/MAY DAY/RIGHTS-BRAZIL: Rural Slavery Tough to Root Out

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 22 2003 (IPS) - An estimated 25,000 men, women and children continue to work today as slave labourers in rural Brazil, despite persistent complaints by human rights organisations and promises by the new government to eradicate the practice over the next four years.

But slave labour, in the form of debt bondage, is not exclusively employed by Brazilian plantation owners, as shown by the Senor estate in the northern state of Maranhao, which is owned by a Belgian company, and was holding more than 200 workers in slavery conditions.

The case came to light in October, after the estate administrators called in the local police to evict 30 men, women and children who were working on the property from their shacks, accusing them of robbery.

The bonded labourers, who were expelled without pay and were not even allowed to collect their belongings, spent several nights on the streets of Açailandia, a nearby city of 90,000, before seeking assistance from the Centre for Defence of Human Rights (CDDH), a local non-governmental organisation.

The rights group took them in for three weeks, but then ”we had to hide them in a Movimento das Sem Terra (MST or Landless Rural Workers Movement) camp because of the threats” they had received, Carmen Bascarán, a Spanish lay missionary who heads the CDDH and has lived in the region for eight years, told IPS.

The information provided by the evicted workers led to a raid on the estate by the Labour Ministry’s Special Mobile Inspection Group (Grupo Especial de Fiscalizaçao Móvel), which discovered 200 bonded labourers.

Brazil is one of the countries in the world where modern-day slavery or bonded labour remains entrenched in rural areas.

Under the system, many workers are enticed into accepting verbal contracts on the basis of fraudulent promises of well-paid work. They are then taken by truck to isolated parts of states like Maranhao and neighbouring Pará, in the country’s remote Amazon jungle region.

The debts begin piling up as soon as the workers are hired, as they are charged for the cost of their transportation, ”rent” for the shacks or tents in which they are housed, and inflated prices for the food and alcohol they are sold in the ”company” stores on the estate. Even the cost of their working tools are deducted from their wages.

The workers, whose identity documents are confiscated, are not allowed to leave the heavily guarded estates until they work off their debts. But since the prices they are charged are higher than the low wages they are earning, the debt continues to build up, and they are tied to their employers.

Rural slave labourers often work 16 hours a day without pay, and are frequently the victims of physical abuse. Human rights groups denounce that some are even murdered if they seek to escape, with almost complete impunity.

The Belgian company that owned the Senor estate was prosecuted and forced to pay back wages to its 200 workers. But the firm refused to do the same for the 30 people who were fired, only one-third of whom received part of the pay they were owed, said Bascarán. ”Some of them worked for two years and received no more than 400 reals (130 dollars) in all,” she added.

On the Senor estate, a vast plantation on which fruit and peppers are grown, the workers, paid according to how much they harvested, were not allowed to watch when the produce they had picked was weighed.

But the story of the Belgian-owned company’s workers, narrated to IPS in detail by Bascarán, is similar to that of the employees of many plantations and ranches in Brazil.

The Labour Ministry and the Catholic Church Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) estimate that there are a total of 25,000 bonded labourers in this country of 170 million.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the head of the leftist Workers Party (PT), who took office on Jan. 1, promised to make the fight against rural slave labour a priority.

The goal is to completely eradicate the problem over the next four years, said Labour Minister Jacques Wagner.

”The political will exists,” as reflected by the fact that 953 workers were freed in the first quarter of the year alone, equivalent to 60 percent of last year’s total, Labour Ministry spokeswoman Sonia Carneiro told IPS.

Another measure that has been announced is the cancellation of loans granted by public institutions to rural establishments found to use bonded labour.

But the problem is deeply rooted in sectors like the ranches that produce charcoal for the five steel mills in Açailandia.

The steel mills do not assume responsibility for the charcoal workers, even though the ranches are under their control. One strategy they use to avoid trouble is frequently replacing the ”owners” of the ranches – who they appoint – to keep them from being held accountable for abuses.

The charcoal ranches also depend heavily on child labour, another scourge that affects an estimated 5.4 million young people aged five to 17 in Brazil, including 296,000 children under nine, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.

The inspections carried out by the Labour Ministry’s special mobile teams, created in the mid-1990s to investigate complaints, have become much more effective in the past few months, due to the coordination of the raids with prosecutors, judges and the federal police, said Bascarán and friar Henri des Roziers, the head of the CPT in Xinguara, a town in southern Pará.

The inspections are ”well-done,” but few are carried out, and it takes days after reports of slave labour are filed before the raids actually take place, which compromises their effectiveness, Des Roziers said in a telephone interview with IPS.

The cases uncovered after complaints were presented last year by workers and various institutions involved 5,559 people working in slavery conditions, only 30 percent of whom ended up being released.

Moreover, landowners and businesses found guilty of employing bonded labour are merely forced to pay back wages and to ”regularise” the employment status of their workers.

In other words, ”they have to start respecting the laws, but they suffer no effective punishment,” and that is not enough to ”dissuade” them or others from continuing the practice, said Des Roziers.

Bearing that out is the fact that 27 of the 117 estates reported for using bonded labour in the state of Pará last year were repeat offenders.

”There are large landowners that have been found guilty of employing slave labour 10 times in 15 years” – an illustration of the total impunity they enjoy, he noted.

Des Roziers said that only prison terms and stiff fines would effectively dissuade landowners from resorting to slave labour.

But while a handful of estates have been confiscated for holding employees in debt bondage, it is a slow and bureaucratic process that fails to punish landowners who profit from slave labour.