SLAVERY IN BRAZIL
COMM: Thousands of Brazilians are lured into the Amazon where theyre forced to cut and burn the rainforest. Theyre slaves.Its big business. And its deadly
Sync: The guy in the yellow shirt who was one of the armed guards whos been arrested has just confessed to being a killer.
COMM: Every year some 50,000 slaves turn an area of the Amazon the size of Switzerland into a waste land.
COMM: Its been more than century since Brazil abolished slavery, officially.
Sync: Twenty years ago everything below me would have been virgin rain forest thats all gone now in the name of plantations and pastures for beef.
COMM: Here where farms are the size of an English country the landowners are the law.
Sync: This region of northern Brazil in Amazonia is at the absolute heart of the slave trade its also got a terrible reputation for murder and extortion. Here in the local paper there are examples of one, two, three, four, five, six, local murders by gangsters
COMM: Its often difficult to tell the gangsters from the Gatos foremen hired to control labourers.
COMM: Valdeir is in hiding from a Gato whod shot him after hed worked for five months - and asked to be paid.
Sync Sam: Did it go through you? Thats just by your heart.
Andre: The bullet is still inside you can see the bullet its still there.
Sam: Oh my God I can feel it. What kind of gun was that? And they shot you in the leg.Was it a pistol or a rifle?
A 38, a pistol.
PTC: The moment he opened the door the Gato shot him in the chest. He fell over and he shot him in the leg again he then went into the room next door and shot three times into the sleeping body of his friend who was killed instantly and he only survived by pretending to be dead.
PTC: Its been three months since Valdier was shot and he doesnt seem to think much can be done hes gone to the police but hes got no faith in them or in the judicial system.
COMM: But the judicial system itself is under pressure. Two hours south, in a town called Redemption, one young women judge lives under siege. Redemption is best known as Brazils capital of the pistoliero the hired gun.
COMM: The judge lives in the courthouse, behind a security fence and armed guards.
PTC: Judge Leah Sarmento stands in judgement on labour disputes. The main labour dispute around here are complaints against landowners either for not paying wages or for slavery
COMM: In the seven months shes been here shes attracted bitter hostility.
Sam Sync: Is this the court room- your chambers? Step into my chambers young man.
SAM so those are all your cases? How many cases have you had since you started?
Judge: 1248 cases
COMM: Of these 110 concern allegations of slavery. But shes convinced there should be more.
SAM She also has a very strong conviction that the number of cases here, astronomical that they are, dont reflect the real scale of the problem, because a huge number of people she thinks, are not even making it to the labour court because theyre afraid for their lives
COMM: The judge herself has been threatened.
Sync Sam: Are they phone calls are they letters? So a lawyer, let me just get this straight.
COMM: She said shes had direct threats from local leaders in her own courthouse.
Sync Sam:
came to your judges chambers and said, you should be careful with your obsession with the law because there was a judge killed in Sao Felix, which is part of your area of operations.
PTC: she says that theres basically a culture of impunity. There are very rich and very powerful people here who expect to be able to buy anybody she says. And that shes been accused as a judge of being obsessed with the law.
COMM: Anti-slavery campaigner Dorothy Stang, an American nun, was murdered in February. I set off to meet her close friend father Henri Des Roziers. Xingura is a magnet for penniless workers and the Gatos who exploit them. Because of his campaign again slavery theres a 100,00 reals price on his head.
SAM PTC: Father Henri is showing me around the area of Xingura where the workers come, they are frequently put up in tiny little shack like hotels. Where they run up bills that they cant pay. The Gatos then come in, pay the bills. From that point on he owns them.
COMM: Brazil has laws to protect workers. But they count for little in the Amazon where the law flows from the barrel of a shotgun.
Sync Sam: have you been ripped off before?Rui de Costa is 33, hes penniless. And a former slave.
RUI yeah
SAM how many times
RUI Twice
PTC Ive only been here about two minutes and literally the first person that Ive sat down and asked a very simple question, have you been ripped off before? He said oh yeah, twice, 3 or 4 months works for nothing. The scale of this problems extraordinary.
COMM: Father Henris been helping to free slaves for decades. Back at his office he showed me a Labour Ministry name and shame list of people convicted of slavery.
PTC: what weve got here is a list of convictions for slavery over the last couple of years. Im going to go through and see how many are in the area around here where Im staying in Xingura.
COMM: There are 165 names of this list. Its really like a Brazilian Whos Who.
SYNC Sam: Innocentsio Gomez Doliveira from the fazenda Carapeas convicted of having 56 slaves in November 03. At the time he was president of Brazils National Congress and hes still a congressman. What do you have to do in this country to get barred from Congress?
PTC: thats just over 130 kms so just in this area here from Xingura, which is where, my finger is like that 35 convictions for slavery. And on average, Im guessing, therere about 50 slaves per conviction.
COMM: Brazils left wing president Luiz Lula da Silva wants to end slavery by the end of the year. His plans to confiscate land from convicted slavers are being blocked by landowners in the Congress.I wanted to know if they didnt find slavery immoral wasnt it faintly embarrassing?
PTC : Here we go, Fazenda Rio Vermelho, brothers Quagliato, Fernando Luis was convicted November 03 just over a year ago. 167 slaves on this farm
PTC: this is a farm so big that its actually subdivided into smaller farms, which are named, I dont think with a great deal of irony, after American states.
COMM: Its easy to keep prying eyes well out of farms this big. The nearest public road can be 100 miles away and workers will struggle to leave without permission.
PTC: Well top tip for ranchers with guilty consciences who want to keep us away. Lock your gate.
COMM: One major landowner wasnt too shy to show me around his farm.
PTC: Luciano Geddes has invited us out to his farm; hes the regional leader of the big landowners association and actually also vice president of the same organisation for the whole state. Hes publicly admitted that theres a problem with the perception that landowners are slavers.
Sync: Bon Dia etc
COMM: Luciano is the second generation of his family to farm this land. His clan carved three farms out of the rain forest.Brazils been ruled by civilians for 20 years but its far right legacy has survived the passing of the generals. Today conservatives see allegations of slavery as part of a left wing conspiracy to drive them off the land.
PTC Lucianos saying that theres no such thing as slavery in this country, not in the sense of people being forced to work against their will. What he is saying is that theres a number of minor violations of brazils labour laws. But the accusation of slavery is coming directly from commercial interests who are trying to hold back Brazils development.
COMM: He said these were state subsidized European farmers.But if there was no slavery: why was Leah, the judge, being threatened?
PTC: Luciano is saying that the threats against the judge have no basis in reality theyre being invented by these commercial interests that seem to want to prevent this region of Brazil, Para, from developing properly.
COMM: Perhaps Luciano had a point. So I got in touch with the catholic Churchs Pastoral Land Commission it works closely with alleged slaves.
COMM: Dava had a tip-off while we were with her and agreed to take me to meet men whod escaped from a charcoal kiln.
Sync SAM Q how long did you work there? And did you get paid at all in that time?
MAN TALKSSAM: they were owed between 6 and 7 months pay. Theyre afraid to go back there and demand their money because they say the owner and his sons are armed with 38 special revolvers
COMM: Every year huge tracts of the rain forest are illegally felled, burned and turned into charcoal for smelting iron for export to America. These men said theyd been slaves at a kiln.That there was a young mother being held, that she was starving.
COMM: There was no sign of the starving mother.
SYNC: Shes the daughter of the owner.
Sam: Is the owner here, or his son. DO they have a cell phone we need to talk to him?
COMM: Brazils rain forest are disappearing into kilns and conditions for the workers are medieval.
SAM that was a burn? What from the doorway? So youre coming into doorways that are so hot that they burn you?SAM this was full of charcoal? So you basically had to mine hot charcoal?
PTC: these men were forced to come into these kilns and burrow in and as if mining coal they would be mining hot charcoal.
COMM: Its a tough life but was it slavery? Dava had discovered that the workers had denounced their boss as a slave driver because he refused to pay them in advance.
COMM: What Luciano the landowner had said rang true workers were abusing labour laws to settle grudges.
COMM: But human rights groups and the United Nations estimates that 50,000 Brazilians are enslaved every year.Three days before I was due to leave I got a call from the Labour ministry. Its agents were planning to raid farms and free slaves.
COMM: Six small teams of police and labour lawyers are all Brazil has to combat slavery.
PTC: The police and the people from the labour ministry theyve come to a remote town right on the edge of the Amazonian jungle where theyve got reports of a vary bad case of slavery.
COMM: Escaped slaves slip past armed guards and travel huge distances to contact the authorities.
PTC This is Geraldo, who recently escaped from a farm deep in the forest and in fact he says there are 50 workers there being held against their will. They were taken there by a gato undercover of darkness. There are 3 armed men standing around them
COMM: Its a ripping escape yarn. Geraldo says he hid from jaguars up trees and Paulo Ceasar the team leader takes some convincing. But in the end the team is won over and the raid is on.
PTC: Its five oclock in the morning and the team including the federal police are now planning to go into the farm that is some 300km somewhere in the jungle to form a rescue. The main problem now is going to be to find the farm where they are being forced to work.
COMM: Its a long hard drive back over the route the informer took in the dead of night.After several hours the element of surprise begins to slip were lost and have to stop for directions.
PTC: Theres some confusion as to where the bad guys are.
Sync: This informer do you trust him.ANDRE yes its true his story is trueSAM is there armed men and illnesses?
PC WALKS AWAY PTC: They are reluctant to talk too much in front of a civilian witness but Paolos say there are three armed guys on the farm, conditions are appalling and people havent been paid. There are about 50 people there theres illness, the living conditions the sanitation are non-existent.
COMM: As we approached the farm where the slaves were allegedly held the informers warnings about pistolieros meant the police broke out their weapons.
COMM: We inched forward through a wasteland of charred forest. And quickly came upon a slave camp.
PTC: Illegal weapon shot gun number one one of the ways in which they manage to prosecute the slavers is by capturing them with illegal weapons its an offence they can be arrested for and thats frequently, they tell me the best way of getting a prosecution because it has the severest sentence.
Sync Sam: Whats this
PC? What is this shop?
PC: This is the shop for the workers.
Sync Sam: How does it work?
PTC they have to get all their food and other equipment, everything, from this little cantina, this little shop. Everything they buy is entered into one of these exercise books and they stack up dept that theyre totally unable to pay and are therefore can never leave the farm because
theyre in debt to the owner and the Gato whos running it.
COMM: We find about 15 men here. Theyre all in debt to the cantina.
SAM Jose says hes been here for 3 months and he hasnt been paid. Hes running up a debt here in the cantina and he says hes just going to trust them, to write down the right amount. He doesnt even know how bit the debt is.SAM can I ask you, very politely, if you can read and writeJOSE noSAM so you dont know what theyre writing down in that book do you?
JOSE no.
SAM: I hope you get everything that is coming to you.
COMM: we came across a young boy and his grand mother who were also trapped on the farm.
Sync: He doesnt believe nobody cant speak Portuguese.So tell me, do you work here?
ANDREASON nods
SAM Do you know how old you are?
Andreason: Seven
SAM this is Andreason, he is a slave, hes seven. He does here what the adults do and if doesnt work he doesnt eat.
COMM: More slave camps were said to be hidden in the bush. As the search continued our informer suddenly spotted some pistolieros.
PTC: The man in the yellow shirt has been identified by our informer as one of the armed men who had been holding the slaves on the farm.
COMM: They quickly admitted they had been the slave guards. And more.
PTC: Jesus the guy in the yellow shirt, who was one the armed guards whos been arrested, has just told the federal police, that 8 months ago he killed a woman. He just confessed, just like that.
COMM: He told the police he was wanted in Belem, the state capital, for murdering his wife.
PTC these guys turn out to be the Gatos the subcontractors, who are in charge of the workers or the alleged slaves on the farm theyve all been detained.
COMM; But these men are the small fry. PC and his raiding party are after the boss.They track down the farm manager down to his hideout.
PTC: the managers being told that he has to round up his slaves, transport them to the nearest town, accommodate them in a hotel and prepare himself to actually pay them. Hes saying I cant afford it.
COMM: But what of the owner? It turns out hes a Belem, 1,000 miles away where he runs a restaurant. Hes known as Itzhak and tells PC on a satellite phone that he knows nothing that he just hired the manager to do a job and wasnt responsible for who got paid what. His excuses dont work.
PTC: PCs just told this guy Itzhak, the owner of the land, that it doesnt matter whining about whether or not he actually contracted the job to somebody else and its the other guys fault for having slaves. Hes saying whatever happens youre responsible; youve got to pay. You can pay in 2 days or 3 days or 3 years. Youre going to pay.
COMM: These slaves were freed from their debts and returned to their camps to wait for months of back pay.But many seemed to see slavery as an occupational hazard.
Sync: Now PC has rescued you from another farm where you were made a slave before. How come you find yourself back in the same position?
PTC: People like this are absolutely easy to exploit because once theyve left home in search of a fortune they cant go back until they bring a fortune with them. Theyre embarrassed theyre humiliated and theyve got nothing to go home with. And pretty soon they loose all connection with their families, their friends, and their home town - and they become perpetual drifters moving from job to job sometimes they get paid sometimes they dont and thats how the Amazons being cleared.
COMM: The rain forest, which serves as the lungs of the world, is being choked on its own smoke. Future generations might wonder at why to raise beef for cheap burgers we used slaves to flatten the Amazon.
ENDS