Nestlé, the world’s biggest food manufacturer by sales and maker of the globally popular brand Nescafe, buys coffee from Tomasini. The beans go from his farm to a Nestlé factory in the state of Mexico, where in 2015 almost 20,000 tons of Chiapas coffee was processed and distributed worldwide, according to Nestlé. Starbucks and other major brands also buy Chiapas coffee.

When The Weather Channel and Telemundo first visited Tomasini’s farm, called Chapultepec, in October 2015, without his or Nestlé’s knowledge, the networks’ cameras documented children stripping ripe, red coffee cherries with their tiny fingers from the long, bent branches of coffee trees. They filmed the children carrying the cherries in bulging sacks down the Ruta del Café, which meanders through the jungles north of Tapachula right past Tomasini’s farm. The children said they were taking the coffee to a place on Tomasini’s farm where the coffee cherries would begin their transformation into beans.

Two boys, aged 12 and 14, were bent over carrying sacks of coffee cherries. The older boy’s bag weighed close to 100 pounds. His younger brother’s bag was 60 to 70 pounds. Even younger children – perhaps as young as five – carried lighter loads.

Emilio Diaz, who oversees Nestlé’s coffee supply chain in Mexico, said he was surprised to hear that children had been filmed helping with the harvest on a farm that supplies beans to his company. He, a corporate spokeswoman and three Nestlé agronomists, led The Weather Channel and Telemundo on a tour of two of the coffee giant’s farms near Tapachula. The owners of two farms were welcoming and the conditions were much better than those filmed on Chapultepec. No children were seen. These farms also are featured on the company’s website.

Toward the end of the day, the group visited Tomasini’s farm. Now, three months after he had talked openly with a reporter over two days, Tomasini appeared agitated and refused to talk. The dorms on his property were tied shut with rope and few workers were visible – no children. Diaz spent several minutes calming down Tomasini, after which the farm owner agreed to sit on his veranda, watch the video of the children, and comment about it. He adamantly denied the children in the video had worked for him, saying he didn’t recognize them.

“I don’t have dozens of kids working on my farm,” Tomasini said. “I’ve never had them, never – not even during seasonal labor times. I don’t have them…. Five-year-olds? No, no. I am not a slave driver. That ended years ago…. Five-year-olds is slavery.”

Diaz said Nestlé is trying to avoid child labor in its supply chain and, as far as it knows, has succeeded. But he said it’s a problem ultimately that Nestlé alone can’t solve.

“We cannot ensure that we will solve the problem,” he said, because Nestlé doesn’t have the authority to enforce labor laws. That must be done by the Mexican government. “We would love to be able to do it but this is a very complex situation. So we will do our best as we are doing now to contribute and to improve the coffee farming conditions.”

Tomasini said he tries but simply can’t persuade his Guatemalan guestworkers to leave their children at home. Parents feel their children are safer and better off with them rather than being left behind in Guatemala. Plus, they can make more money if their children are there to help. If he were to be strict, he would lose his labor supply; the families would simply move to other farms. His coffee crop would rot on the ground.

“If you say no, they leave the farm… all is lost,” he said.

But Tomasini does draw a line, he said. To comply with child labor laws he doesn’t allow children under 15 to leave the dorm area while their parents are working.

“I give an order: ‘No children go to the plantations,’” Tomasini said. Any children under 15 filmed working by The Weather Channel and Telemundo last October must have been picking and carrying for a neighboring farm, he said, noting that one had been raided a few weeks after the networks’ film crew visited last fall.