Brazil freed 4,600 farm slaves in 2008

[Judi Lynn]

Brazil freed 4,600 farm slaves in 2008
Published: Jan. 3, 2009 at 5:22 PM

SAO PAULO, Jan. 3 (UPI) -- More than 4,600 people forced into slavery on farms in Brazil were released in government raids in 2008, the Brazilian Labor Ministry says.

The ministry's records state its anti-slavery task force and federal police had raided 255 remote ranches and plantations over the course of the year in a continuing crackdown on so-called debt slavery.

Britain's The Guardian reported Saturday that many of the workers came from impoverished areas of northeast Brazil and were forced to work in squalid conditions to pay off debts for food and housing.

Human rights activists say the practice continues in remote agricultural regions despite the government's efforts to eradicate it.

More:
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/01/03/Brazil_freed_4600_farm_slaves_in_2008/UPI-28181231021367

[Judi Lynn]

1. Brazil Rescues 4,634 from Slavery in 2008

Brazil Rescues 4,634 from Slavery in 2008


BRASILIA -- Brazilian authorities rescued a total of 4,634 workers this year from conditions analagous to slavery, the Ministry of Labor and Employment said Wednesday.

The ministry's Mobile Group, an interagency unit that includes officers of the Federal Police, conducted 133 operations in 2008, the most since its creation in 1995.

Most of those liberated were farm laborers forced to work long hours under often dangerous and unhygienic conditions.

One of the most common forms of defacto servitude in Brazil is debt peonage, under which an employer binds a worker to the job by paying him far too little for the employee to repay his ever-growing debt to the boss for food, lodging and transportation.

The biggest offenders are cattle ranchers and owners of sugarcane plantations, the ministry said.

Ministry regulations call for sugar workers to be paid the equivalent of $540 a month for cutting 10-12 tons of cane per day, but many plantation owners ignore the law.

More:
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=324484&CategoryId=14090

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01/03/2009 04:26 PM ID: 75954 Permalink
Slaves Freed From Remote Farms

Last year more than 4500 people were rescued from slave-like conditions by authorities in Brazil. Though slavery is banned in the country from 1888, many impoverished people work as debt slave on remote ranches and plantations.

While they are in debt to pay off it, are forced to work, living in isolated camps. There are no contacts between them and their families. Small armies of gunmen are employed by ranchers to prevent the escapes.

Many slave workers are killed when they demand for payment from their employers.

http://www.shortnews.com/start.cfm?id=75954

[Judi Lynn]

2. From July: Brazil Anti-Slavery Team Frees 1,100 Farm Workers

Brazil Anti-Slavery Team Frees 1,100 Farm Workers
Brazil's government anti-slavery team freed more than 1,000 laborers from inhumane working conditions.
Published: July 02, 2007 23:40h


Brazil's government anti-slavery team freed more than 1,000 laborers from inhumane working conditions on a sugar cane plantation in the Amazon, officials said on Monday.
The International Labor Organization in a statement called it the largest single bust ever made in Brazil, where some 160 illegal worksites have been raided in the past few years.

"The degrading conditions are always the same. Nothing but straw to cover yourself, no bathroom, nowhere to keep food. It's a cycle that repeats itself with minor variations," a spokesman for the government anti-slavery team said.

Labor prosecutor Luis Fernandes and his colleagues found 1,100 laborers working and living in what they called slave-like conditions and stuffed into overcrowded sleeping quarters on a cane plantation.

The property, located about 155 miles (250 kilometers) from the mouth of the Amazon river near the town of Ulianopolis, was owned by a company called Pagrisa.

The workers said Pagrisa started recruiting six months ago. Employers often hire workers from poor, drought-stricken states near the Amazon to clear trees or plant grass or crops.

More:
http://www.javno.com/en/world/clanak.php?id=58869

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So, NOW we learn these slaves are being used to tear out the Amazon rain forest.


Last Updated: Thursday, 29 January, 2004, 11:47 GMT
Brazil slave inspectors shot dead



Some labourers are forced to
clear forest

Three Brazilian officials were shot dead while investigating allegations that farm workers were used as slave labour, the Labour Ministry has said.
A spokesman said the officials and their driver were ambushed in the state of Minais Gerais.

But he said it was not clear whether the murders had anything to do with the investigations.

Last March President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva announced measures to end slave labour in Brazil.

A police spokesman said the driver had managed to alert the authorities before he died.

The spokesman said police had been sent to the area, about 140 kilometres from the capital Brasilia, in a bid to catch the killers.

Vice President Jose Alencar said in a statement: "This brutality will not go unpunished, all resources have been mobilised to catch the criminals."

The Roman Catholic Church's committee on land reform has estimated that 15-25,000 Brazilians are kept in conditions equivalent to slave labour.

More:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3440615.stm

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Brazzil - People - February 2004
Brazil: For Some, Slavery Is the Only Option

Brazil's Labor Court Prosecutors Office (MPT) liberated 32 workers submitted to slave-like conditions on a farm belonging to Brazilian Senator João Ribeiro, in the municipality of Pirraça, in the south of Pará state. The workers were taken to the municipality of Araguaina, where they testified before the Federal Police. The MPT intends to file a public civil suit in the Labor Court system of Pará for the reparation of damages suffered by the workers.

The head of the MPT's National Coordinating Body to Combat Slave Labor, Luís Antônio Camargo de Melo, informed that the mobile group arrived at the senator's farm after receiving denunciations that the workers were restricted in their right to come and go, but when the MPT began its investigation, it wasn't aware that it had to do with a senator.

~snip~
It is estimated that between 25 and 40 thousand workers live under slave-like conditions in the country. The chief characteristic that identifes slave-like labor is the restriction of freedom. Cláudia Márcia Brito, from the Secretariat of Labor Inspection, said that the form of slavery that exists nowadays is crueler than the tradition form. "The contemporary slave is expendable," she declared.

Brito has already taken part in various inspections carried out by the Ministry of Labor's mobile group that checks the existence of slave-like labor on rural properties. She said she discovered various workers living in canvas tents, eating poorly, and drinking the same dirty water as the animals on the property. She said that during one of the visits she heard a landowner remark that it did no good to offer filtered water to the workers, since they preferred the dirty water. The same landowner also admitted that the corral was cleaner and better cared for than the lodgings occupied by his employees, but that the workers liked it that way, Brito reported.

In her view, passage of the PEC that will permit land confiscation is very important and will serve as an educational tool. "We know that employers act only their pocketbooks are stirred," she affirmed. She also said that the only victim of slavery in Brazil is the worker. "He is not a slave because he wants to, but for complete lack of opportunity," she concluded.

http://www.brazzil.com/2004/html/articles/feb04/p119feb04.htm

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New York Times, 1993:

Slavery on Rise in Brazil, as Debt Chains Workers
By JAMES BROOKE,
Published: May 23, 1993

Rolling hills cloaked in emerald green sugar cane fields lend a luxuriant air to this rural corner of Rio de Janeiro State. But, down in a creek hollow where farm workers sleep in hammocks strung in cow stalls, laborers say the alcohol distillery owner does not pay wages -- only scrip redeemable for food.

Toiling from sunup to sundown for food does not fit strict definitions of slavery. But the laborers' complaints here have swelled a nationwide flood of denunciations of an upsurge of slavery in Brazil.

Brazil was the last nation in the Americas to abolish slavery, only grudgingly giving up the practice in 1888. To continue to exploit cheap labor, landowners developed means of binding laborers by forcing them to run up unpayable debts at company stores or canteens. Chains Made of Debt

~snip~
According to the commission's definition, modern day slavery involves recruitment of workers with false promises, imprisonment for debt, and coercion to prevent workers from leaving their employers. In such situations, workers are reduced to working for food. Some workers are prevented from leaving by menacing armed foremen and others are marooned on isolated ranches, unable to find a way to leave. 'Alarming Proportions'

~snip~
Typically, labor contractors roam rural areas luring unemployed workers with promises of good wages and working conditions. But when workers arrive at the remote work camps, hundreds of miles from home, they soon discover that the bunkhouse may be no more than a plastic sheet and that they owe unpayable debts for bus transportation, meals and the use of work tools, like chain saws.

Last year, about half of Brazil's slavery complaints involved families hired to cut trees and tend charcoal furnaces in the southern Amazon state of Mato Grosso do Sul.

"They used to pay a man here his wages and then claim that he was being paid in advance for future work," said Nauci de Sousa Pires, a 62-year-old boiler assistant who has worked at the Victor Sence sugar cane alcohol company here since 1954. "More recently, they moved to the system of paying with scrip."

~snip~
Looking at one of her 11 grandchildren, a 10-year-old boy named Alan, Mrs. de Souza said hopefully, "I would like him to study, so that when he grows up, he won't end up like a slave like me."

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE1D71331F930A15756C0A965958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all