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Cadaver Hamburgs FlagWrapped.. Fueled By Slavery
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!! Short Cadaverous hamburgs
wrapped in the American flag
.. and the chains of Brazilian
slaves
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FOREST CONSERVATION NEWS TODAY
Brazilian Deforestation Fueled by Slavery
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Forest Networking a Project of Forests.org, Inc.
http://forests.org/ -- Forest Conservation Portal
http://forests.org/web/ -- Discuss Forest Conservation
March 25, 2002
OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by Forests.org
Commercial scaled rainforest logging is evil. Rainforest logging
destroys species. It eliminates ecosystems we need for survival.
Rainforest logging destroys economies and community well-being.
Rainforest logging violates human rights – even fostering slavery. Do
not tolerate rainforest logging. Rainforest logging is unjust, unwise
and ecocidal. Let’s make them stop.
g.b.
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Brazil's Prized Exports Rely on Slaves and Scorched Land
Source: Copyright 2002 New York Times
Date: March 25, 2002
Byline: LARRY ROHTER
INGUARA, 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," Clلudio
Secchin, director of the Ministry of Labor's special antislavery
Mobile Enforcement Team, said in an interview in Brasيlia. "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.
Still, many of the workers, desperate for any work, had journeyed
hundreds of miles to Amazon towns like this one and accepted
employment at ranches even deeper in the jungle. Once on the job,
however, they discovered that their pay would be less than promised,
and that they would be charged for transportation and forced to pay
inflated prices for the food, lodging, medicine and tools.
"We were obliged to make our purchases at the ranch's cantina, since
we couldn't go to town and the foreman forced everyone to remain in
the area," said Gilvan Gomes da Silva, 22. "But everything at the
cantina was more than double the price it would have been in town."
In addition, former slave laborers describe living and working
conditions as abysmal. Mr. Gomes da Silva recalled the time he spent
on a ranch with 48,000 head of cattle as particularly difficult.
Forced to spray chemicals to clear pastureland but deprived of
protective gloves and masks, he became ill and was plunged deeper
into debt when a foreman charged him for the medicines used to treat
him.
"The cattle were treated better than we were, since they were at
least fattened up in buildings with concrete floors, while we had to
sleep out in the jungle," he said.
"The only time we ever ate meat," he added "was when they had rotten
beef they were desperate to get rid of, and so there were men who
didn't have enough to eat and became weaker and weaker until they
just got sick and died."
The peons, as they are called here, were often told they would not
be paid and threatened with violence to keep them from complaining
or leaving. "When I asked to receive my wages, the foreman told me
`Kid, your salary is right here,' and pointed to his revolver," said
Gilvan Rodrigues Freitas, 29.
Workers fall into the trap of slave labor in different ways. But the
most common is to be recruited by the "gatos," or "cats," who go to
towns deep in Brazil's two poorest states, Piauي and Maranhمo, to
hire laborers.
"They talk a good game, sweet-talking you and promising you
everything when they want you to sign up with them," said Francisco
Souza de Santos, 54, a former slave laborer. "But they change their
tune just as soon as they have you in their clutches."
Onboard the bus, a fiery sugarcane liquor called cachaca starts
flowing.
Days later, over bumpy, remote roads, the workers arrive in a
compliant mood.
"Our trip lasted five days, but we only had three meals," said
Onatan Alves da Silva, 53, one of 170 recruited workers who traveled
on four buses to a ranch west of here. "Two young guys named
Fernando and Severino wanted to go back, but the contractor," who
was heavily armed, "hit and threatened them, saying he could fill
them full of holes if he wanted to."
Going to the local police for help, however, is often futile.
Sworn statements by workers fleeing slavery are on file at the local
office of the Pastoral Land Commission here, reporting incidents in
which they went to the police in Marabل to complain of being held as
slaves and were promptly returned by the police to the ranch from
which they came.
"On the ranch where I was held, the cops were really tight with the
foreman, who walked around with a .38 pistol in his belt," said
Reinaldo Carvalho da Silva, 23. "They'd come around to his house to
have coffee and gossip, so there was no way I could go to them."
But it is also common for ranchers and contractors to decide that a
worker is no longer needed and to tell him that they will "forgive"
his debt. The worker can then leave, but must find his way through
the trackless jungle to a settlement usually at one of the many
shabby "pioneer hotels," that take lodgers on credit.
In reality, these boarding houses are essential to perpetuating the
system. Cut off from their families and unable to find anyone to
help them, escapees and fired workers find themselves once again
becoming prey for the gato.
Outside one pioneer hotel in Sمo Félix do Xingu stood Baltazar
Ribeiro dos Santos. The government's enforcement team had freed him
in a raid last August, but a few weeks later he owed about $44 to
his land- lady and risked being sold to the next recruiter who would
pay the tab.
"I'm so ashamed," he said. "Nothing like this has ever happened to
me before in the 24 years that I have spent as a roving laborer. How
did I let myself get ripped off like that? I feel like slitting my
throat. How can I go home to face my wife and kids? I left with
nothing, but I can't go back with nothing."
Benta Borges, the owner of the hotel, first claimed not to know what
a gato was. But eventually she acknowledged her relationship with
the labor recruiters.
"There's corruption in the whole world," she said when pressed about
her business. "Whatever arrangements the ranchers or contractors
make with the peons is their business, not ours. We just give them
lodging. We don't ask questions."
Toothless Enforcement
Many ranchers are influential businessmen or powerful politicians.
Last summer, for instance, the enforcement team, acting on a tip,
raided a ranch west of Sمo Félix do Xingu owned by Francisco Nonato
de Araْjo, from Piauي, where he is a member of the state
Legislature, a prominent official in the ruling party and, until
recently, the state secretary of agriculture.
The raid freed Baltazar Ribeiro dos Santos and 59 other workers,
some of them ill with malaria, from what was categorized as slavery.
Mr. Araْjo did not respond to telephone messages left for him at his
offices and on his cellular phone. But he has at various times told
local newspapers and radio stations that the ranch belongs not to
him but to his father, blamed the ranch foreman for withholding the
workers' wages and argued that "this type of hiring is standard
practice in the region."
The enforcement team cannot arrest or prosecute offenders itself,
and must rely on the local state's attorneys and courts, many of
which are either indifferent to slavery or openly sympathetic to
ranchers.
In addition, the Labor Ministry unit is chronically short of money
and resources.
At least part of the vacuum has been filled by the Catholic Church,
whose Pastoral Land Commission distributes a pamphlet to potential
recruits warning them to keep their "Eyes Open So As Not to End Up A
Slave." Many of the workers, however, are illiterate.
"Alerting workers to the danger is not enough to stop them," said
the Rev. Ricardo Rezende, who works with former slave laborers.
"Their thinking is that `If I am hungry enough, I will run the risk
and hope that this contractor is better than the other ones, because
it's better to take that chance than let my family die of hunger.' "
But Mr. Bezerra, the timber company executive in Florida, dismisses
talk of slave labor as "lies and politics," propagated by ambitious
officials "who want to run for office and want the green banner
behind them."
He, too, is a Brazilian, once lived in the Amazon and still travels
to the region four times a year. He says he has never seen even a
single sign of slave labor.
Both the Catholic Church and the environmental movement, he
continued, are infiltrated by "watermelons, people who are green on
the outside and red on the inside."
"That's right," Mr. Bezerra said. "They are a bunch of Communists
who think that all businesses are bad."
But Brazil's most prominent antislavery crusader, Pureza Lopes
Loyola, a peasant woman from Maranhمo, tells a very different story.
Her brother, Ataide, went to work on an Amazon ranch in 1974 and was
never heard from again. When the same fate befell her teenaged son,
Abel, eight years ago, she set off on a three-year odyssey until he
was finally found.
"Everywhere I went," she said, "I saw the same scenes of workers
suffering from malaria, hepatitis other dreadful diseases, prevented
from leaving by armed guards. Now I have a grandson, and I fear for
him.
"I pray to God every day for the government to go after this whole
structure of slavery so that he too doesn't fall into this terrible
trap," she added.
"But I don't think they will."
###RELAYED TEXT ENDS###
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