REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: Sandy Tolan
An uplifting story about slavery?
It seems improbable, I admit, but that's what you could find, too, if you spent two weeks in the heat and grit of the Brazilian hinterlands with a team of high-spirited professionals whose singular focus is ending slavery in Brazil, 120 years after it was formally abolished.
Some background: In the mid-1990s, Brazilian and international human rights groups, along with government investigators and a few enterprising journalists, began uncovering a web of slave labor linked to some of Brazil's biggest export industries: cattle, soy, sugar cane (for ethanol), and pig iron (used in making steel for automobiles).
Most Brazilian companies use legitimate labor, but again and again, investigators found, Brazilian land barons, through middlemen known as gatos (Portuguese for cats), had enslaved tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of workers. Gatos would scour the rural towns, looking for migrant laborers from the poor, dry regions of Brazil. They'd promise work, and offer transportation to remote labor camps, where workers would clear trees to plant crops, or make charcoal for the pig iron furnaces.
My Brazilian journalist colleague, Petra Costa, and I met an ex-slave named Ismauir de Sousa Silva on a rural homestead in the state of Tocantins, in the region known as the Bico do Papagaio, or Parrot's Beak. "My work was to cut the rainforest," he said. "We began at 6 a.m., we worked until 1 p.m., and during that whole time they wouldn't give us anything to eat. The water we were drinking was the same water the animals were pissing in. Money? We didn't receive any." Ismauir had been told that the
gato who recruited him would buy groceries for his wife back home. "But he never did."
Instead, the gato ran a company store on the jungle farm, charging outrageous prices for food, cigarettes, clothes, boots, even the machetes and chainsaws Ismauir used to slice through the forest. This inevitably added up to more than his wage. "We were always in debt. But I didn't know this was slavery." Escape from the debt bondage was impossible due to extreme isolation, threats, and intimidation.
"I was afraid," recalled Ismauir. "I knew that they were capable of doing anything." On another farm, he told us, after bosses threatened to kill his co-worker, "I escaped, and spent six days running away through the rainforest. So we know that everything is possible with them."
It never occurred to Ismauir or his fellow workers to contact the authorities, because in his experience, the government was always on the side of the rich, "and we didn't have any money. It was a situation that had no solution."
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Enter the anti-slavery inspection teams from Brazil's ministry of labor, backed by President Lula, a former labor leader and hero to much of the nation's poor and working classes. (No one in Brazil calls him by his real name, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.) Immediately upon taking office, Lula put a major emphasis on ending slavery in Brazil. In July 2003, a labor ministry mobile inspection team, backed by federal police wielding M-16s, raided the jungle farm where Ismauir was working, freeing the workers there. Ironically, Ismauir wasn't among them. The landowner had tricked him, promising him more money and warning him that the government was not to be trusted. He "escaped" with the landowner, only to be bilked again.
"At that time I didn't believe in any justice," Ismauir said. "I didn't believe in authorities."
That is changing, for Ismauir and others across remote corners of Brazil, thanks to a well-organized network of public servants, Catholic layworkers, progressive business interests, and a team of Sao Paulo-based investigative journalists from a group called Reporter Brasil. The coalition relies on information sharing and a willingness to work impossibly long hours in harsh, isolating, sometimes dangerous conditions. In 2004, three labor inspectors and their driver were murdered on the job. Now each team travels with armed federal police.
More than anything, the coalition is bound by a fierce, shared hatred of slavery. "When I see this I get really disgusted," says Leandro Carvalho, the labor ministry inspector featured in our radio report. "I feel like sometimes just shaking the employer and asking him, 'Have you no fear of divine punishment?'"
But the story of slavery in Brazil is morphing into a story of freedom. So far, the mobile teams, acting on tips from ex-slaves, rival employers, the layworkers, and their own investigators, have freed more than 30,000 slaves. The Brazilian labor ministry has established a "dirty list" of landowners using slave labor, which denies them credit and effectively ends their operations. Anti-slavery campaigners are also pushing for a bill in the Brazilian congress that would amend the country's constitution and essentially allow authorities to seize the properties of slave-labor farms. As of December 2008, the campaign had collected some 140,000 signatures toward its goal of one million. The measure faces hard resistance from large landowners. Meanwhile, Reporter Brasil, the International Labour Organization, and a coalition of Brazilian businesses known as Ethos are overseeing the National Agreement to Eradicate Slave Labor in Brazil; to date, nearly 200 Brazilian companies have signed the pledge.
Despite the progress, Leandro Carvalho warns that it may take decades or longer to eliminate slavery entirely. "We want to change a culture," he says, "and you don't change a culture overnight."
Special thanks to Ki-Min Sung.
LINKS
Forced labor information (International Labour Organization)
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