Brazilian Leader Introduces Program to End Slave Labor

www.nytimes.com By LARRY ROHTER

BRASÍLIA, March 13 — Attacking one of Brazil's most shameful but deeply rooted social problems, the country's new left-wing government has announced a sweeping initiative intended to eliminate slave labor.

The plan calls for stepping up police raids on ranches, logging operations and mines that lure poor and often illiterate peasants into servitude, as well as heavier fines and criminal penalties for offenders.

But the government said it would also seek passage of a constitutional amendment that would allow the seizure of businesses and properties found to employ slave labor and to turn those assets over to the former slaves to run.

"Much more than a law, we need determination and the political will of the state to eradicate slave labor in our country," President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former labor leader, said in announcing the project on Tuesday. "Only in this way can we earn the right to walk in the world with head held high."

The Roman Catholic Church estimates that at any given moment at least 25,000 Brazilian workers are held in debt slavery, most of them in remote areas of the Amazon jungle. Typically, recruiters go to poor rural areas and guarantee peasants good wages and benefits, but renege on those pledges once the laborer has arrived at the jungle workplace and is guarded by gunmen.

"Slavery remains a severe social and economic problem in this country, the result of pitiful people without food or land being duped by false promises and of government policies that have not made the eradication of servitude a priority," said Eduardo Varandas, a federal prosecutor who has brought slavery charges against several ranchers. "The worker ends up stuck with financial obligations he can't ever repay and becomes a slave of his own debt."

Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish chattel slavery, in 1888, and forced labor continued to be common in rural areas in modern times. But government authorities, labor unions and antislavery groups agree that the problem has intensified in recent years as a result of growing economic pressure to develop the Amazon's vast agricultural frontier.

In 1995, at the beginning of his first term of office, Mr. da Silva's predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, announced "a national effort to truly comply with the law" that had abolished slavery here. His government created an enforcement squad that was empowered to punish those who recruit Brazilians into slavery, and between 1995 and 2002 it freed more than 5,000 enslaved workers.

But government inspectors complained that their efforts were hampered by weaknesses in Brazil's legal code. While they have the authority to force employers to pay back wages to enslaved workers, criminal charges have to be referred to the court system, where they are often ignored by apathetic prosecutors or shelved by judges sympathetic to business interests.

In some cases, inspectors have raided the same ranch many times, freeing workers, only to return and find that others have been enslaved. The government intends to discourage that behavior by publishing a list of offenders, who will be denied access to any form of government loans, credits, subsidies or tax benefits, and by prohibiting those found guilty from appealing their convictions while out on bail.

"This is not to combat slavery, because that has already been tried," Nilmário Miranda, the government's human rights secretary, told reporters here. "What we are going to do is do away with slave labor by the end of this government's term of office," in 2006.

The program also calls for a sharp increase in the number of inspectors. The Ministry of Labor says that this year it will hire and train more than 650 new inspectors, who will have good salaries and the untrammeled authority to enforce the law.

In the past, "people have known that they can bribe a labor inspector or a police officer, or a mayor or alderman or member of Congress," Mr. da Silva said. "I want it to be known that those days are over."