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Brazil: slavery and debt bondage in the Amazon
a book review by W. E. Gutman

Brazil is not all Sugar Loaf, Carnival, the samba, Carmen Miranda balancing a bowl of fruit salad on her head and scantily thong-clad sirens gracing the Copacabana beaches. There is a darker, more sinister face to South America’s largest nation that tourist and investment guides conveniently omit. 

Emblematic of Brazil’s troubling contradictions is the murder last year of American nun and rain forest defender Dorothy Stang, 73, on a muddy road deep in the heart of Brazil’s Amazon rain forest. The victim of a contract killing --- the killer had been paid $25,000 --- Stang spent the last 30 years of her life defending poor settlers in the rain forest.

A hastily convened Brazilian Senate commission grudgingly conceded that the killing was part of a wider conspiracy involving ranchers, many of whom are caught up in corruption and land-related violence that in the past 10 years has claimed 1,000 lives. Only eight killers were ever convicted. 

Brazil has also earned a reputation as a hub of human trafficking. Worldwide, the illegal trade in people is surpassed only by drug and arms trafficking. In the 500 years since the conquest of Brazil, Amazonia has proved a fertile field for slavery. Distance and isolation play their part, together with ingrained violence and the lawless culture of the frontier. Slavery International estimates that thousands of Brazilian men, women and children are caught in the chains of slavery, forced to work at the most degrading jobs in the most degrading conditions, subjected to violence and deprived of the most fundamental of rights: the freedom to come and go.

“It’s a dirty, undercover business thriving on secrecy and brute force,” says Binka Le Breton, author of Trapped: Modern-day Slavery in the Brazilian Amazon, a book that chronicles an ongoing story of exploitation, bondage and violence. A journey into the heart of darkness, it sheds a bright and unsettling light on the countless men and women who disappear into the deep forest where cattle live better than those who tend them, and where the only law is that of the gun. The author tells many stories of unimaginable cruelty, of extraordinary courage, of humiliation and endurance, stories to make one both ashamed and proud to be human. In huge ranches, rubber tree plantations, gold and iron ore mines and charcoal pits deep in the Amazon, migrant workers are enmeshed in a web of debt, deceit, and cruelty, caught up in an illegal but rampant trade in humans.

Le Breton, a concert pianist who abandoned the keyboard in favor of the Brazilian rain forest in 1989, explores the lives of these victims of debt slavery, and lets them tell their stories in their own words All have beeen terrorized. Most will be physically isolated and separated from their network of family and friends. Some will be beaten, humiliated, sexually abused. And all will be threatened with physical and/or psychological violence.  Worst of all, they will be deprived of their liberty. Many will lose contact with their families and hometowns. Some will even forget their own names. Le Breton also talks with those who benefit from this commerce, as well as those fighting against it, and offers suggestions on how this injustice can be consigned to history

With the dawning of the 21st century, the situation of rural violence in the Amazon remains unresolved. Land conflicts continue in a cycle of increasing tension whereby the landless routinely occupy unused land, are summarily evicted, reoccupy (or invade), and are evicted anew. Police participation in evictions is often accompanied by levels of violence sternly prohibited by the constitution. Small town politicians indulge in a frenzy of fraud, diverting government funds destined for health, education and roads into foreign bank accounts. Non-governmental organizations, at the peril of their volunteers’ lives, continue to expose the problem. But it’s all for naught in a nation where politics drives justice, where might speaks loudest, where generations of peaceful native minorities are being denied their past and stripped of a future.

Fact has always been stranger than fantasy. For those unafraid to take a whiff of myth-busting truth and fix their gaze on the starkness of reality, the vook is a vivid and highly readable saga by a resident of Brazil who set off by bus and motorbike to trace for herself the links in this hidden trade and expose them to the world. This work is sure to provide relief from the synthetic world of “reality TV,” pulp fiction, controlled news coverage and opinions saturated with pretense and distortions.

Trapped: Modern-day Slavery in the Brazilian Amazon (256 pages, $19.95), is available from Kumarian Press, 1294 Blue Hills Ave., Bloomfield, CT 06002, by phone at (800) 289-2664 or Fax (820) 243-2867, or by logging on to http://www.kpbooks.com.

W. E. Gutman is a veteran journalist on assignment in Central America since 1991. He lives in southern California.

Also in this section:
Bollywood romance
New Orleans Night at the Gazebo
Cool Internet sites
Review, Books