The estimate is that there are between 150-200 thousand undocumented Bolivians living in the city of São Paulo. More than 90% of them work for small factories that are the property of Koreans, Brazilians, and other Bolivians. They work about 18 hours a day, and they get paid $30 cents for each piece they sew. The places where they work, and generally live, are dark, humid, and totally unhealthy. Many people develop respiratory problems or tuberculosis. When the Federal Police free enslaved Brazilians from farms in the Northeast, those workers are free. But when the police find Bolivians in the same situation in São Paulo, the most probable outcome is that they are deported from Brazil. Thus, the immigrants themselves do not want to denounce the situation.

Migration and Slave Work

Luiz Bassegio¹ e Luciane Udovic²

Slave labor is still common in Brazil. This practice has caused the death of many workers due to fatigue or exhaustion in the fields. According to the Pastoral Service of Migrants, migrant workers are the majority of victims of slave work. The impunity of those responsible, the morosity of the judicial processes, and the lack of coordination between the different governmental departments ends up protecting people responsible for the practice of forced labor in Brazil.

The report “Slave Labor in Brazil in the 21st Century,” released in September of 2006 by the International Labor Organization (ILO), brings to light innumerable cases of slave labor. Municipalities in the southern region of Maranhão –such as Açailândia and Bom Jesus das Selvas- for example, are prime exporters of migrant slave labor to the states of Pará and Mato Grosso. Also, many of the principal exploiters of the regime of slavery in the nation are located in the South of the Maranhão- in large farms and coalmines. According to the report, the majority of the laborers are migrant workers, between ages 18 and 40 years. The greatest portion of the migrant population is located in the state of Maranhão. The states of Piauí and Tocantins complete the list of the three principal exporters of migrant slave labor to the state of Pará. Unemployment in these regions where the migrant workers come from is a serious problem, so people need to leave their homes and go in search of work in distant places, such as the agricultural border region of the Amazon, in the states of Pará and Mato Grosso.

Data by the Ministry of Labor show that 80% of the workers found in situations of slavery work are in the cattle farming industry. The vast majority of the cases deal with clearing out land after the trees have been burned, so that the land can serve as pasture. After cattle grazing, the other industries with high incidences of slave labor conditions are soy and cotton plantations, making up 10% of the cases.

The ILO report brings to light information about the quality of life of the workers, such as in the case of Manuel do Maranhão, who experienced the hard conditions of contemporary slave labor:

“The skin of Manuel turned into leather after years of Amazonian sun and the sweat from his face. In the Southeast of Pará, cattle are worth more than people. Manuel ends up serving the cattle, with the job of cleaning the pasture: they have made a watering hole for the cow to drink and for us to drink as well.” He has worked from Sunday to Sunday, but there is no payment, just beans, rice and a blanket to cover himself at night. When it is time to pay the workers, the cats (contractors of migrant laborers at the service of farmers) said that Manuel and the others had “eaten” all of his payment, and that if he wanted money he would have to stay and work more. “They say the law does not enter the farm,” says Manuel, who fled and decided to fight for his rights. Manuel was born in a city of Maranhão on the border with Piauí. He has five sons, the youngest of which is eight years old. But Manuel could not obtain land to create a small farm in his state. “If I had land, I would not have left my home and go to Pará,” he says.

In the last ten years, almost 18 thousand people were liberated from situations of slavery in the country. According to the ILO, there are about 25 thousand people living under conditions of slavery in Brazil.

Today, the methods used to keep workers in slave-like conditions are the same as those used in the 19th Century: a table of debts. The laborers begin to work already in debt for transportation, clothing, food, and even the material needed for work. All these costs are deducted from their salaries. The situation is even worse because the majority of the workers leave their own cities to work very far from home, and they break home ties, so many times they do not even know what city or state they are in. The majority, 91.5% of the freed people, are migrant workers from Maranhão, Piauí, and Tocantins.

The state of Pará is the leader in cases of slave labor. The Pastoral Land Commission shows that from 1995 to 2005, 50% of the cases of slave labor were found in Pará. Of the freed workers, 37.5% came from that region. After Pará, comes the state of Mato Grosso, with 22.3% of the freed workers. This is not accidental, but rather it is precisely in the “new frontier” of agriculture where most cases are found. So, slave labor is aassociated with forest destruction and violence in the countryside. Amongst the top ten municipalities that registered most cases of assassinations in the fields, seven are also on the top list of regions that concentrate enslaved workers.

In São Paulo, sugarcane cutters die of exessive work

In the state of São Paulo, 70 % of sugarcane workers are migrants from the North or the Northeast of Brazil. Migrant workers go to São Paulo in search of work, principally in the sugarcane industry, and have to live in very difficult conditions.

In October 2005, during a public hearing in the city of Ribeirão Preto, migrant worker José Ezequais Souza Barros, 28 years old, revealed his situation: “I worked on the Moreno plantation in the municipality of Luiz Antonio, São Paulo, from 7 am to 4pm. I had hardly 30 minutes of break for lunch. I broke my shoulder cutting sugarcane, and I have been unable to work for two months. I used to cut 10 tons of sugarcane each day for the price of R$1.30. The bad living conditions, he dust and the heat, the lack of food, give an idea why the sugarcane workers are dying.”

The work of cutting sugarcane is not regulated. There is not a single means for determining production per capita, to the extent that not even the workers know for sure how many tons they cut per day. The workers are deceived. It used to be thought that, on average, in one day’s work, a workers would cut about 10 tons of sugarcane. However, upon installing a computer to count the production, it was actually 20 tons.

The cane cutters are, in the most part, migrants between 18 and 40 years old, from the states of Bahia, Pernambuco, Minas Gerais, Maranhão, and Paraíba. In the last two years, 17 workers in the São Paulo sugarcane industry have died of excessive work.

The Slave Victims of Sewing

It’s estimated that there are between 150 thousand and 200 thousand undocumented Bolivians in the city of São Paulo. The majority, more than 90%, work for small factories that are the property of Koreans, Brazilians, and other Bolivians. They work about 18 hours a day, and they get paid $30 cents per piece they sew.  The places where they work, and generally live, are dark, humid, and totally unhealthy. Many people develop respiratory problems or tuberculosis.

When the Federal Police free enslaved Brazilians from farms in the Northeast, those workers are free. But when the police find Bolivians in the same situation in São Paulo, the most probable outcome is that they are expelled from Brazil.  Thus, the immigrants themselves do not want to denounce the situation of slavery.

The cook Imaculada (fictional name), 21 years old, has been living for four years in Brazil.  She says that she decided to pay by the “salvo-conduto” (safe-conduct), because the consulate told her that only this way would she be able to request a Brazilian citizenship for her daughters both born here, one who is 4 years old and the other who is 3 months old.  She lost all her documents in an assault, but she has a birth certificate sent by relatives.  Her situation is precarious.  According to a press representative of the Federal Police, the “salvo-conduto” serves as an identification, but it does not help in any way for Imaculada to stay in Brazil or register her daughters. Her only chance is that the process of expulsion takes long enough that the daughters might be recognized as Brazilian citizens, which takes about two years and would give Imaculada the right to residency. But she also hopes for an amnesty from the government for undocumented immigrants.

Universal citizenship and human rights: Another world is possible

The presence of thousands of immigrants in practically all nations demands a reflection about this theme. In terms of immigration, Latin American integration, in its current model, is not enough to respond to the interests of our people. We don’t want an integration that permits financial capital to move freely throughout our continent, without permitting the most impoverished and excluded people to do the same. We don’t want an integration oriented towards opening our economies only to large corporations. We want an integration based on equality, participation, plurality, and solidarity.

Representatives of 1,193 organizations from 84 countries debated this issue during the Second World Social Forum on Migration, in Rivas Vaciamadrid (Spain), from the 22nd to the 24th of June, 2006. The “Declaration of Rivas” stated:

“Migration is a process that happens in the context of economic globalization.  It’s an economic, political, cultural, and social process related directly to the effects of neoliberal policies worldwide. All people who arrive to a new place should have all the rights inherent to the conditions of citizens, including the right to vote.”

1 Luiz Bassegio is National Secretary of the Pastoral Service of Migrants