SLAVERY IN BRAZIL

COMM: Thousands of Brazilians are lured into the Amazon where they’re forced to cut and burn the rainforest. They’re slaves.It’s big business. And it’s deadly

Sync: The guy in the yellow shirt who was one of the armed guards who’s 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: It’s been more than century since Brazil abolished slavery, officially.

Sync: Twenty years ago everything below me would have been virgin rain forest that’s 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 it’s 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: It’s often difficult to tell the gangsters from the Gatos – foremen hired to control labourers.

COMM: Valdeir is in hiding from a Gato who’d shot him after he’d worked for five months - and asked to be paid.

Sync Sam: Did it go through you? That’s just by your heart.

Andre: The bullet is still inside you can see the bullet it’s 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: It’s been three months since Valdier was shot and he doesn’t seem to think much can be done he’s gone to the police but he’s 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 Brazil’s 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 she’s been here she’s 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 she’s convinced there should be more.

SAM She also has a very strong conviction that the number of cases here, astronomical that they are, don’t 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 they’re 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 she’s 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 there’s 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 she’s 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 there’s 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 can’t 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, he’s penniless. And a former slave.

RUI – yeah

SAM – how many times

RUI – Twice

PTC – I’ve only been here about two minutes and literally the first person that I’ve 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 problem’s extraordinary.

COMM: Father Henri’s 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 we’ve got here is a list of convictions for slavery over the last couple of years. I’m going to go through and see how many are in the area around here where I’m staying in Xingura.

COMM: There are 165 names of this list. It’s really like a Brazilian Who’s Who.

SYNC Sam: –Innocentsio Gomez D’oliveira from the fazenda Carapeas – convicted of having 56 slaves in November 03. At the time he was president of Brazil’s National Congress and he’s still a congressman. What do you have to do in this country to get barred from Congress?

PTC: that’s 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, I’m guessing, there’re about 50 slaves per conviction.

COMM: Brazil’s 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 didn’t find slavery immoral wasn’t 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 it’s actually subdivided into smaller farms, which are named, I don’t think with a great deal of irony, after American states.

COMM: It’s 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 wasn’t too shy to show me around his farm.

PTC: Luciano Geddes has invited us out to his farm; he’s the regional leader of the big landowners association and actually also vice president of the same organisation for the whole state. He’s publicly admitted that there’s 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.Brazil’s been ruled by civilians for 20 years but it’s 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 Luciano’s saying that there’s 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 there’s a number of minor violations of brazil’s labour laws. But the accusation of slavery is coming directly from commercial interests who are trying to hold back Brazil’s 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 they’re 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 Church’s 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 who’d 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. They’re 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 they’d 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: She’s 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: Brazil’s rain forest are disappearing into kilns and conditions for the workers are medieval.

SAM – that was a burn? What from the doorway? So you’re 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: It’s 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 – they’ve come to a remote town right on the edge of the Amazonian jungle where they’ve 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 say’s 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: It’s 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: It’s five o’clock 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: It’s 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 – we’re lost and have to stop for directions.

PTC: There’s 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 Paolo’s say there are three armed guys on the farm, conditions are appalling and people haven’t been paid. There are about 50 people there – there’s illness, the living conditions the sanitation are non-existent.

COMM: As we approached the farm where the slaves were allegedly held the informer’s 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 – it’s an offence they can be arrested for and that’s frequently, they tell me the best way of getting a prosecution because it has the severest sentence.

Sync Sam: What’s 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 they’re totally unable to pay and are therefore can never leave the farm because
they’re in debt to the owner and the Gato who’s running it.

COMM: We find about 15 men here. They’re all in debt to the cantina.

SAM Jose say’s he’s been here for 3 months and he hasn’t been paid. He’s running up a debt here in the cantina and he say’s he’s just going to trust them, to write down the right amount. He doesn’t even know how bit the debt is.SAM – can I ask you, very politely, if you can read and writeJOSE noSAM so you don’t know what they’re 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 doesn’t believe nobody can’t 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, he’s seven. He does here what the adults do and if doesn’t work he doesn’t 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 who’s 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 – they’ve 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 manager’s 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. He’s saying I can’t afford it.

COMM: But what of the owner? It turns out he’s a Belem, 1,000 miles away where he runs a restaurant. He’s 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 wasn’t responsible for who got paid what. His excuses don’t work.

PTC: PC’s just told this guy Itzhak, the owner of the land, that it doesn’t matter whining about whether or not he actually contracted the job to somebody else and it’s the other guy’s fault for having slaves. He’s saying whatever happens you’re responsible; you’ve got to pay. You can pay in 2 days or 3 days or 3 years. You’re 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 they’ve left home in search of a fortune they can’t go back until they bring a fortune with them. They’re embarrassed they’re humiliated and they’ve 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 don’t and that’s how the Amazon’s 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