” he said.
The Philippine anti-trafficking task force did not respond to requests for comment.
Taiwanese police and fishery officials said they had no record of having questioned Chung Shao-chin (鍾紹欽), the captain of Andrade’s ship, about his death. The ship, Hung Yu 212, was cited for illegal fishing in 2000, 2011 and 2012, according to the commissions that regulate tuna fishing in the Indian and Atlantic oceans. A secretary at Kaohsiung-based Hung Fei Fishery Co recently said that the owner was traveling and was not available to answer questions. Efforts to interview other crew members were unsuccessful.
On April 6, 2011, Andrade’s cadaver arrived in Singapore on the Hung Yu 212. Wee Keng Poh, a forensic pathologist at Singapore’s Health Sciences Authority, conducted an autopsy six days later. He concluded that the cause of death was acute myocarditis, an inflammatory disease of the heart muscle. His report gave little more detail.
The body was then flown to the Philippines, where Noel Martinez — the pathologist in the provincial capital — performed a second autopsy. He disagreed with the first, instead citing a heart attack as the cause of death. Martinez’s autopsy report also noted extensive unexplained bruises and cuts, inflicted before death, on Andrade’s brow, upper and lower lip, nose, upper right chest and right armpit.
Shaking his head, Emmanuel Concepcion, a friend of Andrade’s, said he knew what conditions on long-haul fishing boats were like and doubted that Andrade had died of natural causes. After being recruited by Step Up, Concepcion also worked on a Taiwanese tuna ship, in the South Atlantic, but quit after the cook fatally stabbed the captain, who had routinely beaten crew members.
Asked what he thought was the most likely cause of his friend’s death, Concepcion said: “Violence.”
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