Brazil's Prized Exports Rely on Slaves and
Scorched Land
The New York Times, March 26, 2002
Xinguara, Brazil - The recruiters gather at the bus
station here in this grimy Amazon frontier town, waiting for the weary and
the desperate to disembark. When they spot a target, they promise him a
steady job, good pay, free housing and plenty of food. A quick handshake
seals the deal.
But for thousands of peasants, that handshake ensures
a slide into slavery. No sooner do they board the battered trucks that
take them to work felling trees and tending cattle deep in the jungle than
they find themselves mired in debt, under armed guard and unable to leave
their new workplace.
"It was 12 years before I was finally able to
escape and make my way back home," said Bernardo Gomes da Silva, 42.
"We were forced to start work at 6 in the morning and to continue
sometimes until 11 at night, but I was never paid during that entire time
because they always claimed that I owed them money."
Interviewed recently in his hometown, Barras, about
600 miles east of here, Mr. Gomes da Silva said particularly troublesome
workers, especially those who kept asking for their wages, were sometimes
simply killed.
"I can't read, so maybe a half-dozen different
times I was ordered to burn the identity cards and work documents of
workers who I had last seen walking down the road, supposedly on their way
out," he said. "We also found heaps of bones out in the jungle,
but none of us ever talked about it."
Brazil was the last country in the Americas to
abolish slavery, in 1888, and forced labor for both blacks and whites
continued throughout the 20th century in some rural areas. But government
authorities admit that despite a federal crackdown announced seven years
ago, "contemporary forms of slavery" in which workers are held
in unpaid, coerced labor continue to flourish. The reasons range from
ranchers in cahoots with corrupt local authorities to ineffective land
reform policies and high unemployment.
Perhaps most important, though, is the growing
pressure to exploit and develop the Amazon's vast agricultural frontier,
in part to supply foreign markets with two prized goods: timber and beef.
In the jungle west of here, fortunes are being made
clearing the forest and harvesting mahogany and other tropical hardwoods,
including jatoba and ipe. The United States is the main importer of
Brazilian mahogany, and though logging has been permitted only in 13
designated areas, Greenpeace, the advocacy group, has listed nearly 100
companies it says deal in illegal mahogany to meet a growing demand from
American furniture makers.
Furniture companies like Ethan Allen and L. & J.
G. Stickley say their mahogany comes only from "suppliers that advise
us that they comply with responsible forest practices," as Ethan
Allen Interiors Inc. of Danbury, Conn., put it in a statement. But the
companies also acknowledge that they do not have independent monitors and
do not believe that they should have to determine the origin of imported
wood.
"We cannot do the job of the Brazilian
government," said Aminy Audi, an owner of Stickley, a big buyer of
Brazilian mahogany in Manlius, N.Y., for its own stores and a manufacturer
for other brands. "We have to believe the certification, and we have
had no reason to believe otherwise."
Brazilian government statistics indicate that Aljoma
Lumber of Medley, Fla., near Miami, was the largest importer of Brazilian
mahogany in the United States in 2000. Asked about slave labor in the
Amazon, the company's vice president for hardwoods, Romel Bezerra, said
that "there is no such thing these days," and insisted that his
company's mahogany came from legal sources.
"Brazil has put in place many, many regulations,
with export licenses and stamps all over the place," he said.
"They have established strict controls on logging and cutting and
transportation and export, so it is impossible to ship mahogany
illegally."
But the Brazilian government has estimated that as
much as 80 percent of Amazon timber comes from illegal sources, according
to a confidential 1997 report. In booming mill towns like this one,
dealers openly resell, copy or simply counterfeit the government
certificates needed to export timber.
When a shipment of mahogany reaches the port of Belém
for shipment to the United States, government inspectors have no way to
determine its origin.
As the trees have fallen, there has also been a huge
expansion in cattle ranches that raise grass-fed "green beef."
Brazil's commercial cattle herd, the largest in the world, generally does
not eat manufactured feed or synthetic supplements.
That makes Brazilian beef especially attractive in
Europe and the Middle East, where fears of mad cow disease are still
strong. Exports of Brazilian beef, fresh and processed, grew 30 percent in
2001, to $1 billion, according to government statistics.
"Slave labor in Brazil is directly linked to
deforestation," Cláudio Secchin, director of the Ministry of Labor's
special antislavery Mobile Enforcement Team, said in an interview in Brasília.
"There are more and more cattle ranchers who want to increase the
size of their herds, but to do that they need more space, so the clearing
of land is a constant."
In 1995, the first year that Mr. Secchin's team
operated, 288 farmworkers were freed from what was officially described as
slavery, a total which rose to 583 in 2000. Last year, however, the
government freed more than 1,400 slave laborers.
Mr. Secchin attributed the increase to "the
growth both of slave labor and of our efficiency in combating it."
But he acknowledged that most cases probably go undetected.
A national survey conducted in 2000 by the Pastoral
Land Commission, a Roman Catholic Church group, estimated that there were
more than 25,000 forced workers. A decade ago, there were less than 5,000.
Desperation and Coercion
Mr. Gomes da Silva, a slight, bearded man, said he
had been forced to work on four ranches over a dozen years and had met
hundreds of other slave laborers. Recent interviews with more than a score
of other former victims produced similar accounts of forced labor,
nonpayment for work and threats or use of violence.
The task of felling trees, some so tall they block
out sunlight, is dangerous and exhausting work. The unrelenting heat
bathes workers in sweat that causes chainsaws and axes to slip from their
grip and draws mosquitoes, flies and chiggers that bite incessantly and
transmit diseases. The dense smoke from incinerated tree trunks stings the
eyes, and predators like leopards and cougars are often close by.
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