Families Trapped for Generations as Illegal Slavery Thrives in Brazil

Marta dos Anjos Rocha, 8, lost her lungs in the charcoal ovens.

She was 5 when she became a slave at this camp, packing eucalyptus logs into kilns of brick and mud that “cook” the charcoal powering most of the steel mills in Brazil.

Marta never had anything to protect her bare feet and hands from the hot coals, no goggles for the swirling ash, no mask--not even a rag--to keep her lips and lungs free of the smoke.

And she couldn’t quit, either. Her father, Jose Rocha, owed the master six weeks of work for the food they were rationed, the shack they slept in, the axes they used. Her family was trapped in debt.

From daybreak to dusk, alongside her father, mother and older sister, Marta toiled in the back lands of Minas Gerais state. One day her mother found the girl kneeling beside a woodpile, coughing blood.

Marta doesn’t work the ovens anymore. She doesn’t run either, or walk very far without fainting.

“It hurts to breathe,” she mumbles. Even her voice sounds like ashes. “Sometimes, it feels like my chest is on fire.”

Meanwhile, the Rochas’ debt keeps growing. They owe 10 months’ work for the extra food and medicine that Marta requires, plus three new hand axes and rakes needed for the job.

“Sir, there are no walls here, but we’re still prisoners,” says Rocha, 43. Hunger has worked on him. His skin stretches taut over his limbs. His yellow eyes peer through a mask of soot.

“We work harder and harder, but the master keeps saying we owe more. And if you try to leave without paying, well, they give you a whipping so bad that, well, best not to even say it.”

It could be a chapter from a Charles Dickens novel, a tale from the last century. But the Rochas were trapped into a life of bondage only last year. And they are not alone.

Britain’s Anti-Slavery International has denounced Brazil as the greatest offender in the Americas for cases of involuntary servitude, worse than Peru, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Documented cases of Brazilians living like slaves soared from 597 in 1989 to 25,150 last year, according to the Pastoral Land Commission, a nonprofit group sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church.

Gabriel do Nascimento Vieira, a priest and head of the land commission in northern Minas Gerais state, puts the figure at 100,000.

“Just here in northern Minas there are about 30,000 slaves, and 4,000 of those are children,” says Vieira, who is based in Montes Claros, a city of 250,000 on the edge of the outback in northern Minas Gerais.

“The system is designed to make necessary forced labor. And who’s getting rich off it? Shoemakers, sugar producers, steel companies, and the American, Italian and German car makers that import our steel.”

On paper, slavery died more than a century ago.

In 1888, under world pressure, Princess Isabel signed the so-called “Golden Law” that made Brazil the last Western nation to abolish slavery. Today, the law prohibits “reducing a person to a condition analogous to slavery.”

But although a few bosses have been jailed for abusing employees, and reports of forced servitude fill filing cabinets at the federal Labor Ministry, no one has ever been prosecuted for keeping slaves.

Responding to a flood of denunciations, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso appointed a task force in June to free the “modern slaves of Brazil” and punish those who use slave labor.

Cardoso, who is trying to portray Brazil abroad as a modern economic power, earmarked $290 million for the commission, composed of delegates from five cabinet ministries and federal and highway police.

“Unfortunately, slavery has not ended,” Cardoso said. “This is completely illegal, inhuman and hurts the country economically.”

In the Amazon, there are documented cases of foremen at lumber camps chaining workers at night to trees, or shooting those who try to escape.

But modern-day slaves in Brazil are usually entangled in a system known as debt bondage, which forces whole families to work in vain efforts to pay off “loans” from their masters.

The formula is simple: Give an illiterate, desperate worker a job, then pay less than it takes to survive. In many cases, a parent’s debt is passed on for generations.

Coercion works in many ways: Phony employee contracts, beatings, rape, or torture by menacing armed foremen. Hunger, too, is an effective whip.

“In the past, slaves were an investment to the master, so they were cared for,” says James Cavallaro, a spokesman for Human Rights Watch-Americas in Brazil. “But these workers are disposable. They’re used up and tossed away.”

The use of forced labor is so widespread and so tied to the power structure in Minas Gerais that human rights activists and federal prosecutors say it’s difficult to stop.

Each year, Minas Gerais produces 70% of the national output of 35 million cubic yards of charcoal--a $3.5-billion industry that supplies all the mills in Brazil’s biggest steel-producing state.

The eucalyptus plantations that provide the charcoal cover almost half the land in northern Minas Gerais, according to the Brazilian Assn. of Coal Producers.

The Associated Press called Paulo Campo, the association’s president, but a secretary said he was not available to comment on allegations of slave labor.

The Pastoral Land Commission says labor contractors known as “cats” recruit workers--”mice”--in depressed, interior towns, where a job that pays 60 cents an hour is a prize. They arrive in trucks decorated with balloons and streamers and loudspeakers announcing wonderful jobs and high pay.

To many illiterate farmhands, it all sounds like a raffle or a TV game show, and many times they offer themselves without packing a bag.

Up to 200 people are crammed, standing, onto the back of a flatbed truck. The truck travels hundreds of miles, stopping only for fuel and water for the human cargo.

Its destination is usually a sugar cane plantation along the Atlantic coast, a gold mine or cattle ranch in the north, lumber mills in the Amazon, or charcoal camps in Mato Grosso do Sul or Minas Gerais.

Manoel Martins de Souza came from the Minas Gerais town of Mirabela two years ago in the back of one of those trucks, with his wife, Maria Geralda, and their three teenage children.

The Souzas were desperate. They had worked like slaves cutting sugar cane from sunup to sundown in neighboring Bahia state. This might be their way out of poverty.

They rode 175 miles with 50 other “mice” past fields of tree stumps and rocky, wind-swept hills of the Jequitinhonha (Jeh-kee-cheen-YON-ya) River Valley, listed by the United Nations as one of the poorest places on Earth.

Just before dawn, the truck rumbled to a halt beside a stand of eucalyptus trees. In the moonlight, they could see rows of beehive-shaped kilns belching smoke.

Bellies empty, they were sent straight to the ovens.

“The ‘cat’ told us we owed upfront for the ride, the food we was going to eat, the house they was loaning us,” Souza says. “Some people tried to leave without paying. I heard the guards beating them.”

The bunkhouse was no more than wooden poles covered by black plastic. There was no latrine, no electricity, only a mud stove. They were to drink rainwater that collected in a rusted oil drum.

There were no buses, and stores were two hours away. The “cat” became the sole provider of food, clothing and tools. Only he could give them permission to do anything out of the routine, such as see a doctor.

Souza, a toothless man with smoke baked into his skin, owns only a pair of dungaree shorts, a belt made of shoelaces, and a pair of rubber sandals. The sandals are the only footwear in the family.

During a visit by a reporter, he spoke warily at first, saying he had been told by his employer to keep quiet. But soon he relaxed, dropped his load of wood and retrieved a cardboard box with pay stubs.

The stubs, a collection of old envelopes, slips of paper and napkins, showed that in a recent month his family earned $112.50 for four truckloads of 71 cubic yards of charcoal.

The market price for a cubic yard of charcoal is about $25.

But Souza isn’t any good at figures. He puts his age “around 49.” He can’t read or write, and signs his name with a squiggly line on any receipts his boss hands him. He doesn’t dare argue.

Other stubs showed he had paid $17 for a can of cooking oil, $17 for a bag of sugar, $12 for a bag of noodles, and $20 for a sack of rice. That month, $340.25 had been deducted for food and board, leaving an outstanding negative balance of $227.75.

This left Souza and his family owing $1,126.45 after 25 months of work.

How did it happen?

“I can’t figure it,” Souza says, “when I work every day and don’t barely sleep. And with the kids cutting trees, and working the ovens and all, it just doesn’t make sense.”

Several miles up a winding, dirt track, a visitor came upon a dozen boys wearing only filthy Bermuda shorts. Cheeks sunken, hair matted in soot, they leaned on pitchforks and axes in front of piles of charred logs.

None of them had a work contract or identification, although the law requires it.

Behind them, bricks and mud were strewn about. A furnace had exploded the night before when gases built up inside. Nobody was hurt this time, but it gave the boys the jitters.

Adesvaldo da Silva, a doe-eyed boy whose head barely reaches the prongs of the pitchfork he holds, says he has chopped wood, cleared areas for tree planting and worked the kilns for six months without pay.

“I was told I’d get a bonus, but when I asked when that was, the ‘cat’ gave me this,” says the boy, turning to show fresh scars that curled across his back--the work of a chain.

“That boy,” says Vieira, the pastor, “is about 10. These children were separated from their parents, who probably work in some other charcoal camp far away. The youngest child I’ve seen here was 5 years old.”

Another boy, Amadeus de Souza, 15, appears from the billowing fumes of a kiln, hobbling like a sick stork. It is impossible to tell if he is black or white, the soot on his parched skin is so thick.

“My feet are asleep,” Amadeus says. “I’ve walked barefoot so much on hot coals I can’t feel anymore what it is I’m walking on. The feeling only comes back when we work the fields in the planting season.”

Vieira explains that during the planting season from May to August, the pubescent girls and boys often are separated from their families to seed cleared areas, in part, because the work is lighter.

“That’s not the only reason they go,” Vieira says. “When out of sight of their parents, they’re often raped and sodomized in the fields by the ‘cats’ or the truckers.”

The recent explosion in slavery reports appears to reflect two trends: an increased awareness of forced labor and the growing disparities between rich and poor.

More than a decade after a 21-year military dictatorship ended in 1985, Brazil’s press has stepped up coverage of the problem. That, coupled with the growing unionization of rural workers, has contributed to the jump in denunciations.

At the same time, income disparities worsened, making it easier for Brazil’s wealthy to prey on the weak.

A 1995 World Bank study indicated that Brazil had the worst income distribution in the world. The richest 10% of Brazilians hold 51.3% of the country’s wealth. The poorest 20% have just 2.1%.

“At least here, we are workers,” says Maria Geralda de Souza, Manoel Souza’s wife, boiling pequi nuts in an old Texaco motor oil can on a mud stove. A handful of nuts would be her family’s lunch that afternoon.

“Imagine if we left here. It would be worse. We wouldn’t be able to do anything. We’d all starve.”

Luiz Antonio Chaves, a former head of the Montes Claros labor department, says the tiny size of the state agency that monitors slave labor reflects the strong ties among plantation owners, steel producers and the local authorities.

Only nine agents and one car are in charge of inspecting labor abuses in the 50 municipalities and 7.5 million acres of eucalyptus plantations in northern Minas Gerais, he says.

Investigating slavery is a thankless task. Most workers are afraid to file complaints, and the targets of impending investigations usually get tipped off by insiders.

“It’s common for plantation owners to move the charcoal camp sites around regularly, to avoid getting caught,” Chaves says.

Chaves was removed from his post in late 1994, he says, for denouncing slave labor in the region. The mayor’s office in Montes Claros declined comment.

Eucalyptus saps the soil of nutrients and can be grown for two or three harvests, so landowners buy and clear vast areas rich in native vegetation to maintain charcoal production.

If the process continues, environmentalists fear that within 20 years northern Minas Gerais could become a big dust bowl.

But talk about the future means very little to Marta Rocha, who curls up to sleep on the dirt floor of her hut with her mother, her sister, Regina, 17, and her brother, Jefferson, 4.

It is midnight. Outside, the wind howls through the eucalyptus trees and whips at the corners of the shack. Marta’s only comfort is the steady breathing of her baby brother, asleep in her arms.

Marta has no illusions, no school to go to tomorrow. She has four hours to sleep. Four hours to stop feeling the burning in her lungs. Four hours to forget the black beans and manioc flour her master didn’t bring that day.