Logging activity inside indigenous land Cachoeira Seca, in the state of Pará (Photo: Lunaé Parracho/Repórter Brasil)

A rookie in the trade of cutting down trees, João* asked himself how life led him to this “terribly wrong” way to make ends meet. Camped out in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest in the state of Pará, 90 kilometers from the Trans-Amazonian Highway, João regretted taking the job, the first to come along in months.

He and his colleagues had finished cutting down the first of many massaranduba trees for the day when they heard the roar of cars. “Come on, let’s hide in the forest,” João heard from one of his more experienced colleagues, and followed. Peering through the leaves, they saw armed men appear clad in vests marked “Federal.”

“Oh God, get me out of here. Don’t let me die,” João pleaded as he ran further into the woods. His fear was rooted in stories told by his more-experienced colleagues, tales of how state authorities handle workers like him: with repression, prison and even physical violence.

After he was found by the inspectors, João said the idea of the state being there to protect him never crossed his mind. But this was, in fact, the goal of the team led by Ministry of Labor auditor José Marcelino and comprised of representatives of the Ministério Público do Trabalho (an independent branch of the Labor Justice Department), the Federal Public Defender’s Office and escorted by the Federal Highway Police. A team of journalists from Repórter Brasil also followed the team and interviewed the workers.

The operation was trying out a new strategy for bringing the law to the frontlines of rainforest destruction. Instead of treating workers as enemies, the idea was to recognize them as victims, even as possible allies in the fight against illegal logging.

When the group was finally found, João and his colleagues gave lengthy depositions, helping authorities understand how timber extraction works and unveiling myriad possible crimes committed by local sawmill owners. Because of the risks to their lives workers endured on the job and the degrading conditions in which they lived, the inspectors rescued the workers and framed the case as slave labor, in accordance with the Brazilian penal code.

João talked about how he would work from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., off the books and without protective equipment. Even though logging is a risky activity, with one of the highest death and amputation rates in Brazil, neither guidance nor minimal protection was given. He described fatal accidents as banal events.

“There was this guy who did the same thing as me. He died. He got distracted while rolling up a cigarette. The tree fell off the truck and on top of him. He ended up in the cemetery,” João said.

Neither first aid nor medicine waited back at the communal tent. Just a rifle for protection and hunting. As well as an old motorbike to take the workers to the city, more than 100 kilometers on a dirt road away, in case of an animal attack or an accident. But workers did not count on the possibility of being rescued.

“There are no accidents over there, only death,” João said. “If you mess up, you’re all done for.”

João is a weathered worker with a long resume at some of the toughest jobs available for migrants like him.” He left a poor region in the northeast of Brazil still young and cut his teeth in construction sites and coal mines, where his lunges hurt when he coughed. Even so, he considered logging as his worst labor experience so far.

In the blue-tinged shadows of the tent, the workers had hung up their colored hammocks and backpacks with their belongings. Without walls and just a dirt floor, there was nothing kept out the cold morning wind or visiting insects and venomous snakes.

One of the workers who was rescued in the operation against slave labor (Photo: Lunaé Parracho/Repórter Brasil)

“Thank God everyone was already in their hammocks,” João said. “Then one of the men turned on their flashlight. There was a huge snake there, more than two meters long, thick. This guy grabbed a piece of wood and struck it on top, killing it.” Jaguars also occur in the area, with reporters observing tracks on the ground near camps.

With a nervous laugh, the group’s cook said she wasn’t scared and didn’t have anything to complain about. She described how she prepared meals on two camp stoves improvised from 18-liter cans. Rice, beans, and spaghetti were the most common meals, with occasional pieces of sun-dried beef that were hung to dry from a clothesline at the camp and frequently visited by flies. The camp water came from the city in barrels and, according to worker testimony, always had a little “grime on the bottom.”

The camp’s washtub was shielded by an impromptu partition made from palm leaves and a black tarp. The cook took her bath when the workers were in the forest. For all other necessities, the forest was the only bathroom.

Ministry of Labor raids have revealed that it is common for vulnerable workers in Brazil to experience serious labor violations, such as the ones described above. Based on the conditions at the camp, inspectors framed the case as slavery-like conditions in accordance with Brazilian legislation.

Ultimately, the Ministry of Labor found the sawmill company that operated the site, M.A. de Sousa Madeireira, responsible for the criminal conditions in which its employees worked and lived. However, in his dusty office in Uruará, company owner Manoel Araújo de Sousa asserted he was not responsible for the workers. He said he was aware of the extraction of wood, but he had nothing to do with the site’s operation since it was a self-directed effort by one of his former employees. He did admit, however, that he kept a portion of the harvested wood and that he was the “owner” of the land where they were working.

As proof that he could extract wood from the location, Araújo de Sousa claims to have a purchase contract, with no registered title or authorization for extracting timber.

As part of its penalty, M.A. de Sousa Madeireira had pay workers’ rights fees amounting to 31,000 reais ($9,950). The sawmill’s attorney declared her disagreement with the ruling holding the company responsible for the labor violations. Araújo de Sousa and his brother are allegedly working to raise the capital.

Crimes against the forest, workers and communities

Manoel de Sousa’s sawmill is a small fish in a sea of illegal activity operating in the region. The city of Uruará comprises one of the largest centers of expansion in the Amazon’s logging industry – and government investigations indicate illegal activities are growing more explicit.

Trucks without license plates carrying away loads of large native tree trunks are commonly seen entering the city by way of the Trans-Amazonian Highway.

According to data from the Ministry of Labor and Pastoral Land Commission, 931 workers were rescued from slave labor conditions while harvesting trees from 2003 to 2016. A relationship between employment practices analogous to slave labor and some illegal logging operations in the Amazon was uncovered by a research led by the Integrated Action Network for Fighting Slavery. The study  indicates that the conditions endured by João and his colleagues may affect many workers in the sector.

Worker talks to inspectors of the Labor Ministry (Photo: Lunaé Parracho/Repórter Brasil)

Places like the logging camp from which João was rescued often do not appear on maps that track deforestation. This is because they engage in selective logging that causes changes in canopy coverage that aren’t large enough to be detected remotely. This illegal practice has been growing in the past few years, specifically because it outwits satellite monitoring, as shown by several studies conducted by Greenpeace and Instituto Socioambiental (socioenvironmental institute (ISA)).

The illegal logging industry also takes specific measures to ensure the timber they extract isn’t traced back to where it was harvested. Previous investigations revealed that after the most market-valuable trees are cut down, the timber is taken to sawmills on trucks without license plates. At the sawmill, the illegal origin is “laundered” with handling documents that change the harvest location to legal sites.

In an area south of the Trans-Amazonian Highway, days before the operation that uncovered João and his colleagues, the same rescue team discovered small roads opened up by loggers within the Cachoeira Seca Indigenous Territory, where the Arara community lives. An indigenous group only recently contacted by the outside world, the Arara report hearing chainsaws and are avoiding hunting in portions of their land for fear of encountering loggers.

Along the makeshift logging roads within the indigenous territory, the inspectors and reporters saw logs piled up, swaths of scorched earth and tents just like the one João slept in – but they failed to locate any workers. When they came across someone on a motorbike going down the road, the inspectors were informed that they should give up in their search; the team’s presence had been made known through a radio system used by the loggers to communicate.

Place where the meals were cooked by the loggers inside indigenous land of Cahoeira Seca (Photo: Lunaé Parracho/Repórter Brasil)

The practice of worker-exploitation in the illegal logging industry appears widespread. While the inspectors were processing João and his colleagues, the team discovered another case and rescued seven more workers cutting down trees in slave labor-analogous conditions. This time, the employer was Eudemberto Sampaio de Souza (no relation to Manoel Araújo de Sousa), owner of Betel sawmill, which was found responsible for labor crimes and required to pay compensation to its workers up to 50.000 reais ($15,800).

Sampaio de Souza, however, placed the blame squarely on the workers.

“We ask for the documents for each supposed employee,” he told Reporter Brasil. “They say that they’ve lost them, or don’t have them, or will se about it later. You ask for their name, they give you a nickname. Plenty are boozehounds, many are drug addicts. They are people who come out of states like Mato Grosso, Maranhão, Bahia, and Pernambuco. Nobody knows their story, nobody knows their past. Many times, by taking them out to work, it’s saving their lives.”

Satellite data from the Brazilian government show this area of Pará lost nearly 400,000 hectares of tree cover between 2001 and 2015. Small logging camps like that from which João and his colleagues add to this toll – but often log too selectively to show up via satellite monitoring.

Read the other reports:
Suppliers of Lowe’s in the US and Walmart  in Brazil linked to slave labor in the Amazon
Investigation reveals slave labor conditions in Brazil’s timber industry
Current regulations unable to control trade in products from slave labor, expert says

“Really scared”

Days later, still more workers showed up at the hotel where the labor inspectors were staying. This time, the reports were heavier, mentioning death threats and the hiring of hit men to intimidate workers.

“We came here, but we are scared. Really scared,” said one of the men who knocked on the inspectors’ hotel door. His face ticked nervously as he talked about how his boss hired a gunman after he tried to collect his payment.

“If the end of the month comes and a lot is owed, they will send someone out to kill you. I’ve seen that happen. It was inside the city itself. He came to collect and they shot him. There’s plenty more stories like that.”

Other workers also noted not being paid for the job, and then being threatened when attempting to collect upon what they were owed.

“It’s better to pay three thousand for a gunman than five or six thousand to an employee,” said another man, quoting his boss.

The entities that reportedly hired gunmen are currently under investigation, and their names could not be released at the time of publication in the interest of the investigation and for the safety of those involved.

While the definition of slave labor in Brazil extends beyond lack of payment, this group of workers only recognized their situation when they weren’t paid. According to one of the men, “even today slavery hasn’t ended. It just modernized itself. Back in the day you would get beaten, nowadays you don’t. But you don’t get anything for all of your work.”

Another worker interviewed also alleged corruption of local authorities has had a role to play in illegal logging activities.

“The military police here is dangerous,” said one of the men. “They go to his sawmill and grab money, they grab wood, both the military and civil police. If any one of us turns one of them in to the police, it’s suicide.”

The workers also spoke of the total isolation of the logging camps and the impossibility of leaving them.

“On election day [2016 municipal elections], we spent five days out in the woods without food,” said one of the men who worked as a tractor driver. “They didn’t come out to get us to go vote, nobody came out.”

Another worker claims his employer forced him to remain on-site, and didn’t allow communication from the camp to the outside world.

“There isn’t even a way to go out and come back, because the boss won’t allow it. If you don’t stay in the forest for thirty days you lose the job. Only the boss will come over and pass along messages, see how things are. We only receive news,” said the man who has young children in the city of Uruará.

Brazilian Federal Highway Police investigates truck that was carrying illegal logs to sawmills in the city of Uruará (Photo: Lunaé Parracho/Repórter Brasil)

These complaints and the conditions discovered by investigations of logging camps have led to an ongoing investigation into slave labor in the logging sector. Ministry of Labor prosecuting attorney Allan Bruno, who was also part of the operation, received the cases and sent them along to the federal attorney general’s office, which is investigating the possible crimes of withholding salary, threatening lives, as well as for environmental, landholding, and tax issues.

Auditor José Marcelino says labor inspectors are just beginning to understand how the illegal logging industry operates in the region. However, what is known is that it is a trade full of economic risk.

“Just cutting down the trees does not guarantee selling the wood,” Marcelino said. “And, since the entrepreneur doesn’t have adequate cash flow, he doesn’t meet the costs of paying the workers what they have the right to.”

Labor inspector, Marcelino (first to the left) and the rest of the group talking to one of the workers (Photo: Lunaé Parracho/Repórter Brasil)

This economic risk is coupled for the workers, who may have no choice but to resume working for these illegal operations. Even after receiving his compensation, João said he would go back into the woods, under the same conditions, if he could not arrange for other work in the following months.

Report part of a special feature: Wood and Slavery (“Profissão Madeireiro” english version)

*The names of the workers have been changed in an effort to avoid further violence as interviewees remain at risk.

O post Slave labor in the Amazon: risking lives to cut down the rainforest apareceu primeiro em Repórter Brasil.

Products derived from timber extracted by workers living in conditions analogous to slave labor in Brazil are connected to a complex business network linked to the U.S. market – possibly reaching the shelves of large retailers and being used in renovation of landmarks – according to a new investigation conducted by Repórter Brasil. After purchasing from suppliers held liable for that crime by the Brazilian government, local traders exported timber to companies like USFloors, which supplies the retail chain Lowe’s, as well as Timber Holdings, which supplied timber for construction projects at Central Park and Brooklyn Bridge in New York.

The commercial network linking retailers to sawmill companies was identified by a three-month investigation and confirmed by the companies. The wood products were mixed at Brazilian intermediaries, so the investigation was unable to track the exact destination of each piece of wood. However, its findings reveal that large retail and construction groups are sourcing the product from companies whose supply chains are contaminated by the alleged use of criminal practices, with the conditions of workers rescued from sawmill sites aligning with slave labor practices as defined by Brazilian law.

New York City’s iconic Brooklyn Bridge was recently renovated using wood from sources linked to slave labor. Photo by Tiago Fioreze via Wikimedia Commons (CC 3.0)

Read the other reports:
Investigation reveals slave labor conditions in Brazil’s timber industry
Slave labor in the Amazon: risking lives to cut down the rainforest
Current regulations unable to control trade in products from slave labor, expert says

Bonardi da Amazônia

The cases investigated by Repórter Brasil began at sawmill companies based in the state of Pará – an important hub for the timber industry in the Brazilian Amazon. One of them is Bonardi da Amazônia, a sawmill company that recruited nine people who were rescued from conditions analogous to slave labor exploitation in October 2012. The workers were located by the Brazilian Ministry of Labor and Bonardi da Amazônia was formally held responsible for the crime.

The investigation found that workers slept in shacks in the forest at night, in makeshift facilities made of logs removed from the forest itself and covered with tarps, 110 kilometers (over 68 miles) from the nearest town. There were no walls to protect them from the dangers of the forest such as snakes, scorpions and even jaguars. They bathed and washed their clothes in a stream shared with local animals; there was no bathroom. The workers had no formal contracts and told investigators they were paid based on their productivity.

Because of the degrading accommodation and hygiene conditions found by Labor Ministry inspectors, Bonardi da Amazônia was held responsible for using slave labor in accordance with the conditions for that crime outlined in the Brazilian Criminal Code.

Between August 2012 – two months before the crime was discovered – and July 2015, Repórter Brasil found Bonardi supplied timber to Tradelink Madeiras, a company belonging to the London-based Tradelink Group. One of the companies that buys wood products from Tradelink is USFloors – a leading floor manufacturer for the North American market. Tradelink confirmed the commercial relationship by email and, in reply to Repórter Brasil, stated that field inspections were conducted at this supplier but no labor irregularities were found at Bonardi da Amazônia in June 2012. That is, the Bonardi site was visited by Tradelink employees four months before criminal activity was uncovered by labor inspectors.

In justification of its business dealings with a sawmill held responsible for slave labor practices, Tradelink maintains that Bonardi pledged to change its labor conditions. According to Tradelink, the decision to continue purchasing from Bonardi was based on an agreement the company signed with the Ministério Público do Trabalho – an independent branch of Justice in Brazil (see Tradelink’s response).

When contacted by Repórter Brasil, Bonardi asserted that it met all authorities’ requirements (see Bonardi’s response).

Bonardi remained a supplier for Tradelink until July 2015, even after the sawmill was included in the government’s “transparency list” in March of that year. The list discloses the names of companies caught by the federal government engaging in working conditions analogous to slave labor. Companies are included on the list after the Ministry of Labor completes an administrative procedure on the results of inspections, which guarantees the right of defense to those held responsible.

The “transparency list” is used by several companies that have formally committed to fighting slavery in their supply chains. It was disclosed by the Ministry of Labor at the request of Repórter Brasil and the Institute of the National Pact for the Eradication of Slave Labor (Inpacto) through the Access to Information Act (see its latest update here).

USFloors and Lowe’s

Tradelink Madeiras’ products have international reach. In 2015, one of its clients in the United States was wood flooring producer USFloors. Its products have been sold by the retailer chain Lowe’s – the second-largest construction material chain in the U.S. Lowe’s has more than 1,700 stores in the country and also operates in Mexico and Canada.

USFloors confirmed by email that the timber purchased from Tradelink was subsequently sold to Lowe’s. However, both USFloors and Tradelink claim that this specific material did not come from Bonardi. In its response to Repórter Brasil, Tradelink states that the timber sold to USFloors came from a different sawmill. A USFloors representative who responded to Repórter Brasil stood behind Tradelink.

“I personally went to Tradelink factory in Brazil and we felt that among other factories we visited, Tradelink was the only company with adequate procedures for due diligence to ensure compliance with local and international regulations,” said Philippe Erramuzpe, chief operating officer of USFloors. He added that all of the company’s suppliers are required to “certify that the material is not harvested in violation of any local laws or requirements” (see USFloors’ full statement).

Repórter Brasil tried to contact Lowe’s by telephone and email several times, but the company did not respond.

Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park

Another regular client of Bonardi da Amazônia, from 2012 to the present day, is Ronardi Comercial Exportadora de Madeiras, a Brazilian trading company based in the state of Paraná. Its clients include U.S. companies such as Timber Holdings USA, a wood flooring manufacturer that has supplied raw material for major urban projects such as the Atlantic City Boardwalk in New Jersey, restoration of the Brooklyn Bridge, and construction projects in Central Park.

Many of these projects include the use of the Brazilian ipê, or Brazilian walnut (Handroanthus spp). With its colorful canopy, this tree stands out in the forest. But with a high value in the market, the ipê is ever more difficult to find in Brazil. It is the same type of timber that Timber Holdings purchased from Ronardi in 2016, and which Ronardi has also purchased from Bonardi.

In a statement obtained by Repórter Brasil, Ronardi stated it “vehemently repudiates any violation of labor laws.” The company says it requested clarification from Bonardi on the issue and reproduced the company’s statement in which Bonardi mentions to have improved working conditions and has no pending labor issues. (See Bonardi’s and Ronardi’s full statements).

Repórter Brasil also contacted Timber Holdings. In its first response, sent by email, the company stated it purchased two containers of ipê flooring with papers saying that the timber came from Bonardi da Amazônia. In a later email, however, the company changed its response, stating that the timber acquired from Ronardi came from other sawmills.

“Our company is completely against any kind of slave labor and illegal timber trade, and it should be noted that Timber Holdings was one of the first companies in the world to invest in an outsourced audit for every shipment of timber imported from Brazil,” Timber Holdings said in its statement. According to the U.S.-based importer, no shipment of timber is approved if a company with which it is dealing is listed on the Brazilian government’s “transparency list.” Timber Holdings stated it conforms to this standard at every stage of the supply chain, from the source to the direct seller. (See Timber Holding USA’s response to Repórter Brasil).

Tramontina and Walmart

Another supply chain investigated by Repórter Brasil revealed links between slave labor exploitation and Tramontina, one of the largest manufacturers of kitchen utensils in Brazil. The group’s products are sold to the nation’s top retailers, including Brazilian Walmart stores.

The case begins with Madeireira Iller, a company held liable for using practices analogous to slave labor in December 2012. The Brazilian Ministry of Labor rescued 31 people who worked in the processing, cutting and transportation of native wood for the company, in the city of Santarém, Pará.

Workers were living in similar conditions as those in the Bonardi case and most other cases linked to slave labor in the industry: tarp or straw shacks with no walls, meals prepared below minimum hygiene standards, no toilet, and water taken from the local stream.

Although they worked in an occupation in which the risk of accidents is high, Madeireira Iller workers were not wearing protective equipment at the time of their rescue, had no formal contracts, and their earnings were based off their productivity. They were not guaranteed the legal minimum wage – it all depended on the number of trees they harvested.

According to the Ministry of Labor, the company’s owner told 23 of the people working at the facility to flee and hide from inspectors, allegedly to avoid being caught committing violations. The inspectors’ account states the workers were forced to hide in the forest for five days.

Three years after the inspection, in 2015, Madeireira Iller was charged with environmental crimes and the company’s owners arrested. The government operation “Clean Wood” dismantled an operation allegedly engaging in illegal logging and land grabbing. Madeireira Iller was fined over $578,000 for having timber stored without proof of legal origin as well as for entering false information in the official forest control systems.

Repórter Brasil contacted Írio Luiz Orth, a member of the family that owns Madeireira Iller. According to labor inspectors, he was the primary representative in charge of the company’s administration when the slave labor case took place. However, Orth declined the request for an interview.

As with Tradelink and Bonardi, Tramontina’s press office stated that consultants personally assessed the supplier’s labor conditions in 2012 – the same year in which slave labor was found by the Ministry of Labor. The company reports that an internal evaluation showed a reality that is quite different from the one observed by federal inspectors: “During visits by Tramontina’s staff, it was possible to see the existence of eating facilities, accommodations, uniforms and personal protective equipment. In case there were workers in other places, the company was not aware of it,” the company said in a statement issued to Repórter Brasil.

Madeireira Iller continued supplying Tramontina until June 2015, according to Repórter Brasil’s investigation. The supplier was excluded only after it was found that it “probably processed timber from some legal projects and from other projects of dubious origin,” according to Tramontina’s statement.

Three months before that, however, Madeireira Iller had been included in the government’s slave labor “transparency list.”

When asked by Repórter Brasil if Tramontina used the “transparency list” when monitoring its suppliers, the company claimed that it does.

“We have always used it and will continue to use it,” said a company representative. Tramontina stated that from 2016 on, it started updating the records it provides for the de-accreditation of suppliers found to be involved in slave labor practices and environmental crimes every three months instead of the previously used six-month period.

Walmart, as well as two other retail groups in Brazil – Carrefour and Pão de Açúcar – have also pledged to restrict their business with companies included in the “transparency list.” They are signatories of the Brazilian Pact to Eradicate Slave Labor, a multistakeholder initiative created 12 years ago advocating this kind of restriction. As the three of them are all Tramontina clients, Repórter Brasil asked for their stance on the case. Carrefour says it rejects any form of labor similar to slavery or any practices that are not in accordance with environmental legislation. Walmart and Pão de Açúcar underscored that Tramontina had already taken steps to exclude Madeireira Iller from its supply chain. (Read the full statements from Tramontina, Carrefour, Pão de Açúcar and Walmart.)

Report part of a special feature: Wood and Slavery (“Profissão Madeireiro” english version)

Note from Repórter Brasil (March 18th): The link to the most recent version of the “Transparency List” was updated in March 18th.

O post Suppliers of Lowe’s in the US and Walmart in Brazil linked to slave labor in the Amazon apareceu primeiro em Repórter Brasil.

Even before the end of the first half of 2017, three major tragedies in rural Brazil had left their mark in the country’s history. In the state of Mato Grosso in April, nine agricultural workers were killed with particular cruelty. In May, an attack on the Gamela indigenous people, in the state of Maranhão, left two victims with severed hands, five with bullet wounds and another fifteen injured. The third case, also in May but in the state of Pará, was a violent police operation that resulted in the killing of ten landless laborers. “The police turned up shooting,” said witnesses who managed to escape.

The three cases occurred within the context of land disputes, but this is not the only link between them. Repórter Brasil visited all three sites to investigate the attacks and discovered another common trait that is even more alarming: the foreboding tone. In each case, there were signs that the violence was waiting to happen. Some of the victims asked for help from the authorities before the crimes were committed. The survivors are still asking. In the cemetery in Mato Grosso, where five of the workers were buried, the gravedigger dug extra graves in preparation for the next massacre.

The cruelty of the attacks is shocking, but not surprising for anyone who has accompanied the escalation of rural violence.

To keep track of this situation, we have launched a multimedia special called Rural War. In it, we investigate the motivations for the attacks, the context in which the crimes have proliferated, the stories behind the numbers and the links between this violence and the productive sectors that supply the big cities of Brazil and the world. The series, illustrated in comic book language, also mixes photos, videos, audio and infographics within the reporting.

The year 2016 has already gone down in recent history as the one registering the highest number of deaths caused by rural disputes of the past 13 years. There were 61 fatal victims. The brutality of the conflicts in the first half of this year suggests that 2017 could be even worse. “We are seeing in rural areas of Brazil an escalation of the conflict that has always been present in the history of the country,” said Jurema Werneck, executive director of Amnesty International in Brazil.

Nearly a million people were involved in more than 1,500 conflicts over land, water or labor, according to the report Rural Conflicts published by the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission (CPT). This is the highest figure in Brazil since 1985 and is equivalent to the number of Syrians who are internally displaced due to the ongoing civil war.

Part of the blame for the escalation of violence is the lack of action by the State. Or worse: the actions that only strengthen one side of the dispute, the rural landowners.

In December 2016, in the midst of the escalation in violence, the government of President Michel Temer abolished the National Agrarian Ombudsman, the only federal agency responsible for mediating rural conflicts. After protests from social movements, the agency was recreated under a new administration. In 2017, legislation was proposed by the agribusiness caucus in Congress proposing that agricultural laborers could be paid in just food or accommodation.

While violence is also on the rise against indigenous and traditional peoples, measures are being debated in Brasília to make changes that weaken these populations. In January, the Ministry of Justice created a group that gives powers to government representatives outside the National Indian Foundation (Funai) to determine the limits and deny recognition of indigenous lands. Until this point, the Ministry had followed the technical guidance of Funai. In March, the new Minister of Justice Osmar Serraglio, who has close ties to agribusiness, declared “land doesn’t fill people’s bellies” in an interview on the indigenous situation with the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper. Serraglio later stood down as minister in May.

Set up in late 2016, the Congressional Inquiry Commission on Funai and the Colonization Land Reform Agency (Incra) released its final report in May of this year. The document recommended the indictment of more than 90 people, including anthropologists, indigenous representatives and even federal prosecutors who work on the defense of the rights of indigenous peoples and agricultural laborers.

Brazil is the world leader in murders of environmental activists, according to the NGO Global Witness, which for more than two decades has been studying the links between natural resource exploration and conflicts, among other things. Between 2002 and 2013, the NGO documented 448 killings of Brazilian defenders. The CPT report portrayed the same situation. The number of cases of violence against people jumped from 615 to 1,079 between 2007 and 2016. Cases of criminalization rose 185%. “They have institutionalized the struggle for rights as a crime in Brazil, as if people who protest are criminals,” said Cesar. “When the state is more repressive, it grants a license for violence and legitimizes paramilitary actions,” he said.

The brutality of the violence in rural Brazil was addressed in the United Nations in May 2017. “We are concerned about the increase in attacks in Brazil against human rights defenders. The State needs to deal with  the impunity,” said Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The statement was made a week before Brazil was denounced in Geneva for its social policies in recent years. The UN adopted a strategy of “naming and shaming” by focusing on the violations committed in the country. In this case, it focused on indigenous rights, which are now facing the largest offensive since the military dictatorship. In June, special rapporteurs from the UN and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights declared that “the rights of indigenous peoples and environmental rights are under attack in Brazil”. The response of the Brazilian government, which is already weak internationally, was worse than the analysts could have predicted. In a press release, the Ministry of Foreign Relations called the statements of the rapporteurs “unfounded”.

“The situation is catastrophic,” said Márcio Meira, former president of Funai. “The government is committing atrocities with rights that have been secured at great cost since 1988.” In Meira’s opinion, indigenous peoples are always the first to feel big changes. “This means that, later, the tragedies will befall other vulnerable groups, such as agricultural workers.”

​According to Werneck, of Amnesty International, the solutions are not simple, but they do exist. She cited the Constitution of 1988, which established a time frame for the demarcation of indigenous lands. “Look how much time has gone by and nothing has come of this commitment by Brazilian society and obligation of the State. The land demarcation process is too slow and it is also being set back by endless legal appeals,” she said.

Combating impunity in rural conflicts is also a priority to stop the loss of life. According to data from Amnesty International, thirty of the forty municipalities in southern Pará have an impunity rate of 100% when it comes to murders of agricultural laborers over the past 43 years. “We need to stop the threats and insecurities, put an end to the impunity for crimes related to disputes over land and natural resources, and make progress on the land demarcation and titling processes.”

If you know of a story that needs to be told in this special series, email Repórter Brasil at contato@reporterbrasil.org.br and write “conflicts” in the subject line.​

O post Escalation of rural violence foretells climate of war in 2017 apareceu primeiro em Repórter Brasil.

A new testimony supports suspicions that civil police officers were working in association with private security guards on the Santa Lúcia farm, where the massacre of ten landless agricultural laborers took place in the state of Pará. They were murdered during a civil and military police operation on May 24 in the municipality of Pau D’Arco. It was the biggest rural massacre of the past 20 years.

The Santa Lúcia farm was inherited from Honorato Babinski by his wife Maria Inez Resplande de Carvalho and three children. The property is in the name of one of the sons, Honorato Babinski Filho.

This was not the first time that the police have killed people on the land owned by the Babinski family. In 2013, on the Pantanal farm, owned by Maria Inez Resplande de Carvalho, witness says the rancher paid a civil police officer to remove squatters from her land. Days later, during a police action on the same property, another group of civil police officers shot and killed the employee who allegedly made the payment.

The report of the payment of a bribe is one element of the investigation that aims to find out whether a group of Pará state civil police officers was working illegally to defend the interests of the Babinski family.

The witness, Elizete Gomes da Silva, spoke exclusively to Repórter Brasil. Her testimony was taken by the prosecutor Alfredo Amorim, who is leading the investigation of the massacre in the State Public Prosecutor’s Office. The case is also being investigated by the Federal Police.

Elizete is risking her life by denouncing the alleged police corruption in the city of Redenção, where she lives. She was the only person interviewed by Repórter Brasil who agreed to have her name associated with the reports about the police. Fear has gripped the witnesses and people who have information about the massacre. There are currently six survivors in the witness protection program.

Despite the presence of the Federal Police in the region, the conflict continues to claim lives. Last Friday, July 7, another murder was committed in connection with the Santa Lúcia farm. Rosenildo Pereira de Almeida was shot three times in the head in the city of Rio Maria, nearly 60 kilometers from Pau D’Arco. Rosenildo was one of the leaders of the camp set up on the Santa Lúcia farm after the massacre. According to the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), he had received threats to leave the camp.

On Monday, the state courts ordered the arrest of 13 of the 29 police officers who took part in the operation. Of these, 11 are military police officers. One of them is the deputy commander of the Military Police of Redenção, Carlos Kened Gonçalves de Sousa. According to information from local newspapers, Sousa and the head of the Police Department for Land Conflicts, Valdivino Miranda, who commanded the police action at the farm, have approached the Federal Police to negotiate a plea bargaining deal.

Witness says she delivered cash to the police in 2013

If proven, Elizete’s allegation is serious. She was married to Leomar Almeida da Silva, a security guard or “gunman” on the Pantanal farm. The terms security guard and gunman are used in the region to describe the men hired by landowners to protect their farms. It is an old practice, and a number of private security firms have sprung up in recent years with licenses to provide this service formally.

Elizete says her husband was hired by the rancher Maria Inez Resplande de Carvalho in 2013 to keep squatters off the Pantanal farm. According to her, one of the Leomar’s jobs was to pay the police to survey the farm. Following the orders of the landowner, he allegedly took the first installment of two thousand Brazilian reals to a civil police officer in Redenção. After the survey of the area had been conducted, Elizete herself personally delivered the second installment, of one thousand Brazilian reals, to the officer.​

A few days later, on October 18, 2013, the civil police went to the farm and shot at a group of men who had recently been hired to protect the area. Leomar was the only person killed in the operation. According to the investigation opened into the case, Leomar died in the farm caretaker’s house, where he was spending the night with the recently hired men.

At the time, the civil police told the local press that the operation was a response to reports of armed men on the Pantanal farm. Leomar was accused by the police of being the head of a gang “responsible for bank robberies, drug trafficking and occupation of farms”, according to a report in a local newspaper.

Elizete swears that Leomar was not involved in criminal activities and she came to her husband’s defense, denouncing the bribery scheme to the Internal Affairs Office of the Civil Police, which opened an internal administrative inquiry in January 2014. When contacted by Repórter Brasil, the Pará State Public Security and Social Defense Department said that “after the conclusion of the inquiry conducted by the Internal Affairs Office, the administrative case was shelved since it found the complaint to be groundless”.

A criminal investigation was opened into the death of Leomar, during which Elizete’s testimony was taken. The case is pending in the state courts.

When contacted for this report, the rancher declined to answer any questions about the Pantanal farm. Her lawyer, Olga Moreira, said that the case is still in the investigative stage and, as a result, her client preferred not to comment.

Association between the police and security guards

​Elizete’s testimony is not the only element to suggest that the Pará state police are working in concert with ranchers. Other evidence pointing in this direction is the fact that the security guards from the Santa Lúcia farm took part in the police action that resulted in the massacre on May 24. This has been confirmed by the prosecutor in the case, Alfredo Amorim. “The participation of security guards is completely irregular and at least one of them was armed. I know they were working for the farm,” said Amorim in an interview with TV Liberal.

Forensic officers at the Santa Lúcia farm. Photo by Antonio Carlos

Honorato Babinski Filho, the owner of the farm, said the responsibility for the management of his security guards lies with the company Elmo, which he contracted to handle the security of the farm. “I was not aware of the operation conducted by the police and likewise I did not know that the security guards had participated.”

The participation of the private security guards corroborates one of the suspected motives for the crime: revenge. This is because, on the day of the massacre, the police had gone to the farm to serve arrest warrants to ten landless laborers under investigation for the murder of Marcos Batista Ramos Montenegro, one of the farm’s security guards. Marcos died from a shot to the face on April 30 – less than a month before the massacre.

Survivors claim they heard the voice of the Civil Police Chief of Redenção, Antônio Miranda, ordering the executions. Officially, the police chief did not take part in the operation that resulted in the massacre.

“I heard Miranda saying: ‘kill them’,” said one witness who was hiding less than 70 meters away. “The others were crying. I heard them, they said: ‘I’m not going to run, for God’s sake’. They were alive. I heard the blows and then I didn’t hear them talking anymore. Just moaning, whimpering. Meanwhile, the police officers were laughing and shouting. Miranda’s voice was loud, excited, celebrating”.

Bodies of the victims at Redenção Hospital. Photo by: Antonio Carlos

When contacted for this report, the Pará State Security Department claimed that Police Chief Antonio Miranda was not present during the operation. “There is, therefore, no need for an investigation,” it said in a statement. The police chief was not relieved from duty.

The version of the confrontation initially released by the police was dismissed by the prosecutor investigating the case. Survivors said the police turned up shooting and then, after some of the landless workers surrendered, they were tortured and executed one by one.

The main line of investigation now is to discover which police officers fired their weapons, the reason for the executions and whether the police violence against those rural workers is associated with the payment of bribes by the ranchers. “One important aspect is to determine whether there is a record of systematic killings of rural workers by police officers in the region,” said Deborah Duprat, Deputy Federal Attorney General. “Another line of investigation involves the private security companies. I want to know if they are companies or organized militias”.

The workers that were camped at the Santa Lúcia farm and their relatives say that “everyone knows that the police receives money from landowners”. They claim that paying police officers to reinforce security on the farms is a common practice in the region.

One of the rural workers from the camp described, on condition of anonymity, how the occupations function and the alleged response of the farmers in association with the police: “Most of the farms here are created by land-grabbing [forging documents]. The group [of landless people] first determines whether the land is documented. If it isn’t, they gather their family together, set up camp and file a lawsuit. The farmer can either go to court, which is unlikely because in court he’ll spend more money. Or he’ll contract a different kind of service. Using security guards and gunmen, he’ll spend a lot less. The farmer turns up, pays and says ‘I want this done’. Then they [the police] go and do it”.

One month before the massacre, land repossession sparked an escalation of violence

Landless agricultural workers have been occupying the Santa Lúcia farm since 2013 on and off due to three land repossession cases. Before the massacre, the main leaders and most of the workers camped there all had close family ties. Of the ten people that were killed, seven were from the same family. They were not part of any formal movement, although they were engaged in dialogue with some organizations, including the Liga dos Camponeses Pobres (League of Poor Peasants).

One of the reasons leading the group to continue the occupation was a case opened by the  Colonization and Land Reform Agency (Incra), which was negotiating with the owners to purchase the farm for land reform purposes. Although the land occupied by the squatters was not being farmed, the Santa Lúcia property does raise cattle. The landless workers were challenging the farm’s documentation, alleging that the title was illegally obtained by forging land ownership documents.

In this land dispute that has been dragging on for four years, squatters who spoke to Repórter Brasil, on condition of anonymity, said relations with the security guards and the police have always been tense. But there was an escalation of violence a month before the massacre, starting on April 20 of this year, when the civil police went to enforce the third land repossession order at the Santa Lúcia farm.

At around this same time, the landowner Babinski Filho hired the security firm Elmo, which is now at the center of the investigation.

On the day of the repossession, according to the reports of the laborers, the police headed to the farm together with the private security guards. The name most mentioned by the laborers in their reports on this incident is, once again, the Civil Police Chief Antônio Miranda. “He called us a bunch of criminals occupying somebody else’s farm,” said one of the occupiers, only on condition of anonymity.

Also on the day of the repossession, another witness said the police officers and the private security guards oversaw the burning of the shacks: “One police officer got out of the car and told the gunman: “as soon as they’ve removed their belongings, set it on fire”. In a statement, one of the farm employees confirmed that two gunmen were hired specifically to burn the shacks.

One of the laborers reported that, although he tried to remove his belongings, his shack was burned while the police stood by. “The police were there with the gunmen, and they set it on fire. There were clothes, a mattress, food. We didn’t have time to save anything.”

Burning possessions is illegal and is indicative of the increased hostility towards the occupiers. To prevent such violations, the state government developed a protocol with a set of guidelines to be followed when enforcing land repossessions. This protocol was established in response to a massacre in the municipality of Eldorado dos Carajás in 1996, when 19 members of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) were killed by the Military Police during a demonstration.

Left: funeral of the landless laborers killed in the Eldorado dos Carajás massacre; photo by João Roberto Ripper. Right: funeral of the agricultural laborers killed in the massacre; photo by Antonio Carlos

In April this year, however, the land repossession at the Santa Lúcia farm began by violating the first rule of the protocol: the operation should be carried out by a specialized police brigade from the state capital, Belém. Never by the civil or military police from the region.

The owner of the farm denies the abuses committed by the police and claims the repossession was peaceful. “All the formal and necessary procedures were observed. Including with the presence of a legal officer that notified the people,” said Honorato Babinski Filho, in an email sent by his lawyer.

Just days after the repossession, gunmen allegedly shot at the landless workers. The incident was recorded in police reports filed by three laborers at the Redenção police station. Repórter Brasil has all the documents.

One of the police reports was filed by Jane Julia de Oliveira. Her statement was taken on April 26 by Valdivino Miranda, the same officer who a month later commanded the operation that would take her life. Valdivino Miranda was still at liberty when we completed our reporting.

On April 30, one of the farm’s security guards Marcos Batista was shot in the face and killed. The investigation into the case is being conducted in secrecy and it is looking into the involvement of the laborers in the death of the security guard. Not long after the murder, the leaders of those landless workers started to receive anonymous threats by telephone. Friends and relatives said the pressure was mounting daily.

According to one witness, Jane – the leader of the occupation – feared for her life and she asked to stay at the witness’s house just days before the massacre. “She said ‘I’m going to stay here because there are two pickup trucks hanging around at home’,” said the witness. “They telephoned her from a restricted number and said ‘your day is coming, your time is coming’.”

State legislator Tércio Nogueira speaking at a rally in support of the police officers involved in the massacre. 13 of them were arrested this week

Rally in support of the police officers involved in the massacre

While the brutality of the case shocked human rights organizations locally and across Brazil, and the incident was addressed in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, authorities connected to the police in Pará staged a rally in support of the officers involved in the massacre.

Repórter Brasil covered the rally, which took place on May 29, three days after the funeral of the victims. At least two state legislators and one federal congressman made speeches, together with leaders of civil and military police associations.

“Farmers, rural producers, police officers and firefighters, you are not alone in this war,” said state legislator Tércio Nogueira, followed by applause. In the crowd, a banner made by the inactive military police officers of Redenção read “support for our colleagues of the Santa Lúcia episode in Pau D’Arco”.

Also present at the rally was the federal congressman Éder Mauro, who was investigated for torture in a case that was shelved by the Supreme Court. He was the most voted representative from Pará in 2014 and is a member of the pro-gun caucus in Congress.

After he returned to the State Legislature in Belém, Éder Mauro got into an argument and had to be restrained by his colleagues to stop the congressman from assaulting an opposition member, Carlos Bordalo. As president of the Human Rights Committee, Bordalo was one of the members responsible for drafting the report on the massacre.

One of the conclusions of the report was the possible motivation for the violence against the laborers: “it is plausible to assert that the operation had the veiled purpose of undermining any ability to reorganize the occupation, benefiting the supposed landowners and ending the land conflict once and for all”.

The latest murder, of Rosenildo Pereira de Almeida on July 7, is a sign that the investigation has still not reached the perpetrators of the crime. According to the Liga dos Camponeses Pobres (League of Poor Peasants), the organization of which the victim was a member, Rosenildo had been working on the reenactment of the crime that took place days earlier with the federal, civil and military police.

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Many years later, facing his younger brother, the sexagenarian Augusto Miranda Brasão was to remember that since the age of 12 he worked with his father cutting piassava to pay off debts to his bosses. This palm tree, whose coarse fiber is used to make brooms, has marked the life of Augusto, his brother, father and grandfather. For a hundred years, the different generations of the Brasão family have lived under a criminal enterprise that bind thousands of indigenous extractivists on the upper and middle Negro River, in the state of Amazonas. The brothers live in the community of Malalahá. Just like in the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, the life of piassava workers is repeated in cycles and has a dose of magical realism. They are trapped in a world of exploitation in which work is confused with debt payment, a situation that recalls times gone by.

Three generations. Like their father and grandfather, the Brasão brothers work in the extraction of piassava, whose fibers are used to make brooms. Photo by Fernando Martinho

The working relationship is based on a system of loans provided by the bosses who control piassava production. For enough food to last a month, the bosses charge nearly R$1,500 – some items cost 300% more than similar products sold in the town. A kilo of piassava, meanwhile, is worth around R$2. The workers receive what is left (when there is something left) after deducting the loans for the rancho – the name given by the local population for food, transport and basic working equipment. From the amount paid at the end of the month, the employer also withholds 20% for potential impurities. And in some cases another 10% is deducted for the “rent” of their place of work by those who claim to be the owners of the area.

Slave labor. Piassava workers spend weeks or months inside the forest to pay off debts contracted with their bosses, as the tradesmen on the river are called. Photo by Fernando Martinho

Working conditions. A piece of canvas tied to wooden posts makes their accommodation. There is no bathroom, sink, place to store food or safety equipment. The workers eat what they hunt. Photo by Fernando Martinho

Required by the boss. Before delivering the product, the piassava workers must first comb and trim the fibers and then tie them into bales. Photo by Fernando Martinho

Tons of piassava. The piassava bales are transported by ferry. This picture shows a batch of piassava bales in the community of Tapera. Photo by Fernando Martinho

“The goal is to keep the piassava worker indebted and subordinate their whole life,” explained the researcher Márcio Meira, former president of the National Indian Foundation (Funai), who has studied the cycle of bondage in the Amazon. The inhabitants of the Negro River call this system aviamento. But the official name for this form of contemporary slavery, according to the Brazilian Criminal Code, is debt bondage.

However, a decree that would not consider this type of exploitation as slave labor was published on October 13 by Labor Minister Ronaldo Nogueira, who wants to change the current definition. “The decree does away with the concept of contemporary slavery,” said Antônio Carlos de Mello, coordinator of the Programme to Combat Forced Labor of the International Labour Organization in Brazil. According to Rafael Garcia Rodrigues, a labor prosecutor and former national coordinator of Slave Labor Eradication at the Office of the Public Prosecutor for Labor Issues, the decree could “abolish” the concept of debt bondage. “It’s an unbelievable setback.” The decision of the government, without any prior discussion, comes ahead of a new impeachment vote in the Lower House of Congress and a week after the dismissal of the national coordinator for policing slave labor, André Roston.

Many piassava workers are the first to deny that their working conditions constitute slave labor. “What would happen if they reported it? How would they get back home with nothing? It’s a trap,” said Alexandre Arbex Valadares, a researcher at the Applied Economic Research Institute (Ipea). He explained that once they start, the worker has no other alternative than to survive and pay their debts.

These conditions, however, are viewed as normal by the piassava workers themselves. Augusto, trapped in the system for 48 years, says he is free and that he only works when he wants. “Nobody here forces me to do anything.” He and his brother spent that day, May 28, 2017, working to pay off a “little debt” of R$800 with nearly a ton of piassava. Cutting palm leaves in temperatures that can exceed 30º C in the fall and carrying 60 kilos at a time on their backs is only half the day’s work. While they wait for a tapir that they hunted to cook, Augusto explains that the boss requires them to cut, comb, trim and tie the fibers up into bales. “But we’re not slaves, like people say we are.”

In Brazil, according to the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), 1.5 million people are unable to leave their employment due to some kind of debt.

The cost. Former piassava worker Aelton José Pereira Muniz holds up a sheet of paper with the list of expenses he received from the boss. Some items were sold at three times their price. Photo by Fernando Martinho

The list of rancho. The name given by the local population for food, transport and basic working equipment. Photo by Fernando Martinho

Education in the community. In the community of Malalahá, the school, which has a broken blackboard and no walls, has just one teacher. One of the students, Bia, holds a spider monkey. Photo by Fernando Martinho

In the community of Malalahá where they live, the person giving the orders is the boss Edson Mara Mendonça, say the piassava workers in the region of the upper Negro River. But he is not the only one. Debt is encouraged by other bosses who travel to the communities in search of piassava workers. Jucileno Neves Pacheco, a 59-year-old from the state of Bahia, owes R$400 to another boss, but out of fear of reprisals he preferred not the reveal his name. “I’ve got product to pay for, but first I have to buy some oil and gasoline from him to collect the fibers”. In other words, in order to pay the debt, the worker must first take on a new loan. And then there’s the tape, remembers Pacheco. A 300 meter roll of tape used to tie up the leaves costs, on average, R$400. Tying the fiber into bales makes it easier for the boss to transport. “To begin with, we thought the tape was a good idea, because we thought it would be provided [by the boss]. But no. When they saw that they could make money, it started costing us more. And it doesn’t serve any purpose at all for us,” said Pacheco.

For one piassava worker with sad eyes, 41-year-old Alberto Neres da Silva, bondage appears to have robbed him of his capacity for emotion. “One by one, I lost my children,” he said calmly, about a story that should have been told like it is: a tragedy. In distant times in his life, and each time working in piassava extraction, he lost three children. They all died before they were one year old due to the precarious living conditions on the piassava plantations. Many, like Neres da Silva, take their whole family upstream with them. This allows them to reduce food costs and avoid living apart for three weeks each month.

Two of his children got sick inside the plantations and were buried there. The first time, the boss did nothing to help, said Neres, without expressing any indignation. The second, a manager refused to offer any assistance because “the boss had not given the order”. The third time, Neres made it to the local community in time. When his son started to show signs of recovering, the boss found him to tell him that the infant would be fine. “I owed money and I took it as a warning. I went back upstream and after two weeks, my son’s condition deteriorated. The boss only arranged for a speedboat after the boy was more dead than alive.” He got the tattoo on his arm after the third death: “God is powerful, I have faith”.

Evening on the river. The diesel-fueled generator in the community of Campinas do Rio Preto runs four hours per day, from 6 pm to 10 pm. Photo by Fernando Martinho

The debt economy was introduced to the Negro River during the rubber boom. One of the accounts of the Italian Ermanno Stradelli, who traveled up the dark waters of the river in 1881, states that debt gave the indigenous peoples – to this day the majority of the population in the state of Amazonas – the status of being “civilized”. In the words of the Italian, “the man who does not owe money is a man without value.” The statement appears in the book Baré, Povo do Rio, published by Edições Sesc. To avoid conflict with the boss, according to the researcher Elieyd Sousa de Menezes in her master’s thesis, foreigners encouraged interracial marriages.

In Malalahá, bondage has created a situation that is unusual to say the least. The piassava worker Olânio dos Santos Bento, aged 28, explained that his father, Olavo, aged 88, is his boss. “But he’s not like the other bosses,” he said. Olânio’s debt was R$800. He caught “leishi”, or Leishmaniasis, a disease caused by parasites. Prevented from working due to pain, his debt accumulated. “My father was a great boss. He had 60 men working for him,” he said with pride. Olânio’s brother is a “little boss”, a small tradesman, who on one of his trips upriver played soccer with the indigenous locals. Social mobility in the debt bondage chain is possible when a worker has the means of production, which is rare.

The naturalization of bondage. Olavo dos Santos, aged 88, is father and boss to his own son, Olânio, aged 28. Bondage is not frowned upon by the son. Photo by Fernando Martinho

Tragedy. Three children of the piassava worker Alberto Neres da Silva and Claudia died on separate occasions while he worked with piassava. The bosses did nothing to help. Photo by Fernando Martinho

Olavo, the father, has lived on a boat for 50 years. On the floor of the vessel is all kinds of food and accessories. Like his son, the grandson of his Portuguese father and Baré indigenous mother, Olavo was a piassava worker. Like his son, he doesn’t hesitate in saying “there’s not a single indian here” about the residents of Campinas and other communities. “Indians live in isolation,” he said. “The rest are caboclos.” And he doesn’t have a good word to say about them either. “A good piassava worker doesn’t have big eyes [greed],” he said, before citing an example of a good worker, in his opinion. “There was a guy who waited for everyone before getting his food. And he didn’t eat wheat products, biscuits. It was water, salt and whatever he could hunt.” Then, surprisingly, he said that “running up a tab makes life difficult” – precisely the system that he still uses with his workers. Asked about this, he was speechless for the first time.

“A good piassava worker doesn’t have big eyes [greed],” he said, before citing an example of a good worker, in his opinion. “There was a guy who waited for everyone before getting his food. And he didn’t eat wheat products, biscuits. It was water, salt and whatever he could hunt.”

Reference community. Campinas do Rio Preto is considered an educational hub on the river. Six teachers take turns giving pre-school to high school classes. Photo by Fernando Martinho

All across Amazonas, the pejorative expression “those who aren’t indians” used by Olânio and Olavo is a common way to refer to the Baré indigenous people. Like so many other indigenous groups, the Baré were persecuted in the early decades of the 20th century. In Baré, Povo do Rio, indigenous people and researchers mention illegal occupations, massacres both physical and cultural – such as the forced introduction of Catholicism – and imprisonment and slavery. To survive, they concealed their own identity. They lost their rituals and native tongue. The strategy to disappear worked so well that Funai declared the group extinct. In 1990, the recovery of their identity began.

“The alliance of so many peoples around an indigenous issue is, above all, an alliance for survival. They undertook this process so they wouldn’t be decimated,” explained the anthropologist Camila Sobral Barra, who studies the peoples of the Negro River for Instituto Socioambiental (ISA).

The search for identity is associated with the search for land. “With demarcation, the land returns to the indigenous peoples and stops generating profit for the piassava bosses, businesspeople [from the agribusiness and mining sectors] and for politicians,” said Barra.

Business on the river banks. Bosses look for workers in the communities and make false promises. Photo by Fernando Martinho

An appropriate response

In 2013, the Cooperative of Piassava Workers from the Upper and Middle Negro River (COOPIAÇAMARIN), known locally as the association of bosses, organized an anti-demarcation march in Barcelos. They used the report by the anthropologist Edward Luz, which was commissioned and rejected by Funai because it was drafted without hearing the indigenous people. Luz is an evangelist from the New Tribes Mission Brazil, an organization that was banned from indigenous communities in 1991, accused of trafficking children, slavery and sexual exploitation. In 2013, Luz left the Brazilian Association of Anthropology.

Four piassava workers told Repórter Brasil that COOPIAÇAMARIN had paid the fuel costs for them to travel downstream and join the anti-demarcation march. The effort brought together nearly a thousand people with signs and cars with loudspeakers – the banner “I am a piassava worker, I exist” is still there – and brought the town of 25,000 inhabitants to a standstill. The intention was to defend the interests of the bosses, but it had the opposite effect. The march drew the attention of the Office of the Public Prosecutor for Labor Issues (MPT). “We thought there were only a few extractivists and all of a sudden a thousand were there in front of us,” said the MPT prosecutor Renan Bernardi Kalil. Contacted several times, COOPIAÇAMARIN could not be located.

A year later, prompted by the stories they heard at the demonstration, the MPT, the Ministry of Labor, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, the Federal Highway Police and the Army conducted a field raid.

Carried out in April and May 2014, the action rescued 13 piassava workers. They worked for a boss known as Carioca, the nickname of Luiz Claudio Morais Rocha, the owner of the company Irajá Fibras Naturais da Amazônia, whose legal name is L. C. Morais Rocha Comercial. One of the workers owed nearly R$20,000, a debt that had accumulated over thirteen years of bondage.

The final report concluded that the group was living in conditions akin to slave labor, and identified a total of twenty-six labor irregularities. The conditions were classified as debt bondage on account of illegal indebtedness and remuneration below the minimum wage – the same situation faced today by the piassava workers interviewed by our reporters.

“An example of how the repression of slave labor is ineffective when it is also the only strategy to combat the crime,” said the federal prosecutor Julio José Araújo Júnior, who participated in the rescue action in 2014. The Regional Federal Court of the 1st Region, in Brasília, accepted the civil lawsuit against the boss Carioca. The sentence of Federal Judge Jaíza Maria Pinto Fraxe on the labor violations suffered by the piassava workers was the subject of an award this year from the National Justice Council, a body that oversees the Brazilian judicial system.

The criminal proceeding had a different outcome. A new prosecutor took over the case and argued for the acquittal of Carioca. In August this year, Federal Judge Ana Paula Serizawa Silva Podedworny acquitted the boss due to lack of evidence. The press office of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office informed that the original prosecutor of the criminal case has appealed the judge’s ruling.

When contacted, Carioca denied the charges. By telephone, he said that the rescued piassava workers did not work for him and that he does not have shacks in that location. “They brought it from there and sold it to me. Sometimes, I traded gasoline. But they (the inspectors) said I can’t do that anymore.” About trading on the river today, he said: “After everything that’s happened, whatever I buy I’ll pay for up front.”

According to local residents, now that Carioca is out of the picture, the tradesman Antonio Lacerda has emerged as the new boss in the region. The Repórter Brasil team visited the community of Tapera, where the business is based. Tons of piassava bales were piled up on the banks of the river, on the river itself and even underneath the houses. All the residents would say, out of fear, was that Lacerda wasn’t there. The team of reporters tried to locate Lacerda up until the time of publication, but was not successful.

Piles of piassava. In the community of Tapera, there were bales stored even underneath houses. Photo by Fernando Martinho

Another use for piassava. The father of six living children, the former piassava worker Ailton Pereira struggled to free himself debt bondage. Today he uses the fibers to make handicrafts. Photo by Fernando Martinho

Dance of the piassava worker. In Campinas do Rio Preto, children and young people rehearse the dance steps. Pictured here is the piassava queen and the representative of the piassava workers. Photo by Fernando Martinho

Fear of leaving bondage

The piassava worker Ailton Pereira, aged 46, lost an uncle and a father-in-law after they were bitten by snakes in the plantations. Since the trunks are covered in fibers – in the Tupi language “hairs that grow from inside the heart of the tree” – the piassava is used as a nest by poisonous animals. “I’ve come close to being bitten several times myself, not including the mosquitoes,” he said. In piassava plantations, it is common to see barber bugs, which transmit Chagas disease, as well as transmitters of malaria. Umbilical hernias, low back pain and early rheumatism are also common occupational diseases.

The father of six living children, aged from 2 to 22, Ailton said he needed courage to leave the piassava plantations. Instead of making bails, today he makes handicrafts with the fibers and sells them in commercial centers. For a broom, he earns R$7. In the community where he lives, he is known as the author of a song about the life of piassava workers. “I got tired of cutting and carrying tons of piassava and always being hungry, for weeks at a time, in the middle of the forest.”

Fear is the greatest tormentor of those who stay. At least according to José Melgueiro de Jesus, aka Zezão, president of the Association of Communities of Rio Preto. “When I was a piassava worker, life was bad but I didn’t leave because I didn’t think I could survive any other way.” He glances at the river, where he left his past behind. “To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t have been able to do it without my wife.” Laudiceia Carvalho Balbino, aged 46, had been insisting for years that they make a change to their life.

The same water that trapped them set them free. Laudiceia recalls the day when Zezão was trying to control the canoe during a storm. Their two small children were hanging on by themselves because Laudiceia was holding their newborn.

The wind blew a branch that hit her on the head. The shock and the pain gave way to anger and she gave her husband an ultimatum. “I was crying and I swore that we’d be able to live differently,” said Laudiceia, while cooking cassava flour in a clay oven.

“After I stopped working with piassava, I could get to know my wife and children again,” said Zezão, talking about one invisible impact of bondage, in which men, through no choice of their own, become mere spectators of their own future. They moved to Campinas do Rio Preto. They took a course in family farming and planted cassava on a piece of land 20 minutes by boat from the community. The workday starts at dawn and ends in the late afternoon. Zezão and Laudiceia cannot count how many times they have had “tremors”, a classic symptom of sunstroke. “Physical work is a sacrifice, but it is blessed. People who plant land don’t go hungry”. Today, they help their neighbors who are trying to get out of bondage by telling them about their own journey and giving them food.

Demarcations on the Negro River

The cost of beating the system of debt bondage has been high for Zezão, who is now a community leader in Campinas where he lives. In May, the Federation of Indigenous Organizations of the Negro River (Foirn), an umbrella organization of 89 associations and more than 35,000 indigenous peoples, held a meeting in the town with local leaders to talk about the demarcations. At the meeting, the Yanomami indigenous group accused Foirn and all of Campinas of being enemies. According to Zezão, the Yanomami think that demarcation will close off the rivers and prevent them from working. “But they didn’t dream that up. There are people behind all this. What they want is indians fighting indians,” said Marivelton Barroso, president of the federation.

Even Mayor Araildo Mendes do Nascimento, say the residents, has given conflicting versions about the demarcations. In the community of Campinas, Careca – the nickname of the mayor – has promised to check on the progress of the demarcation processes. In the community of Malalahá, a different promise was made. “[The mayor] told the minister not to sign,” said Olânio, of Malalahá, referring to a private conversation he said he had with the mayor. Careca is from the center-right Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), the same party as the former Justice Minister Osmar Serraglio and President Michel Temer. Serraglio, who has connections with agribusiness, has made countless statements critical of the demarcations. When contacted, Careca did not answer the telephone calls made by our reporters.

Bondage on the river. Aerial view of the community of Campinas. Six families still live off piassava extraction. Photo by Fernando Martinho

Recent occupant. For two years, the resident of this house, the piassava worker Alberto Neres, has been trying to free himself from debt bondage. Photo by Fernando Martinho

Barroso, aged 26, has been an activist for the indigenous cause since he was a teenager. Without hesitation, he calls the environmental agenda of President Michel Temer a “setback” and accuses the government of negligence. He has the determined voice of someone who has already denounced the government in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and this, he said, has assured him a long list of anti-demarcation enemies – from bosses to politicians. According to Barroso, demarcation will guarantee the autonomy of indigenous peoples in the production and sale of piassava.

On the upper and middle Negro River, it has not been a matter of hours, days or months. For years whole families have been subjected to exploitation through debt bondage in the extraction of piassava. Although many still cannot understand – or admit – the violations they suffer, there is a growing movement that is eager to create, for the first time, a new beginning in the dark waters of the river.

Literacy on the river. Two pre-school classes take place simultaneously in Campinas. Photo by Fernando Martinho

Taste of Amazonas. In the communities along the river, açaí berries are picked for home consumption and for sale. Photo by Fernando Martinho

Translated by Barnaby Whiteoak

O post 100 years of servitude apareceu primeiro em Repórter Brasil.

In Rio Branco, a wall painted with the face of Chico Mendes. He was killed in 1988 for standing up to a rancher in defense of the interests of local rubber tappers. Photo by Fernando Martinho

Dressed in red trousers and a black shirt and wearing an indigenous necklace, the representative of the German Development Bank KFW, Christiane Ehringhaus, praised the pioneerism of Acre to an audience of local residents on the final day of the “Seminar to Assess the Results of the REDD Early Movers Program in Acre”. The event, complete with a group photograph, took place in July at the Resort Hotel in the state capital Rio Branco. On the agenda were the results of the model program of the government for what is conventionally called the green economy, a term used worldwide to combine economic development with environmental preservation. A handful of indigenous people and residents of local communities shared the room with a number of state and national lawmakers and a few others. One was Senator Jorge Viana, president of the Joint Commission on Climate Change in the National Congress, former state governor and brother of the current governor Tião Viana. The Viana brothers are responsible for selling Acre’s model of green economy to the world.

“We are very excited to be able to use these valuable lessons from Acre,” said Ehringhaus, “and we are already taking advantage of these lessons to establish the program in other states”. Mato Grosso has already signed up.

Acre, a state treated with contempt by so many Brazilians, wants to set an environmental example for the world. On the border with Peru and Bolivia, the state has just over 800,000 inhabitants and is ranked 25th in terms of Gross Domestic Product. “We’re not concerned about vanity. If our experience can show Brazil and the world that it’s possible to preserve and develop at the same time, that will be terrific,” Governor Tião Viana told the Repórter Brasil team. The green development plan was introduced when the two brothers from the leftist Workers Party (PT) came to power in 1999. In 2010, a law was passed to regulate the System of Incentives for Environmental Services, a long-winded plan covering 30 pages, front and back, that both praises an alleged decade-long environmental pioneerism in Acre and lists a number of new projects. The first item on the list is the promotion of environmental carbon services (reduction of CO2 emissions in exchange for incentives). KFW, the German government’s development bank, appears as one of the partners in the plan. In 2012, the government received 25 million euros from the German bank, the equivalent of almost R$90 million for projects to reduce CO2 emissions.

At the same event, the state environment secretary Carlos Edegard de Deus claimed that another goal shared by the latest administrations is the “inclusion of the neglected: indians, rubber tappers, riverside peoples and land reform settlers. We have always fought for the inclusion of everyone, provided they adhere to the principles of sustainability.” Intentional or not, the use of the word “provided” reveals the existence of a condition for these people to be included in the government policy. And this condition is to follow the rules of sustainability created and defended by the Viana brothers. These rules, which all place restrictions on human activity, were taken from international agreements that guarantee financing for projects that preserve forests and that also enable the sale of carbon to polluting companies in other parts of the world, particularly in developed countries.

The first complaints about the “wonders of the green economy” did not take long to surface, said Winnie Overbeek, international coordinator of the World Rainforest Movement (WRM). In 2011, several organizations, including WRM, participated in an investigation conducted by the Dhesca Platform in Acre and identified “a series of negative socio-political, economic and environmental impacts, in particular on traditional lands and populations”.

Just ask the traditional peoples. They have no idea where Acre invested the thousands of euros it received from the German government – Winnie Overbeek, International Coordinator of the World Rainforest Movement

“We found a series of environmental and social injustices caused by a government plan that aspires to be a model for the world,” said Overbeek. “Just ask the traditional peoples. They have no idea where Acre invested the thousands of euros it received from the German government.”

The lack of dialogue with the people who live in the forest is one of the criticisms of the program made by scholars, local leaders and extractivist communities. They say the plan does not contribute to the preservation of the forest. Besides not helping, these groups claim the program is a burden, by creating new pressures on the traditional inhabitants who are forced to make changes to their lifestyle, since they are prevented from hunting, fishing or using the forest for their livelihood.

The program is the exact opposite of the philosophy of Chico Mendes, according to the agronomist Elder Andrade de Paula, one of the main opponents of the environmentalism of the Viana brothers. The history of the rubber tapper and union leader is key to understanding the land conflict in Acre that endures to this day. The son of rubber tappers, Mendes was the leading figure in the creation of a union, association and council in defense of the extractivists. He proposed that a lifestyle integrated with the forest was the best way to preserve it – and he always opposed encroachment by large landowners. He was killed in 1988 in front of his house in Xapuri. The rancher Darly Alves da Silva was found guilty of ordering the crime. One of his farms had been expropriated to form an extractive reserve.

Expansion of Deforestation

In the penultimate week of May, in Xapuri, indigenous and extractivist leaders met for three days to denounce the impacts of the Acre government’s green economy. In a letter released after the meeting, they said the policy was imposed “in an authoritarian manner and without consulting the communities in advance”. Since they oppose the expansion, they say they face pressure and threats from the “owners of power in Acre”.

The agronomist Andrade, a professor and researcher at the Philosophy and Human Sciences Center of the Federal University of Acre, said that by presenting itself as a model for environmental policies the state government is being hypocritical, since it is masking old problems in the Amazon region. “The green economy, the new term that has replaced the overused ‘sustainable development’, is an excuse to continue doing what has always been done: produce unsustainably in a social and environmental sense.”

The researcher’s criticisms are backed up by environmental data, which show that Acre is reducing deforestation at a slower pace than the rest of the Amazon region, while the number of cattle continues to rise.

Last year, Acre did the second most amount of deforestation in the Amazon, according to the National Space Research Institute. The felling of forests rose 47% in the state. Despite the increase, the figure was in line with government targets, which are to keep total annual deforestation below 434 square kilometers.

In 2016, the Amazon lost nearly 8,000 square kilometers of forest, the most since 2008. This increase prompted Norway, the main contributor to a trust to conserve the forest, to cut its transfer of funds to Brazil almost by half. The country is the world’s 15th largest producer of oil – which contributes to global warming. This is why it has become an important donor for forest preservation, but only for green economy projects.

In addition to deforestation, the increase in land occupation is another indicator that the economy of Acre is not so green. In 2001, Acre had more than 18,000 farms registered on 2.9 million hectares of land. Large landowners (who have more than a thousand hectares) represented 2% of the farms and they occupied 58% of the hectares. In 2016, the number of registered properties nearly doubled – to 37,000 – and the amount of occupied land quadrupled – to 11.6 million hectares. Despite this increase, the concentration of land has remained the same: large landowners still represent 2% of the farms and they occupy 56% of the total area. “Concentration leads to deforestation and an expansion of grazing land. In other words, latifundia,” said the agronomist Andrade. According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), 85% of the deforested land in Acre is used for grazing.

The government’s technical advisory office disputed the data from the Land Reform Agency (Incra) presented by the agronomist illustrating the concentration of land ownership. It said it was not possible to know with any accuracy how many farms there are in the state. On the deforestation, the governor said the increase was a “one-off bounce”, and blamed small farmers. “They’re the ones that are still driving the deforestation,” he said. Viana claimed that Acre is one of the most preserved states: 87% of the forest is standing and since 2002 it has reduced deforestation by 64%, according to data from the Space Science Institute.

As far as Governor Tião Viana is concerned, livestock farming is compatible with environmental preservation. He wants to triple the number of cattle without increasing the grazing area, which would mean raising up to 10 animals per hectare. Currently, the land holds less than 2 cows per hectare.

One of the showpieces of the green economy in Acre is a program that regulates REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), an international carbon retention system. Since 2010, the government has committed to cut deforestation and therefore emit less CO2, one of the main causes of global warming. Everything below the target is considered non-emitted carbon and can be sold, for example, to companies that pollute the environment, even in other parts of the world. The measurement of the carbon amount is conducted using internationally established mathematical calculations and this imposes a series of restrictions on the use of the forest by communities that depend on it for their survival. A deal is currently being negotiated that will permit Californian companies to exceed the pollution targets in the United States and offset up to 4% of the excess emissions buying CO2 credits that Acre did not emit.

“Carbon trading is nothing more than purchasing the right to pollute,” said Andrade. “In the case of the agreement with California, the population there loses because they will continue to live in a polluted environment, and the traditional peoples of Acre also lose, because their traditional lifestyle is altered.”

Even when large areas are not deforested, complaints of forest degradation are received due to the selective felling of certain species of trees. Degradation is not measured by satellite surveillance, but it is felt first hand by the people who live off the forest. Besides the impact, these populations are prevented by the sustainability rules of the green economy from exercising their subsistence activities.

The rules of sustainability do not affect large farmers or private businesses, but instead the traditional populations – Winnie Overbeek, International Coordinator of the World Rainforest Movement

Sitting next to Andrade by a lake inhabited by capybaras on the campus of the Federal University of Acre in Rio Branco, the coordinator of the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) in Acre, Darlene Braga, said that the pressures imposed by the green economy prevent traditional peoples from hunting and requires them to take part in an economic system that many of them do not understand. “What we see are families being driven out, scared of losing the piece of ground where they live and the right to use the land”.

Overbeek agrees: “Our research shows that this is the case the world over. The rules of sustainability do not affect large farmers or private businesses, but instead the traditional populations. Why? Because they don’t have political power.”

Extractivism vs. planted forests

The latex condom factory Natex is located at the entrance to Xapuri, a small town that is calm and well looked after with colorful wooden stilt houses suspended over the cloudy water of the Acre River – where Chico Mendes was born, lived and was killed. The factory, which opened in 2008 and belongs to the Acre State Technology Foundation, is a source of pride for the government when it talks about policies for rubber tappers. The project is supposed to stimulate the system of “planted forests” without completely ending rubber extractivism, which many traditional rubber tappers refuse to give up. But it has been the target of criticism.

“There are various ways to introduce this idea of a green economy without it appearing as such,” said Andrade. Production by Natex, which supplies the Ministry of Health in northern Brazil, is based on local latex whose price is subsidized (in part with money from the agreement with Germany). Andrade said that last year, Natex paid around R$7.80 per kilo of latex, of which R$3.80 was for the product and R$4 in subsidies. However, to receive the subsidy, rubber tappers had to sign a contract with the government “to observe the rites of the control mechanism of the territory”, said Andrade, pointing out that this is one of the mechanisms used by the state government to institutionalize the philosophy of the program. When contacted, Natex informed that the contracting of the rubber tappers is conducted by the local cooperative Cooperacre, which is responsible for the payment. It did not comment on the contract. The cooperative did not respond to the contact of our reporters.

Dercy Teles Cunha, aged 62, is the first woman to be president of the Rural Workers Union of Xapuri, which was founded by Chico Mendes. Photo by Fernando Martinho

Rubber tapper extracts latex from a tree in one of the forests planted with the support of an Acre government program. Photo by Fernando Martinho

“Rubber extractivism has died and the government, to date, has not presented an alternative form of income generation to replace the one that rubber extractivism provided,” said 62-year-old Dercy Teles Cunha, leader of the rubber tapper movement. Cunha is the first woman to be president of the Rural Workers Union of Xapuri. According to her, most of the latex purchased by Natex comes from rubber plantations (the government denies this and claims that 70% of the rubber comes from native trees). This, she explains, has left the traditional rubber tappers without a trade and does not contribute to the preservation of the Amazon.

The Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve (Resex) was founded in 1990, two years after the death of the rubber tapper and trade union leader, and to this day it serves as a model for the federal government when it comes to this type of conservation area. According to the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio), a federal agency, some 10,000 people live in the reserve on an area of more than 900,000 hectares that spans seven different municipalities and includes 46 rubber tapping areas. Resex was created during a turbulent time of conflict between rubber tappers and the expansion of livestock and to this day it faces various forms of pressures of threats.

The forest is a patchwork of species that man could never hope to rebuild – Dercy Teles Cunha, President of the Rural Workers Union of Xapuri

“The forest is a patchwork of species that man could never hope to rebuild,” said Cunha, sitting in front of her house on a dirt street, refuting the idea of “planted forest”. The rubber tappers and their children still use the forest for hunting, gathering nuts and other activities. The clearest impact of the threats on the forest, explained Cunha, can be seen in the extraction of Brazil nuts. The tree needs to be pollinated by a flying beetle – the mamangá – to survive. Since it can only fly short distances, it needs the lower trees to climb up to the high canopies of the Brazil nut tree. In other words, without the forest, there are no Brazil nuts.

Cunha said she is worried that the countryside will turn into a wasteland. “Then what will be left for the people who live in the forest? Working to pay for the latest generation mobile phones that young people want? What pays for them are the calves that you can sell when they are seven months old for R$700 or R$800.” The expansion of livestock farming is obvious to anyone who visits Xapuri. Grazing land competes with the forest even in the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve.

The community forest management plans, encouraged by the government and authorized by associations inside Resex in partnership with ICMBio, are also the target of criticisms. According to the government, only the trees with the highest commercial value are removed, in a rotational system whereby after specific trees are felled the area is left untouched for 30 years to “recover”. The agronomist Andrade says the government calculations are vague, as is the process. “Who certifies that any given tree is more than thirty years old? Who measures the forest degradation, which does not appear on the deforestation map?”

Operating in Acre is Agrocortex, the only logging company authorized to explore mahogany in the country. The extraction and sale of this wood, which is red and resistant, became a symbol of the forest devastation in the 1980s and 1990s and it was banned until 2011. In that year, Batisflor Florestal LTDA, the owner of the Fazenda Seringal Novo Macapá farm, managed to secure the approval of the environmental watchdog Ibama for a management plan for thirty years. In 2014, Agrocortex started to operate as the executor of the activities, a status it maintained until 2016. In April of that year, it became the owner of the project. At the moment, Agrocortex is the only company authorized to conduct mahogany management in Brazil.

Agrocortex is the only logging company authorized to explore mahogany anywhere in Brazil. Photo by Fernando Martinho

The Repórter Brasil team visited the headquarters of the company in Acre. Agrocortex, which belongs to the Portuguese group Domínio Capital, has authorization to explore mahogany and other woods in an area of 190,000 hectares in the municipalities of Manoel Urbano, in Acre, and Boca do Acre and Pauini, in the state of Amazonas.

The international market is the main buyer, so much so that the company’s website is in English. The cubic meter of mahogany fetches twice or three times the price of other native woods with similar characteristics. The mission of Agrocortex, according to the company’s own website, is “to be a world reference in the sustainable management of tropical forests within a perspective of multiple use of the forest”. All the mahogany extracted by the company is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). When questioned about income and management of mahogany, Agrocortex did not respond to our contact by the time of publication.

Acre’s management plan, one of the pillars of the green economy, was investigated by Overbeek, of the World Rainforest Movement. “It is not a sustainable practice in the sense of not damaging the forest and neither does it benefit the communities. The big logging companies are the ones that benefit,” he said.

Afterwards, you can’t cut down a single tree or even take a stick to make a hoe handle – João Zacarias de Souza, Son of rubber tappers

The logging companies are responsible for the management and restrictions are placed on the use of the forest by the communities. This is what happened in Resex, where the son of rubber tappers João Zacarias de Souza lives. There, things have not turned out to the satisfaction of Souza and his neighbors. They say the company charged for the service of removing and transporting the wood and, when everything was done, very little was left for the traditional inhabitants of the land. The only ones to profit, they said, were the logging companies and it was all done under the guise of sustainability. The rubber tappers said that, for allowing the forest management on an area of 40 hectares, a family received nearly R$6,000 for a 1-year period. “Afterwards, you can’t cut down a single tree or even take a stick to make a hoe handle,” said Souza.

The inhabitants of the land say they earn R$60 per cubic meter of wood, while this same cubic meter is sold for R$1,000. Although the difference is huge, the government justifies the amount. According to the deputy environment secretary João Paulo Mastrangelo, the amount paid for standing timber varies from R$30 to R$70, while sawn timber with the lowest commercial value is sold for nearly R$500. However, he also pointed out that the company bears all the production costs and that only 20% to 55% of each log is actually turned into timber. This, said Mastrangelo, results in a profit of 10% for the company that explores forest management.

Despite the low return, many people accepted. The government offered, as an incentive, 40 hours of excavator work to dig small dams. The idea was to turn the region into a fish farming hub. But nothing ever came of it. The excavators worked less time than promised and the dams were too shallow. “The government people come here and they think everything is just fine. They say these dams worked out well,” said João Zacarias de Souza.

When questioned on this matter, Governor Tião Viana said the problem was a misunderstanding by the residents. “The plan was for a partnership. They would get 40 hours but they had to provide the fuel. But they didn’t have the money for the fuel,” said Viana, for whom the promotion of fish farming is one of the campaigns of his government.

Stretch of the Purus River at the Manoel Urbano port, where few people have heard of the green economy. On the road to the town, there is almost no forest to be seen, only grassland. Photo by Fernando Martinho

Exit rubber tappers, enter livestock

Nearly 400 kilometers separate the towns of Xapuri and Manoel Urbano, and most of this distance is covered by the BR-364 highway. On this main artery running through Acre, a single lane paved highway with almost no curves, the craters are big enough to shred truck tires or swallow small cars whole. On the stretch that separates the two towns, there is almost no forest to be seen, only light green grassland dotted with beef cattle. In Manoel Urbano, a small town with potholed roads and unkempt plots of land, people work almost exclusively in public service and very few have even heard of the green economy.

But close by, about an hour upriver, is one of the most controversial examples of Acre’s environmentalism: the Purus project, a private initiative of REDD covering 35,000 hectares. The project is not directly associated with the state government, but it is hailed as a symbol of the green economy. It was created by the former mayor of Sena Madureira, Normando Sales, formerly of the center-right Democrat Party (DEM). The program is certified by foreign companies and the non-emitted carbon is purchased by various business projects. Part of the credits purchased by FIFA to offset the Rio World Cup, for example, came from there.

The first controversy involves the land where it is installed: three traditional rubber tapping areas where 24 families depend on farming and the forest for subsistence. Since the arrival of the project, some of these traditional inhabitants say they are facing pressure to stop planting, hunting and clearing land.

Antônio Leite Cardeal (center) on the veranda of his house that overlooks the land known as Seringal Itatinga. He said the project did not take into consideration the community’s traditional way of life. Photo by Fernando Martinho

“We are caboclos of the forest, but that doesn’t mean that city people can come here and cheat us,” said the 69-year-old former rubber tapper Antônio Leite Cardeal on the veranda of his house that overlooks the land known as Seringal Itatinga. Cardeal, who moved there in 1964 when he was a teenager, said that about 10 years ago some lawyers from the project approached him to offer a deal. Their proposal, which did not take into consideration the community’s traditional way of life, was to partition a hundred hectares and give it to the squatters who have lived in the region for years.

You wouldn’t be allowed to light a fire, you wouldn’t be allowed to hunt, you wouldn’t even be allowed to light a cigarette – Antônio Leite Cardeal, Former rubber tapper

However, their adult children who had already set up home in the area were not included in the deal, which as far as the former rubber tappers were concerned made the offer unattractive. To receive the carbon credit, they would not be able to raise animals or plant crops on the land. “You wouldn’t be allowed to light a fire, you wouldn’t be allowed to hunt, you wouldn’t even be allowed to light a cigarette,” he said. When he refused, he received offers of upgrades and a “salary” of R$300 for his wife with whom he fathered 11 children. The amount is less than a third of the national minimum wage, which currently stands at R$937.

As a result of the resistance, the founders of the project, according to the former rubber tapper, filed complaints to the state environmental agency over their use of fire to clear land, which resulted in a fine of more than R$13,000. “We have a culture here,” said Cardeal. “Now tell me why it’s fair to fine us for clearing land when the headquarters of the project is full of cattle?” What’s more, said Cardeal and the other rubber tappers, the project went ahead without the consent of the local residents, which was a prerequisite for the project to be certified. In July of this year, there was a hearing between the residents and the “owners” of Purus. Cardeal said that the former mayor Normando Sales, of Purus, told the prosecutors that they had already reached a consensus. “That never happened,” said Cardeal, who together with the other residents started to learn about the sale of carbon credit in order to resist.

It really was a mistake having cattle there – Normando Sales, Former mayor of Sena Madureira

On the day when the Repórter Brasil team visited the headquarters of the project, one tradesman, who identified himself only as Agostinho, was at the site assessing 46 head of cattle that were loose in the grazing land that had been opened in the heart of the forest maintained for capturing carbon. It was the second time that he had visited the site. On the first occasion, six months earlier, he said he had assessed 100 animals. But no sale was made. “It really was a mistake having cattle there,” said Normando Sales three days later, in his office in Rio Branco. He did not say how much he earned from selling credits nor which companies purchase them.

The Repórter Brasil team found cattle inside the Purus project. The tradesman in the picture assessed the cattle – but did not buy them. Photo by Fernando Martinho

Besides the cattle, local residents say the website of the project uses photographs of healthcare treatment provided at the headquarters of the project and schools that, in fact, are municipal services that do not serve the local population. In response, Sales said that at no point did he claim the activities pictured on the website were directly linked to the local population.

“Let’s take a look at what’s going on at Purus,” Governor Tião Viana told an advisor in the presence of the Repórter Brasil team, after being informed about the existence of cattle at the headquarters. Although it is not directly associated with the state government, the project is hailed as a symbol and its flaws are another stain on the green economy.

O post Acre against Chico Mendes apareceu primeiro em Repórter Brasil.

Maria Madalena, a resident of the Ilha Mercês quilombo (maroon) community

“My parents and grandparents died here. How can Suape call us trespassers?” asks Maria Madalena da Silva, aged 65, a resident of the Ilha Mercês quilombo (maroon) community where 90% of the population live off farming and fishing. She knows the answer. The construction of the Suape Industrial Port Complex, a mega-project covering 13,500 hectares on the south coast of the state of Pernambuco, began in 1978 on lands inhabited for generations by traditional communities.

By law, these residents have the right to stay. However, this is not the case for families that have lived there for over a century. More than 25,000 people lived in the region before the project began, according to data from the Suape Forum, an organization that offers assistance to local quilombo, riverside, fishing, shellfishing, coconut breaking and farming communities. Today, there are fewer than 7,000 and they are all treated like trespassers inside the traditional territory.

What has been responsible for the forced exodus, say the families, is the Governor Eraldo Gueiros Industrial Port Complex, better known as Suape. It is a mixed corporation with an estimated share capital of more than R$1.2 billion and the majority partner is the Pernambuco state government.

The petrochemical plant installed in the Suape Industrial Port Complex, in Pernambuco. Of the 25,000 people who used to live in the region, more than 18,000 have left

For the municipalities of Ipojuca and Cabo de Santo Agostinho, Suape serves as a port and a business hub, providing infrastructure on large plots for companies interested in expanding on the regional market or increasing their exports. These include Unilever, Fedex, Toyota, Deca, Campari, Pepsico and Solar Coca-Cola. The more than 100 companies installed in the complex exceed R$50 billion in private investments and employ more than 18,000 people, according to the government.

It was under the administration of former governor Eduardo Campos, who was killed in an aircraft accident in 2014, that the complex expanded and acquired the status of the “Engine of the Northeast”. The current governor is Paulo Câmara, the political protégé of Eduardo Campos. In January this year, the then state housing secretary Marcos Baptista took over as chairman of the complex and vice governor Raul Henry was made head of the state economic development department, which is responsible for Suape.

{ One of the houses demolished in the Ilha Mercês community. The case is being investigated by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office

The benefits publicized by Suape – income generation and employment coupled with environmental preservation – are posted on billboards around the industrial zones. But you don’t have to go far to find the direct impacts that are absent from the marketing of the complex.

Residents who resist tell of serious violations, including threats – sometimes with the use of guns – made by employees of the complex. They also talk about restrictions on access to the land, unauthorized charges and demolitions without warrants – and a number of other complaints. At least three traditional communities have filed complaints against Suape to the Federal Prosecutor’s Office.

“The state of Pernambuco, through the Suape company, is currently the leading violator of human rights in the country,” said Heitor Scalambrini, who has a PhD in energy and is the coordinator of the Suape Forum. Since it violates the UN Sustainable Development Goals, civil society organizations have chosen Suape as a symbolic case in Brazil. In the past, another complaint made it to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

A sign praises the alleged merits of Suape. More than 100 companies are installed there

A new report by the Getúlio Vargas Foundation that will be published in December cites Suape and Belo Monte as anti-examples of what Brazil should already have learned from the construction of large projects. “In both cases, the communities did not participate in the decision-making and there was no transparency in the resettlement of these populations,” said the lawyer Flavia Scabin, coordinator of the Research Group on Business and Human Rights at the Foundation.

Nearly forty years after its creation, the complex appears to be living up to its name. In the Tupi-Guarani language, Suape means crooked paths.

Pipelines run through people’s backyards in several communities. The population says it didn’t know the risks

A militia of ‘colonels’

Otacília Rodrigues da Silva’s house was destroyed by a storm two years ago. She says the security guards from Suape stopped her from building a new one

The memory of Otacília Rodrigues da Silva, who has white hair and a desolate look in her eyes, only fails when it comes to remembering her own age. A resident of the Ilha Mercês quilombo community, she can still hear the sound of the storm that knocked down the walls of her house two years ago. This is not her only trauma. “Suape says I can’t build another house. My greatest fear is dying without having my house back”. In tears, she shows us how she has been able to sleep since then: a 10-milligram pill of the tranquilizer Diazepam per day.

Just like Otacília, other families have also been prevented from rebuilding their own houses or from making renovations by the company’s security guards, which the population calls a militia. A video recorded earlier this year shows a resident pleading with the security guards not to tear down a recently built fence. It didn’t do any good. “They are unspeakably violent,” said Scalambrini, of the Suape Forum.

One neighbor of Divanilda Maria da Silva, aged 45, a resident of the Engenho Tiriri community, confronted Suape and was evicted. Her parents, aware that they had no choice, left before. They are still waiting for compensation to this day. “My mother had a huge plantation. She lost everything. It’s hard to explain. How can someone else understand if I can’t feel my own pain?” Vera Lúcia Melo, aged 48 and a leader of the Engenho Ilha community, entered the People Protection Program after she received threats. “They sent me the message that the people from Suape wanted my head.”

Vera Lúcia Melo, aged 48, entered the People Protection Program after she received threats from Suape employees

Repórter Brasil had access to 22 police reports filed against Suape. Among the accusations are property damage and threats. The witnesses claim that security guards were working together with employees from the municipal government of Cabo de Santo Agostinho and even with armed military personnel from GATI, a tactical battalion that specializes in high-risk missions. Despite all the complaints, the residents say the number is under-reported because some police officers refuse to make the report – which is illegal.

Romero Correia da Fonseca is inspection supervisor at Suape, but residents say he is the head of the militia who controls the security guards. Two companies are responsible for surveillance at the Complex: TKS Segurança and Liserve, which together have 260 men. According to testimonies, Fonseca goes into the communities armed and asks to be called “chief” or “colonel”.

The website of the Pernambuco state Judiciary features at least ten investigations against this employee of Suape. Our reporters contacted the Civil Police, the Military Police and the Army to check his background in these institutions. But the name Fonseca does not appear in any of the databases. In a statement, Suape informed that his job is “only to receive information from the field inspectors.”

Fonseca reports to Sebastião Pereira Lima, the Land and Property Management Officer at Suape. Although he is also called “colonel” – even on the website of the Pernambuco State Legislature – Lima is a second lieutenant in the Army, four ranks below colonel. Our reporters requested information from the Army on the background of the Suape officer. However, it told us that the information cannot be disclosed under the Freedom of Information Law. The request was refused. We have appealed the denial.

Repórter Brasil had access to 22 police reports filed against Suape. The photo shows the port area of the Complex that covers 13,500 hectares

In a statement, Suape said that it condemns “the use of violence against the native families in the region”, that its employees do not carry weapons when they are working and that the demolitions only occur after agreements are approved in court.

Liserve is also named in one of the police reports. The company is run by the businessman Agostinho Rocha Gomes, a board member of the Business Leaders Group (LIDE) founded by the mayor of São Paulo, João Dória.

By email, the lawyer for Liserve, Emmanuel Correia, denied the charges against the company and informed that the work of Liserve’s employees is to supervise the 170 guards of TKS Segurança.

The Suape Complex, however, informed that the employees of Liserve do indeed inspect the territory, in addition to supervising the security guards. Later on, by telephone, the Liserve lawyer admitted that the employees photograph the houses of “trespassers” or those of residents who put extensions on their houses. Correia said that the guards never get involved in problems with residents, that he was unaware of the accusations and that he would look into the cases. When contacted again, he did not reply before the publication of this article.

The civil inquiry opened by the State Public Prosecutor’s Office to determine the existence of a militia in the Complex was shelved by the prosecutor Janaína do Sacramento Bezerra. Our reporters attempted to contact the Prosecutor’s Office on several occasions up until the time of publication, but were not successful. In a statement, the communication office of the Civil Police denied the accusations and refused to comment on the involvement of GATI in the operations. It said that besides the investigation by DECCOT (Bureau for Combating Crimes Against the Tax Order), another one is underway on the alleged Suape militia. The municipal government of Cabo Santo Agostinho did not respond until the publication of this article.

Quilombo under threat

Residents of Ilha Mercês recovered memories of the community to obtain federal recognition as a quilombo community

“I may not be able to read, but I know how to speak,” said Maria Madalena da Silva, a 65-year-old shellfisher and farmer. There is no serenity in the blue eyes of the sexagenarian who said she was brought up working from an early age and with sackcloth for clothes. Just like other areas around the complex, the community where Silva was born and raised is also the subject of a dispute with Suape. And like so many communities scattered around the country, Ilha Mercês recovered its forgotten identity in search of protection.

Thanks to the matriarch’s memories, residents came together and restored fragments of the community’s history: a pestle used to grind coffee, the flour mill of a former resident, an old abandoned slave quarters, the birth certificate of a freed slave and the baobab, a large tree native to Africa around which people would celebrate. In October 2016, the Palmares Cultural Foundation, which reports to the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, officially recognized the area as the Ilha Mercês Quilombo Community.

In the Ilha Mercês quilombo, residents subsist on fishing and farming

In theory, the federal recognition should protect the community from encroachment by Suape, but this is not what has happened. In September 2017, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office and the Federal Public Defender’s Office recommended to Suape that it suspend its intrusions into the community without the consent of the residents, its attempts to purchase land, its bans on the renovation of houses and its unauthorized charges. None of the recommendations were followed.

The Rota do Atlântico Concessionaire, for example, the company that manages the roads leading to the quilombo, still charges tolls from some residents who should all be exempt from this charge. “Anyone who resists the company is made to pay the toll,” said Silva’s son, José Reis da Silva, aged 45 and a leader of the quilombo. When asked, the company said that it fully complies with the conditions established by the Pernambuco state government.

Babobá, a large tree native to Africa around which people would celebrate.

Suape informed that “it is engaged in dialogue with the authorities involved in order to adjust its provisions to the reality of the region”.

Eminent risk

Joana Silva, a resident of the Serraria community

The memories of the land where the quinquagenarian Mario Francisco Silva was born and raised, like his great-grandfather, are under threat. A rickety barbed wire fence separates the Massangana community, home to farmers and extractivists, from a thermal power plant run by Energética Suape II S/A, one of the companies installed inside the Complex.

“One of the walls of my house collapsed and when we asked for help, they told us to contact Suape,” said Silva incredulously. Just like in the other houses in the community, the cracks in the walls, he explained, are caused by the operation of the thermal power plant. “When all the turbines are turned on, it feels like the house is going to fall down.”

There is also no shortage of medical reports of respiratory problems, allergies, fainting and lack of appetite – all caused by the gases that are expelled from smokestacks, say the residents. Installed 10 kilometers from the tourist destination of Porto de Galinhas, Suape II is the largest oil-fired thermal power plant in Brazil and its gas emissions contribute to the greenhouse effect.

The bad smell reaches the communities neighboring the plant, such as Serraria. The 22-year-old daughter of Francine Maria dos Santos Silva gives the warning: “Mom, I can smell gas in the yard”. It also leaves a bad taste in the back of your throat.

By email, Suzana Wolf Jordão de Barros, of the legal department of Suape Energia, told us that “properties occupied by a single family in the area around the project are the responsibility” of Suape.

In practice, say the residents, the companies installed in the Complex exempt themselves from any co-responsibility for the environmental and social impacts. Our reporters visited four houses in the community of Massangana. Disregarding the way of life of the traditional populations, where families live on adjoining land, is not exclusive to the thermal power plant. Suape does the same thing, say the residents.

In the community where Francine Maria dos Santos Silva lives, Suape and the municipal government closed the school without consulting the residents

To undermine the resistance of the communities, the Suape Forum lawyer Luisa Duque said community leaders are now being criminalized. Melo, from Engenho Ilha, is one of them. This year, she was accused of subdividing land and selling plots where she lives. She denies it. The investigation against Melo and other leaders is being conducted by DECCOT. The same thing happened in Massangana.

When contacted, the state government, through its press relations agency, denied the interview request, since it said Suape had already sent a statement with clarifications. The statement [available here in full], however, did not answer the questions.

Survival is harder

The complaints against Suape made it to the UN this year

“Before, I used to catch 40 crabs in an hour’s work. These days, it takes me all day to catch five or six. The only reason we don’t go hungry is because we help each other out,” said the shellfisher Divanilda Maria da Silva about the environmental impacts that have affected life in the communities.

In the Ilha Mercês quilombo, the mangroves have rust colored stains and fruit trees have died – the result, say residents, of a project in the Port of Suape. Making it harder to survive on the land, said Magno Manuel de Araújo, a quilombo leader, is another strategy of Suape. “They (Suape) shut off the river and sea so we die of hunger.”

The lawyer Caio Borges, from the human rights organization Conectas, also visited the Complex recently. I heard a number of questions from the residents that have still not been answered. “Where does the sewage go from all the companies installed here?” and “How much diesel contamination is there in the sea from the ships in the port?” are two of them. The environmental impact studies that have been conducted are clearly flawed, said Borges, and there are no studies on the cumulative impacts.

Plate reveals what reaches the mangrove, effluents (liquid waste or sewage discharged into a river or the sea)

The Pernambuco State Environment Agency, responsible for environmental licensing, issued 26 notices of infraction against the Suape Complex between 2010 and 2014 for environmental irregularities – 17 were fines. Between 2008 and 2010, the federal environmental watchdog Ibama applied fines totaling nearly R$2 million, according to a statement from the institution. Of this amount, R$105,000 has been paid and the rest “is under administrative analysis”.

The director of the agency, Walber Santana, played down his ability to ensure that the complex observes environmental regulations. Since 2011, he said, the state agency has required offsetting measures from Suape for an area of 1,075 hectares and the creation of two conservation units. Asked about the impacts observed by the reporters, Santana said officials from the agency monitor the region frequently and residents can file complaints with the Ombudsman’s Office. Although he promised to send us documentation, Santana did not send any until the time of publication.

In a statement, Suape said that “investments [in environmental policies] are in line with an environmental and social sustainability policy in place in the region” and that the “Ecological Preservation Zone occupies 59% of the territory”.

From island to asphalt

Fishermen who lived on Tatuoca Island were transferred to a housing project far from the sea

The expansion of Suape that had the most impact on local fishing communities was the deepening of the channel at the port, the construction of the Promar and Atlântico Sul shipyards and the siltation of Tatuoca Island. More than 80 families were removed from the island to make way for progress – those who refused were evicted. These residents, who made a living fishing and farming, currently live far from the sea and they have no land to farm in Vila Nova Tatuoca, a housing project built by the federal government’s Minha Casa, Minha Vida (My House, My Life) social housing program. There aren’t even any trees in the streets. They accuse Suape and the company Diagonal − Transformação de Territórios, which was contracted to handle the resettlement, of lying or omitting information.

One of the promises was that every resident would receive the deed for their new house within two weeks. But this wasn’t what they received. Edson Antônio da Silva, aged 45, said employees from Diagonal and from Suape tried to mislead them with a right of use contract proposed by Suape. His uncle signed the document with his thumbprint. In practice, the contract states that the resident has a license from Suape to use the house without making any improvements to the residency, while it also permits the company to make internal inspections without authorization.

International organizations, such as Conectas, say that Suape did not take the way of life of the traditional communities into consideration

In the life of one family, the impact has been immeasurable. One of the matriarchs returned to the island and shortly afterwards committed suicide. “The way of life of these populations was not observed, respected or reestablished. Not even the minimum was done to guarantee their economic and social livelihood,” said Borges, the lawyer from Conectas. From among the eighty or so resettled families, only eight people are employed, said Silva.

In a statement, Suape said it is unaware of any such complaint and that Diagonal-Ceplan “has no authority to make promises on behalf of Suape”. Diagonal, meanwhile, informed that “the company did not make ‘promises’ but instead advised the community, as provided for in the contract.”

In the rainy season, streets turn into rivers. In the rich neighborhoods, the situation is different

According to Silva, just over a month ago Romero da Fonseca – the employee who likes to be called ‘chief’ or ‘colonel’ – was in Vila Nova Tatuoca to tell them they would be transferred to Vila Claudete, another housing project with 2,675 40-square-meter houses in rows, located in the outskirts of Cabo de Santo Agostinho, the tenth most violent city in the country. “This is why Suape and Diagonal did not give us the deed to the house,” said Silva.

In a statement, Suape informed that it offered the residents the definitive use of the property, which “grants all rights to the resettled families, except the right to sell the property”. Suape did not comment on the other unkept promises.

This year, Suape offered fishermen and women from one of the three existing associations the chance to go back and fish in off-limits areas of the port, as permitted by Brazilian law, provided they accepted a “private fishing license”, which is illegal since only the federal government can issue this permit. “Is it fair to the other fishermen and women? No. But what else can we do to keep from starving?” asked one of the fishermen who accepted the offer. Suape was asked about this, but its statement did not address the issue of the fishing license.

Four institutions – two national and the two international organizations Conectas and Both Ends – denounced Suape and the Dutch company Van Oord, which was contracted to dredge the port, to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Our survey found that Suape violated a series of international rights before, during and after its construction,” said Caio Borges, of Conectas. It is the first time that a company installed in the complex has been held accountable for the damages.

The Pernambuco state government, which is the majority partner of Suape, built another housing project, with 40-square-meter houses, to accommodate the displaced families. Whole communities resisted the move

In the Netherlands, the complaint also affected the company Atradius Dutch State Business, which had granted more than R$400 million in credit to Van Oord to carry out the construction works. The complaint claims that Van Oord failed by not “engaging in responsible consultations with all the affected families” and by not being transparent about the impact of the works on the communities and the environment. Contacted several times, Van Oord informed that “the parties in this process are engaged in a mediation process that is subject to confidentiality.”

While complaints of violations committed by Suape find their way to the UN, Unesco, the educational arm of the UN, signed a R$1.3 million international technical cooperation agreement with Suape and the state government in 2016. In the agreement, it states that the environmental oversight programs and the inspection activities are systematized. When contacted, Unesco said that the technical support “does not involve any direct action of Unesco in the day-to-day management of Suape”.

If on the one hand the crooked paths of Suape still affect the daily life of nearly 7,000 people, on the other hand, the threats they suffered have united them. Together, they want to show Brazil the invisible marks of progress in Pernambuco and defend the right to live on the lands where their ancestors grew up.

Suape did not build a retaining wall on the embankment in Nova Tatuoca, say the residents. There is a risk of collapse

Translated by Barney Whiteoak

O post The crooked paths of Suape apareceu primeiro em Repórter Brasil.

Even with the company’s name included in the “dirty list” of slave labor, a group of farms belonging to Succítrico Cutrale received one of the most important socio-environmental certifications in the world: Rainforest Alliance’s “good practices” seal.

The certification – one of the core requirements for exporting orange juice to the European market – was granted by Rainforest Alliance after the process was challenged by another certifier group – Brazilian organization Imaflora.

The seal is especially important for Cutrale, one of the world’s largest orange juice traders. According to the company, 98% of its production is exported to countries in North America, Europe and Asia. The Rainforest Alliance seal is respected worldwide and is identified by a frog. Its campaigns encourage the habit of consuming products that bear the frog on their labels. While consumers would pay more for it, they would be sure to buy a product that values ​​environmental protection, social equality, and economic viability. The campaign’s motto is “Follow the Frog”.

Luís Fernando Guedes Pinto, Imaflora’s agricultural certification manager, explains that Cutrale’s inclusion in the “dirty list” was the reason why his organization challenged the recommendation. The list is released by Brazil’s Ministry of Labor and includes companies that were caught using slave labor.

After Imaflora’s refusal, Rainforest Alliance did something unusual in certification processes and unprecedented in the company’s policy in Brazil: it authorized replacing the certifier during the certification process: Imaflora was replaced with IBD, which then granted the certificate.

Rainforest Alliance’s senior manager global media Donita Dooley said the organization’s evaluation standards include “a critical criterion prohibiting all forms of forced, compulsory, or slave labor”. The seal’s standards, however, include no obstacles that are specific to the dirty list of slave labor.

Therefore, since March this year, Cutrale is the only company included in the list of slave labor that markets products under the Rainforest Alliance seal, according to the organization.

Asked about it, Cutrale argued that the farms certified are not in the slave list. In a statement released by its press office, the company says it has received the certification “of the Rainforest Alliance Seal for having demonstrated to the companies accredited and qualified to carry out audits that it complies with all the requirements contained in the current standard”.

Cutrale exports 98% of it’s production to North America, Europe and Asia

Although all farms officially belong to Cutrale, the certified properties are not the same as those where slave labor was found. Cutrale is included in the “dirty list” due to problems found in 2013 at the Vale Verde and Portal farms, in the Triângulo Mineiro area, while the certified farms are located in Araraquara, state of São Paulo, and the audit was carried out in 2017.

Rainforest Alliance’s website lists four certifications granted to Cutrale’s farms and farm groups: two of them were awarded in March this year (included the one challenged by Imaflora) and others were granted in 2015 and 2017.

Does slave labor matter?

Pinto was one of the auditors in the process conducted by Imaflora. He points out that Cutrale’s inclusion in the dirty list prompted the refusal of the seal. “It’s a contradiction for a company to be granted recognition for sustainability by a certifier while it is included in Brazil’s most important list of bad socio-environmental practices. It is a disservice to society and the market”, he says.

The “dirty list” of slave labor was created in 2003 and it is a database on companies caught exploiting workers in situations analogous to slavery. Cutrale entered the list in November 2017, according to a document leaked by the press before official disclosure.

Rainforest Alliance says that the request for replacement came from Cutrale. IBD directors Luís Henrique Witzler and Alexandre Harkaly informed Repórter Brasil that they had been approached by Cutrale to take over the certification process and, since the situation was unprecedented, they sought to know the stance of Rainforest Alliance, which would have authorized IBD to move forward with the process.

Cutrale’s farm worker photographed by the Regional Prosecution Office

The IBD directors say there are no obstacles to certification because the farms are different. According to Witzler, “from [their] point of view, each farm is a different company because it has its own manager, its HR team, its management. The certification is granted tor farms, not groups”.

Harkaly also stressed that certification is a “tool for change”: “We consider it a mission to enter into management processes that are not clear and making them transparent. It’s natural that a company seeking certification begins to undergo changes”.

Following Repórter Brasil’s inquiries, however, the IBD directors stated that they will open an internal audit process to re-evaluate the certification granted to Cutrale’s farms.

Asked again about the importance of the dirty list on the national scene, Dooley stated that the Rainforest Alliance “realize the importance of the list and agree it can be a valuable tool to drive positive change”.

She argues that the seal encourages companies to improve their practices: “The fact that this company now has a certified farm means that change is possible – it is our hope they can use this farm as a model for bringing the rest of their farms into compliance. We state often that certification of itself cannot solve any country’s entrenched socioeconomic problems”.

Cutrale seeks a way out of the list

Companies in the “dirty list” of slave labor can reach settlements with the government to get out of it. They must establish commitments for change by signing the so-called Conduct Adjustment Agreements. They then enter an observation list which they might leave after one year, provided they have fulfilled their responsibilities.

Cutrale did not make that agreement. Instead, the company tries to overturn the decision in court.

Asked about the steps it is taking to be excluded from the list, Cutrale only replied that “it challenges its inclusion for such a serious charge, with which it does not agree” and that “it is taking steps to remedy, to overcome, such an unfair inclusion”.

The company’s press release mentions its 50 years of operation in the market and states that it has more than 21 thousand employees “legally registered during harvest season”, “who, in addition to labor rights, receive benefits under collective labor agreements signed in the several municipalities where it operates”.

O post Included in the dirty list, Cutrale still has farms certified with “good practice” seal apareceu primeiro em Repórter Brasil.

It is in the arid forests of the Chaco, a rich environment naturally adapted to the intense heat and the scarcity of water, that the Paraguayan government plans to consolidate the country as the world’s slaughterhouse. Driven by Brazilian investors, the State’s long-term agenda was pushed forward by the outgoing president Horacio Cartes – himself a big rancher in this biome that once used to cover more than half the land in the country. Over the course of the next decade, the goal is to create a herd of 20 million head of cattle, or three times the Paraguayan population.

Brazilian money is crucial to this process, not only from meat processing companies but also from ranchers who are drawn to the land due to it’s cheap price. To understand the scale of the influence on the smaller neighboring economy, the two largest meat packing companies operating in Paraguay are Brazilian and they are responsible for nearly 70% of the country’s beef exports.

First rescue of workers from slave labor conditions in Chaco’s history occurred in November last year. Photo: Paraguay’s Public Prosecutor’s Office

Although they are of concern to environmental and indigenous organizations, the large-scale investments indicate that the Brazilian meat industry has come to the Chaco to stay. Based in Barretos, in the state of São Paulo, the Minerva group – which in 2013 received an investment of US$85 million from the IFC (International Finance Corporation), an arm of the World Bank, to expand its business in Paraguay – is now the market leader, followed by the company Concepción, which is owned by the Brazilian businessman Jair Antonio de Lima.

In 2017, Minerva reported record revenues of R$12.1 billion. The historic result is partly due to the acquisition in July last year of nine units of the Brazilian company “JBS”, the world’s largest animal protein processor, in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Over the past five years, Minerva has been increasing its network of suppliers and acquiring meat packing plants in South America. In June this year, the market was unsettled by rumors of a possible merger with another leading Brazilian meat company: BRF, the owner of the brands Sadia and Perdigão. To date, the tie-up between the two groups has not been confirmed.

The cattle farming business in Paraguay has been growing at a pace as striking as the advance of illegal deforestation and reports of forced labor involving indigenous people, including children. As a result of this, the local government and the productive sector have come under mounting pressure to keep a close eye on the Chaco region, the western part of the country where cattle farming has been expanding in recent years. Although it covers nearly 60% of the Paraguayan national territory, an area equivalent to the Brazilian state of São Paulo, the Chaco is home to just 3% of the country’s population.

“The Chaco is today the ecoregion that is suffering the most devastation in the world,” said Alberto Yanosky, executive director of the environmental organization Guyra. “We are cutting down original forests to produce beef,” he added.

In addition to the rich biodiversity, Chaco’s vegetation is very resistant to the high temperatures and the scarcity of water typical from the region. Photo: Repórter Brasil

Deforestation peaked in November last year. Over the course of the month, a remarkable average of 2,000 hectares of native vegetation was cleared each day – the equivalent of 2,600 Maracanã soccer stadiums. According to satellite surveillance conducted by Guyra, at least a third of the Chaco has already been transformed into grasslands to feed half of all Paraguay’s cattle population.

On the subject of working conditions, the news is just as discouraging. In September, the United Nations is expected to release a much-awaited report on forced labor and debt bondage among indigenous communities in the region. In addition to the recurring complaints by unions and social movements, the few inspections that have been conducted recently have set off warning signals.

“The authorities have always tried to hide these shortcomings,” criticized Melanio Morel, director of the union CUT-Autêntica. “The Ministry of Labor has not taken any effective measures to solve the problem,” he added.

“The Chaco is today the ecoregion that is suffering the most devastation in the world,” said Alberto Yanosky, executive director of the environmental organization Guyra

The contractor discount food and workplace material costs from the worker’s wages, said Isabelino Bogado, Guarani-Ñandeva community leader. Photo: Repórter Brasil

Indeed, the first inspection in the history of the Chaco which rescued indigenous workers from forced labor took place in November 2016. A group of 35 indigenous people were found producing charcoal in inhumane conditions at a cattle ranch in the department of Boquerón, in the north of the country. In a climate where temperatures can reach up to 50 degrees, the workers were not given access to drinking water and they were only rescued after a call for help was submitted to Paraguay’s Public Prosecutor’s Office.

“I can’t say for sure that this is happening at all the farms in the Chaco. But whenever a complaint is inspected, this is what we find,” said Teresa Martinez, a prosecutor at the Public Prosecutor’s Office responsible for rescuing the 35 workers.

Slavery

Located 450 kilometers from the capital, Asunción, the town of Filadelfia is the entry point to the Chaco. It was founded nearly 90 years ago by Mennonite, Christian and Protestant colonists who migrated from Europe and settled in the western portion of Paraguay. The town is the headquarters of one of the three Mennonite cooperatives that drive the local economy – consisting of meat, dairy and leather processing plants – and that create the most jobs in the Chaco.

In March this year, the Paraguayan Ministry of Labor opened an office in the center of Filadelfia specifically to receive complaints from indigenous people who work in the region’s cattle ranches. The official in charge is Erundina Gómez, an indigenous woman whose father “worked for 20 years at a farm and never got paid a dime”.

“The indigenous people earn little, work hard, eat little and don’t sleep well. There’s not enough water. This happens everywhere. And everyone knows it”, said indigenous community leader

According to Gómez, the office does not have the capacity to make field trips nor the autonomy to conduct on-site checks of irregularities. This is because, in Paraguay, government inspectors can only enter farms with a court order. As such, the workers not only have to go to the office in Filadelfia to personally file a complaint, but they also have to give their boss the official notice summoning the employer to provide explanations.

Already a third of Chaco’s territory was turned into grasslands. The government’s goal is to reach a cattle livestock of 20 million. Photo: Repórter Brasil

“The Ministry has not invested anything [in this office],” criticized Gómez. “I need to print my paperwork elsewhere.”

The most common complaints of the indigenous people heard by Repórter Brasil concern low wages, which are invariably below the legal minimum. It is common for temporary services, such as land clearing and fencing, to be offered by “contractors” – labor recruiters who usually pay the indigenous people a part up front and the rest when the work has been completed.

“The contractor charges for everything: boots, clothes, food. The workers have to pay for everything,” said Isabelino Bogado, a Guarani-Ñadeva community leader. “The indigenous people earn little, work hard, eat little and don’t sleep well. There’s not enough water. This happens everywhere. And everyone knows it,” he said. In the indigenous communities around Filadelfia, the complaints have been made primarily against the Mennonite colonists, most of whom are involved in cattle farming.

Patrick Friesen, communication manager at the Mennonite cooperative Chortitzer that is based in a town close to Filadelfia, said that the 6,500 members are instructed to operate in accordance with the country’s labor laws. The cooperative owns Trébol, the most popular brand of dairy products in Paraguay, and it also controls Frigo Chorti, the only beef processing plant located inside the Chaco itself. The majority of the plants operating in Paraguay are found in the area immediately surrounding the capital, Asunción.

“Some slept on mattresses on the ground, others on wooden boards. They hung a tarp from the trees to protect them from the sun”, said Teresa Martinez, from the Public Prosecutor’s Office

“The Chaco is very big. And the region where we are located may be very different from another located 400 kilometers from here, where business owners can employ people on their land under forced labor conditions or without proper payment,” said Friesen.

Far from the main urban centers of the Chaco, the first rescue of people working in slave labor conditions by the Paraguayan authorities, in November 2016, occurred in the northernmost part of the country, near the border with Bolivia. The owner of the ranch where 35 workers were rescued from slave labor conditions was a Mennonite colonist and a member of Chortitzer. He was convicted of the crime of human trafficking.

Exposed to temperatures of up to 50ºC, the workers did not have enough water or protection from the extreme heat. Photo: Paraguay’s Public Prosecutor’s Office

“The conditions are very precarious. Some slept on mattresses on the ground, others on wooden boards. They hung a tarp from the trees to protect them from the sun,” said Teresa Martinez, from the Public Prosecutor’s Office, who coordinated the operation. “They were supposed to work for six months, but after three months they couldn’t take it anymore. Because they came from another region of the country, in the east, and they weren’t used to the climate of the Chaco and the lack of water,” she added.

The workers were Ache indigenous people recruited in their native community, some 800 kilometers from the farm where they were found filling charcoal kilns with the trunks of native trees – a process that generally precedes the planting of grassland for cattle raising.

Months after the rescue operation near the border with Bolivia, a second inspection found teenagers engaged once again in the production of charcoal, working in inhumane conditions. The prosecutor Teresa Martínez did not hesitate to claim that, if more inspections were made, new cases of slave labor would almost certainly come to light. “Things are not changing. And they need to change,” she said.

Risk investment

Unlike the Mennonite colonists historically settled in the Chaco, who mostly farm medium-sized estates of around 400 hectares, Brazilian ranchers who invest in land in the region generally acquire properties up to 30 times larger.

Coal burners were loaded with native trees by indigenous people of the Ache community. Photo Paraguay’s Public Prosecutor’s Office

In addition to the Mennonites and the Brazilian investors, the region has also attracted Argentine and Uruguayan cattle farmers. “The price of land in the Chaco has risen 4,000% over the past decade,” said Alberto Yanosky, the executive director of Guyra. “We secured a conservation unit for ourselves about ten years ago and we paid US$20 per hectare [equivalent to 10,000 square meters]. Today, this same land is worth US$800 per hectare,” he said.

The cattle boom in the Chaco has attracted the attention of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Last year, the agency published an extensive monitoring report on the environmental and social impacts of the US$85 million investment that the World Bank, via the IFC, made in May 2013 in Minerva to expand the Brazilian company’s business in Paraguay.

“Large beef exporters, such as Minerva, operate under strict sanitary controls,” said the USAID report. “There is, however, limited-to-no experience of large beef processors in Paraguay applying environmental and social criteria in supply chain management”. The report points out that the investment in Minerva was classified as Risk A – the highest category, according to the IFC’s own standards. Among the potential negative impacts highlighted in the report are precisely a rise in environmental devastation, an increase in cases of forced labor and the encroachment of cattle farming on indigenous lands.

Four years after the approval of the IFC financing, the USAID technical staff concluded that there are still no concrete mechanisms in place to guarantee that cattle purchased from producers in the Chaco have not grazed on illegally deforested land or to make sure that indigenous workers are not subjected to slave labor conditions.

With the purchase of the JBS’s meat processing plants, Minerva took the top spot of meat exporters in the country. Photo Repórter Brasil

As exports increase, so does the pressure to improve the “traceability” of beef from the Chaco. “We are aware that international buyers want to know and to be confident about the legitimacy of their product,” said Patrick Friesen, the manager at the Mennonite cooperative that controls Frigo Chorti, Paraguay’s third largest exporter. “But we need to accept that Paraguay’s branding is in the hands not only of the private sector, but also of the government,” he added.

Repórter Brasil submitted a number of questions to Minerva on its operations in Paraguay, including whether the company has acquired cattle from farmers charged with using forced labor in the Chaco. However, through its press relations agency, the company said it would not comment.

The IFC, questioned, sent us a note saying that the corporation “believes that the path to a sustainable cattle sector in Paraguay is to develop market driven strategies to increase productivity on already cleared land, while protecting the remaining forest in private hands. ” and that they are “currently working with Minerva to improve its supply chain management in Paraguay to achieve best industry practices over time; the company is also engaged in an ongoing process seeking continuous improvement of its environmental and social practices in all geographies it operates”. To read the entire response, click here.

This journalistic investigation was made possible with the support of Ituc (International Trade Union Confederation)

O post Brazilian meat industry encroaches on Paraguayan Chaco apareceu primeiro em Repórter Brasil.

ANAPU, Pará state, Brazil – “Dorothy lives!” shouts a student with his fist clenched. Another ten people repeat the gesture and shout: “Always!” The cries of protest close a prayer held round the grave of Dorothy Stang, the U.S. missionary murdered in 2005 in the struggle for Brazilian land reform here in the Brazilian Amazon.

The prayer precedes the second court hearing of Father José Amaro Lopes de Souza, known as Father Amaro. The priest says he relies on his faith to give him strength in the face of yet another round of court charges in a legal drama he’s been enduring since last March.

The priest is Stang’s successor and a member of the Land Pastoral Commission (CPT), an arm of the Catholic Church that works with Brazilian rural workers seeking agrarian land reform. He is charged with conspiracy, threat, extortion, property trespass and money laundering, all in connection with his allegedly being the leader of a criminal organization aimed at occupying land in Anapu in the Xingu basin of Pará state in the Amazon.

These serious charges were made by the president of the Rural Association of Anapu, Silvério Fernandes, a logger and former deputy mayor of the city of Altamira, who ran unsuccessfully for state deputy in the October elections. At that time, Fernandes was also a chief campaigner in the region for then presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who in turn, recorded a video supporting Fernandes’s candidacy.

After Bolsonaro’s win, Fernandes appeared on local Xingu billboards hugging the president elect, with a message thanking voters for their support. As a reward, it is rumored that Fernandes is in line to head the Xingu, Pará, branch of the Brazilian Institute for Settlement and Land Reform (INCRA), which oversees the workers settlements that Father Amaro has helped support in the region.

In addition to being investigated for his participation in a scheme to defraud the federal government known as the SUDAM Mafia in the late 1990s, Fernandes and two of his brothers received R$28.2 million (US$7.2 million) in fines for environmental crimes. “IBAMA [Brazil’s environmental agency] is an industry of fines,” the logger says in his own defense, echoing the rhetoric of the President-elect, who was also fined in the past by IBAMA for an environmental crime, illegal fishing.

Charges and counter-charges

“He is the main organizer of land invasions in Anapu. Father Amaro was behind it all. He was Sister Dorothy’s right hand, and she always encouraged land invasions,” Fernandes says.

Father Amaro denies the allegations: If I did anything wrong it was to direct people to seek their rights at the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Public Defender’s Office and other agencies, because people were often threatened, they were killed and nothing happened.… If I’ve done anything wrong, it was to help put land in the hands of the workers.”

The charges made by Fernandes and other local loggers and landowners led to a police investigation and a dramatic arrest last March of the priest that involved six vehicles and 15 officers. The operation was even given a name: Eça de Queiroz, a reference to a Portuguese writer whose masterpiece The Crime of Father Amaro is about a clergyman’s illicit relationship with a woman. The Xingu Father Amaro was also accused of sexual harassment, a charge that has since been dismissed by prosecutors.

“Instead of murdering him, they [Fernandes and other residents] found a way to discredit him [Father Amaro] by attacking his image and criminalizing him to drive him from Anapu,” the CPT wrote in a statement, comparing the landowners’ current smear campaign strategy with the one conducted against Dorothy Stang in the early 2000s.

An unfolding dispute

It is still early, but already very hot: a typical day in the Amazon biome. The red dust rising from the roads, and the white smoke from burning rainforest, obscure the blue of the sky above. The smoke causes an inevitable sensation of suffocation in outsiders. Near Dorothy’s grave – adorned with flowers and her photo – a red cross is thrust into the ground. It bears the names of 16 rural workers who have been murdered in the last three years in Anapu, a dark reflection on the region’s escalation of violence.

Stang was assassinated, shot six times, in 2005 while on the road to her major legacy, the PDS Esperança, a Portuguese acronym for the Sustainable Development Project Hope – an Amazon land reform effort that settled small-scale farmers onto plots, with 20 percent of the land intended for agricultural production while the remainder was conserved as forest under Brazil’s Forest Code. That system went – and continues to go – against the interests of Xingu-area loggers.

Supporters of Stang and Amaro say that 13 years ago loggers took aim at Sister Dorothy, and now they target her successor.

At the Anapu courthouse, 51-year-old Father Amaro reads a small book, The Liturgy of the Hours, while the prosecutor questions defense witnesses. Amaro wears a shirt emblazoned with Stang’s photo. The priest didn’t speak at this hearing because he wasn’t to be questioned until later. Amaro seemed calm in court but admitted afterward that he distanced himself emotionally from the proceeding, viewing it as he would a movie.

Amaro first dedicated himself to rural workers and their land rights at the age of 19, after hearing a radio report covering the murder of Father Josimo Tavares, then the CPT coordinator in neighboring Maranhão state. Amaro decided then and there to become a priest and work in the same organization as Tavares. “I didn’t even know what the CPT was,” he recalls.

Three years later, Amaro went on to study at the seminary in Belém. There he met Stang, who invited him to do an internship in Anapu. After being ordained priest in 1998, he went to the local parish and worked with Stang at the CPT until she was murdered.

Father Amaro himself was released from jail in late June. He has since left Anapu and now lives at the church’s headquarters in Altamira, surrounded by security guards. Feeling always threatened, he complains of not being able to walk by himself and shows distress at the uncertainty surrounding his future.

In an interview with Repórter Brasil, the first since his 2018 arrest, Amaro blames Fernandes for the ordeal of recent months. He adds that, after the wrongful lawsuit is concluded against him, that he plans to file a countersuit against his attackers, asking for compensation for the psychological pain and suffering that the false accusations have caused. “Did you see how people treat me in Anapu?” he asks, referring to the hugs he received from the local population when he walked out of the courthouse. The case’s conclusion isn’t expected until 2019, and not before Father Amaro and other witnesses have testified.

Land, the source of Amazon conflict

By the time he was released from jail in June, Father Amaro had served 92 days, all of them in the same prison where Regivaldo Pereira Galvão, aka Taradão (Portuguese for Big Pervert) was doing time; he is the rancher convicted of masterminding Stang’s assassination.

“I suspect they set it up [putting me in that particular prison] to kill me in jail,” says the priest.

Local authorities made no attempt to hold the two men separately. “When I got there Taradão was inside. He was the first to wish me a Happy Easter,” Father Amaro revealed. “I didn’t say anything and I didn’t even shake his hand. He [Taradão] said, ‘You’re innocent. I’m innocent. This was something they’ve set up for us.’”

Like so many other killings in the Brazilian Amazon, Dorothy Stang’s murder was motivated by land disputes. Pereira Galvão bought a plot from the Fernandes family. However, that property was already part of the land reform project advocated for by Stang. Then Pereira Galvão sold the plot to logger Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura, aka Bida. Later, according to authorities, Bida and Pereira Galvão teamed up to arrange Stang’s 2005 murder.

After the crime, Pereira Galvão hid on the farm belonging to Silvério Fernandes’s brother Délio. Although Délio was also investigated for allegedly masterminding the crime, he was never charged or tried for participating in Stang’s assassination, even though he had supposedly threatened the nun in 2002. Délio Fernandes once offered Stang a ride, and reportedly told her that no one should ever invade his lands or they “would have blood to their ankles.”

During a telephone interview with Repórter Brasil, which lasted more than half an hour, Silvério Fernandes spoke mostly in a polite tone, though raised his voice several times. At one point, he declared menacingly that he wanted to “look in the eye,” presumably of the inquiring journalist. When asked if Fernandes was making a threat, he replied: “What threat? F__k you, lad.” Fernandes also directed anger at Father Amaro, who he called “a pederast, a fagot and a bum.”

“The Fernandes family is part of the consortium that killed Dorothy,” Father Amaro told Repórter Brasil, noting that the family is responsible for the charges he now faces. “They claim to be the owners of these lands. What makes them angry? It’s that the PDS [settlement] was created within the area Délio Fernandes had sold to Taradão.”

Inside Anapu

Despite its small population of just 27,000 people, Anapu is larger than some countries, including Jamaica and Qatar. The population there has soared by 32 percent in the last eight years, a demographic boom caused by its proximity, just 80 kilometers (50 miles) away from the controversial Belo Monte mega-dam. With the conclusion of the dam’s construction in 2015, hundreds of families, without jobs or prospects, came to Anapu in search of homes, work and land.

“Many families arrive and are pressured by loggers to invade [established workers’] settlements,” explained Jorge Jatobá Correia, Brazil’s national agrarian ombudsman.

The influx of people hunting for land helped ignite already smoldering disputes between land reform settlers and illegal loggers. Those conflicts had their origins back in the 1970s when Brazil’s military government invited outsiders to settle along the new Trans-Amazon Highway. The government offered provisional land titles that depended on the properties’ production for the deeds to become permanent.

However, in most cases, the land neither became productive, nor were the provisional titles ever cancelled. Eventually the outsiders began selling the properties. The main buyers – including the Fernandes patriarch and his sons – turned to logging, cutting down the rainforest, extracting and selling timber.

It was in this context that Dorothy Stang arrived in Anapu in 1983 and began fighting for the possession of that same land as eventually justified by Brazilian agrarian reform policies. In 2003, during the administration of President Lula da Silva, the first agrarian reform settlements in the area became official. Stang was murdered less than three years later.

After her assassination, international pressure resulted in a stronger Brazilian government presence in Anapu, which provided some respite from the conflicts. But, the Belo Monte dam’s completion and the surge in unemployed construction workers seeking livelihoods and land caused violence to explode again in 2015.

The clash over Lot 44

The escalation of the clashes, which resulted in the arrest of Father Amaro last Spring, has centered around Lot 44, also known as the Santa Maria Farm, an agrarian reform settlement covering an area equivalent to 3,000 football fields whose possession is disputed by the Fernandes family.

Although the Fernandes family continues to claim Lot 44 ownership, the Brazilian Institute for Settlement and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), and the Federal Prosecutor’s Office both requested the property be slated for agrarian reform – a request accepted by a federal justice in Altamira last August. The Fernandes family has appealed that decision.

In October 2016, the encampment of rural workers living on the property was burned, and Public Prosecutors charged Silvério and Luciano Fernandes with the crime. Asked about it on the phone, Silvério said he “demolished” the houses. “Lot 44 is ours. It’s ours!” exclaimed Fernandes, president of the Rural Association of Anapu, and possibly the next head of the Xingu, Pará, branch of INCRA, with authority over the settlements.

Márcio Rodrigues dos Reis, the primary accuser against the Fernandes brothers in the encampment fire, was himself arrested in March 2017 while trying to rebuild the camp at Lot 44. Reis was accused of trespassing and illegal possession of a firearm. Silvério Fernandes accompanied the police when they came to arrest Reis.

Another accuser of the Fernandes family, Valdemir Resplandes dos Santos, was murdered in January 2018. Two of his relatives have also been killed, as has a witness to the crime. Of the 16 murders of rural workers since 2015, police investigations have led to the arrest of suspects in just one case. Another 15 remain unsolved.

The CPT calls the Civil Police “inoperative” in their failure to identify, arrest and charge perpetrators. “The police act in a partial way, without hiding their proximity to the landowners and land-grabbers who illegally occupy public lands. The impunity of these crimes is one of the causes of continuing violence,” the Catholic organization says.

The press office of the Civil Police was asked to comment for this story, but failed to reply.

Bolsonaro enters the fray

Tensions between landless rural workers and illegal loggers were further fuelled by the May 19 murder in Anapu of Silvério Fernandes’s brother Luciano.

After his brother’s death, Silvério recorded a video asking for assistance from then presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. The shirt displayed in the film, stained with Luciano’s blood, was emblazoned with an image of retired army captain Bolsonaro, who has long expressed his opposition to the landless workers’ movement, and likened its participants to terrorists.

“We have to fight these land invaders, these criminals, these thugs. Anapu has become a place of thugs. You are our hope,” Silvério Fernandes said in the video, which went viral on social media among Bolsonaro supporters. Fernandes accuses Luciano’s murder on social movements, whose actions, he says, are locally led by Father Amaro.

This view, however, is not confirmed by the police investigation of the killing. According to the Chief of the Xingu Civil Police Superintendence Walison Damasceno, the motive behind Luciano Fernandes’ killing is allegedly a dispute between loggers. Damasceno, who is in charge of the nearly finished investigation, says the current crime suspects have no connection whatsoever with Brazil’s social movements.

A month after the murder, the police arrested a person alleged to have ordered the killing. Later, they also arrested Josiel Ferreira de Almeida, aka “The Booted Cat,” accused of acting as a middleman in the crime. In October, Almeida’s two sons were murdered in an Anapu bar.

When asked by Repórter Brasil if he had any involvement in the Almeida sons’ deaths, Silvério Fernandes denied it: “We don’t endorse this terrorism of taking anyone’s life. We are good people. We were defending our property. My brother was murdered and now I become a suspect?”

Instead of sacred images and a cross, the altar of the local church in Anapu displays a painting of a rural worker crucified on a cut tree. Sister Dorothy Stang and Father Josimo Tavares, both members of the CPT, both assassinated, stand on either side. The altar divides the town and even the church, since some parishioners want the painting replaced by a conventional altar.

Bolsonaro enters the frayThe Amazon: a tinder box, ready to explode

The disputes in Anapu echo ideological struggles between the left and the right that in recent years have polarized Brazil as a whole, and which some say helped put leading presidential Workers Party presidential candidate Lula behind bars, while catapulting far right candidate Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency.

Now analysts fear that these tensions, especially between Amazon land-grabbers and agrarian reform settlements, could explode into violence in 2019.

In Anapu, most believe that Silvério Fernandes will become the next head of the INCRA Xingu regional branch sometime after Bolsonaro takes office on 1 January. Asked about this possibility, Fernandes says he isn’t aware of it, but he did reveal his intentions if appointed: “I want to solve the land problem in the region. We came here to guarantee the sovereignty of the Amazon.” In his view, the 1970s land contracts need to be honored, whether their requirements were fulfilled or not, with the land settlements claimed by landless workers handed over to the outsiders.

The dream of accomplishing land reform in Anapu will be more distant if Fernandes is appointed as head of INCRA, according to 78-year-old Sister Jane Dwyer. Born in the United States, she decided to become a missionary when she participated in the historic 1963 March on Washington led by Martin Luther King. Dwyer is still active in the struggle for land democratization, despite the prosecution of Father Amoro, escalating violence in Anapu, and Bolsonaro’s threats against rural activists.

Attending a baptism ceremony in Mata Preta – occupied land expected to become a land reform settlement – the nun, who belongs to the same order as Stang, expresses resistance: “We cannot panic. We have to be patient, keep a cool head and at least preserve what has already been achieved.” Dwyer sees no solution, however, if parishioners paint over the controversial altar in the church: “If they do that, I’ll never set foot in there again.”

As for Father Amaro, he remains outspoken and unbent: “It’s time for a united struggle; for believing in life even when everyone is losing faith; for resisting wherever we are; for believing in the small, because they have their strategies for struggle and resistance.” Amaro is also resolved to follow through to the end: “Suddenly these people [have] found a piece of land. If I have to die defending them, I guess I’m ready.

This story was written by Repórter Brasil with support from DGB Bildungswerk, and is co-published with Mongabay.

O post Brazil: Bolsonaro supporter works to imprison Dorothy Stang’s successor apareceu primeiro em Repórter Brasil.

ANAPU, Pará state, Brazil – “Dorothy lives!” shouts a student with his fist clenched. Another ten people repeat the gesture and shout: “Always!” The cries of protest close a prayer held round the grave of Dorothy Stang, the U.S. missionary murdered in 2005 in the struggle for Brazilian land reform here in the Brazilian Amazon.

The prayer precedes the second court hearing of Father José Amaro Lopes de Souza, known as Father Amaro. The priest says he relies on his faith to give him strength in the face of yet another round of court charges in a legal drama he’s been enduring since last March.

The priest is Stang’s successor and a member of the Land Pastoral Commission (CPT), an arm of the Catholic Church that works with Brazilian rural workers seeking agrarian land reform. He is charged with conspiracy, threat, extortion, property trespass and money laundering, all in connection with his allegedly being the leader of a criminal organization aimed at occupying land in Anapu in the Xingu basin of Pará state in the Amazon.

These serious charges were made by the president of the Rural Association of Anapu, Silvério Fernandes, a logger and former deputy mayor of the city of Altamira, who ran unsuccessfully for state deputy in the October elections. At that time, Fernandes was also a chief campaigner in the region for then presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who in turn, recorded a video supporting Fernandes’s candidacy.

After Bolsonaro’s win, Fernandes appeared on local Xingu billboards hugging the president elect, with a message thanking voters for their support. As a reward, it is rumored that Fernandes is in line to head the Xingu, Pará, branch of the Brazilian Institute for Settlement and Land Reform (INCRA), which oversees the workers settlements that Father Amaro has helped support in the region.

In addition to being investigated for his participation in a scheme to defraud the federal government known as the SUDAM Mafia in the late 1990s, Fernandes and two of his brothers received R$28.2 million (US$7.2 million) in fines for environmental crimes. “IBAMA [Brazil’s environmental agency] is an industry of fines,” the logger says in his own defense, echoing the rhetoric of the President-elect, who was also fined in the past by IBAMA for an environmental crime, illegal fishing.

Charges and counter-charges

“He is the main organizer of land invasions in Anapu. Father Amaro was behind it all. He was Sister Dorothy’s right hand, and she always encouraged land invasions,” Fernandes says.

Father Amaro denies the allegations: If I did anything wrong it was to direct people to seek their rights at the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Public Defender’s Office and other agencies, because people were often threatened, they were killed and nothing happened.… If I’ve done anything wrong, it was to help put land in the hands of the workers.”

The charges made by Fernandes and other local loggers and landowners led to a police investigation and a dramatic arrest last March of the priest that involved six vehicles and 15 officers. The operation was even given a name: Eça de Queiroz, a reference to a Portuguese writer whose masterpiece The Crime of Father Amaro is about a clergyman’s illicit relationship with a woman. The Xingu Father Amaro was also accused of sexual harassment, a charge that has since been dismissed by prosecutors.

“Instead of murdering him, they [Fernandes and other residents] found a way to discredit him [Father Amaro] by attacking his image and criminalizing him to drive him from Anapu,” the CPT wrote in a statement, comparing the landowners’ current smear campaign strategy with the one conducted against Dorothy Stang in the early 2000s.

An unfolding dispute

It is still early, but already very hot: a typical day in the Amazon biome. The red dust rising from the roads, and the white smoke from burning rainforest, obscure the blue of the sky above. The smoke causes an inevitable sensation of suffocation in outsiders. Near Dorothy’s grave – adorned with flowers and her photo – a red cross is thrust into the ground. It bears the names of 16 rural workers who have been murdered in the last three years in Anapu, a dark reflection on the region’s escalation of violence.

Stang was assassinated, shot six times, in 2005 while on the road to her major legacy, the PDS Esperança, a Portuguese acronym for the Sustainable Development Project Hope – an Amazon land reform effort that settled small-scale farmers onto plots, with 20 percent of the land intended for agricultural production while the remainder was conserved as forest under Brazil’s Forest Code. That system went – and continues to go – against the interests of Xingu-area loggers.

Supporters of Stang and Amaro say that 13 years ago loggers took aim at Sister Dorothy, and now they target her successor.

At the Anapu courthouse, 51-year-old Father Amaro reads a small book, The Liturgy of the Hours, while the prosecutor questions defense witnesses. Amaro wears a shirt emblazoned with Stang’s photo. The priest didn’t speak at this hearing because he wasn’t to be questioned until later. Amaro seemed calm in court but admitted afterward that he distanced himself emotionally from the proceeding, viewing it as he would a movie.

Amaro first dedicated himself to rural workers and their land rights at the age of 19, after hearing a radio report covering the murder of Father Josimo Tavares, then the CPT coordinator in neighboring Maranhão state. Amaro decided then and there to become a priest and work in the same organization as Tavares. “I didn’t even know what the CPT was,” he recalls.

Three years later, Amaro went on to study at the seminary in Belém. There he met Stang, who invited him to do an internship in Anapu. After being ordained priest in 1998, he went to the local parish and worked with Stang at the CPT until she was murdered.

Father Amaro himself was released from jail in late June. He has since left Anapu and now lives at the church’s headquarters in Altamira, surrounded by security guards. Feeling always threatened, he complains of not being able to walk by himself and shows distress at the uncertainty surrounding his future.

In an interview with Repórter Brasil, the first since his 2018 arrest, Amaro blames Fernandes for the ordeal of recent months. He adds that, after the wrongful lawsuit is concluded against him, that he plans to file a countersuit against his attackers, asking for compensation for the psychological pain and suffering that the false accusations have caused. “Did you see how people treat me in Anapu?” he asks, referring to the hugs he received from the local population when he walked out of the courthouse. The case’s conclusion isn’t expected until 2019, and not before Father Amaro and other witnesses have testified.

Land, the source of Amazon conflict

By the time he was released from jail in June, Father Amaro had served 92 days, all of them in the same prison where Regivaldo Pereira Galvão, aka Taradão (Portuguese for Big Pervert) was doing time; he is the rancher convicted of masterminding Stang’s assassination.

“I suspect they set it up [putting me in that particular prison] to kill me in jail,” says the priest.

Local authorities made no attempt to hold the two men separately. “When I got there Taradão was inside. He was the first to wish me a Happy Easter,” Father Amaro revealed. “I didn’t say anything and I didn’t even shake his hand. He [Taradão] said, ‘You’re innocent. I’m innocent. This was something they’ve set up for us.’”

Like so many other killings in the Brazilian Amazon, Dorothy Stang’s murder was motivated by land disputes. Pereira Galvão bought a plot from the Fernandes family. However, that property was already part of the land reform project advocated for by Stang. Then Pereira Galvão sold the plot to logger Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura, aka Bida. Later, according to authorities, Bida and Pereira Galvão teamed up to arrange Stang’s 2005 murder.

After the crime, Pereira Galvão hid on the farm belonging to Silvério Fernandes’s brother Délio. Although Délio was also investigated for allegedly masterminding the crime, he was never charged or tried for participating in Stang’s assassination, even though he had supposedly threatened the nun in 2002. Délio Fernandes once offered Stang a ride, and reportedly told her that no one should ever invade his lands or they “would have blood to their ankles.”

During a telephone interview with Repórter Brasil, which lasted more than half an hour, Silvério Fernandes spoke mostly in a polite tone, though raised his voice several times. At one point, he declared menacingly that he wanted to “look in the eye,” presumably of the inquiring journalist. When asked if Fernandes was making a threat, he replied: “What threat? F__k you, lad.” Fernandes also directed anger at Father Amaro, who he called “a pederast, a fagot and a bum.”

“The Fernandes family is part of the consortium that killed Dorothy,” Father Amaro told Repórter Brasil, noting that the family is responsible for the charges he now faces. “They claim to be the owners of these lands. What makes them angry? It’s that the PDS [settlement] was created within the area Délio Fernandes had sold to Taradão.”

Inside Anapu

Despite its small population of just 27,000 people, Anapu is larger than some countries, including Jamaica and Qatar. The population there has soared by 32 percent in the last eight years, a demographic boom caused by its proximity, just 80 kilometers (50 miles) away from the controversial Belo Monte mega-dam. With the conclusion of the dam’s construction in 2015, hundreds of families, without jobs or prospects, came to Anapu in search of homes, work and land.

“Many families arrive and are pressured by loggers to invade [established workers’] settlements,” explained Jorge Jatobá Correia, Brazil’s national agrarian ombudsman.

The influx of people hunting for land helped ignite already smoldering disputes between land reform settlers and illegal loggers. Those conflicts had their origins back in the 1970s when Brazil’s military government invited outsiders to settle along the new Trans-Amazon Highway. The government offered provisional land titles that depended on the properties’ production for the deeds to become permanent.

However, in most cases, the land neither became productive, nor were the provisional titles ever cancelled. Eventually the outsiders began selling the properties. The main buyers – including the Fernandes patriarch and his sons – turned to logging, cutting down the rainforest, extracting and selling timber.

It was in this context that Dorothy Stang arrived in Anapu in 1983 and began fighting for the possession of that same land as eventually justified by Brazilian agrarian reform policies. In 2003, during the administration of President Lula da Silva, the first agrarian reform settlements in the area became official. Stang was murdered less than three years later.

After her assassination, international pressure resulted in a stronger Brazilian government presence in Anapu, which provided some respite from the conflicts. But, the Belo Monte dam’s completion and the surge in unemployed construction workers seeking livelihoods and land caused violence to explode again in 2015.

The clash over Lot 44

The escalation of the clashes, which resulted in the arrest of Father Amaro last Spring, has centered around Lot 44, also known as the Santa Maria Farm, an agrarian reform settlement covering an area equivalent to 3,000 football fields whose possession is disputed by the Fernandes family.

Although the Fernandes family continues to claim Lot 44 ownership, the Brazilian Institute for Settlement and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), and the Federal Prosecutor’s Office both requested the property be slated for agrarian reform – a request accepted by a federal justice in Altamira last August. The Fernandes family has appealed that decision.

In October 2016, the encampment of rural workers living on the property was burned, and Public Prosecutors charged Silvério and Luciano Fernandes with the crime. Asked about it on the phone, Silvério said he “demolished” the houses. “Lot 44 is ours. It’s ours!” exclaimed Fernandes, president of the Rural Association of Anapu, and possibly the next head of the Xingu, Pará, branch of INCRA, with authority over the settlements.

Márcio Rodrigues dos Reis, the primary accuser against the Fernandes brothers in the encampment fire, was himself arrested in March 2017 while trying to rebuild the camp at Lot 44. Reis was accused of trespassing and illegal possession of a firearm. Silvério Fernandes accompanied the police when they came to arrest Reis.

Another accuser of the Fernandes family, Valdemir Resplandes dos Santos, was murdered in January 2018. Two of his relatives have also been killed, as has a witness to the crime. Of the 16 murders of rural workers since 2015, police investigations have led to the arrest of suspects in just one case. Another 15 remain unsolved.

The CPT calls the Civil Police “inoperative” in their failure to identify, arrest and charge perpetrators. “The police act in a partial way, without hiding their proximity to the landowners and land-grabbers who illegally occupy public lands. The impunity of these crimes is one of the causes of continuing violence,” the Catholic organization says.

The press office of the Civil Police was asked to comment for this story, but failed to reply.

Bolsonaro enters the fray

Tensions between landless rural workers and illegal loggers were further fuelled by the May 19 murder in Anapu of Silvério Fernandes’s brother Luciano.

After his brother’s death, Silvério recorded a video asking for assistance from then presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. The shirt displayed in the film, stained with Luciano’s blood, was emblazoned with an image of retired army captain Bolsonaro, who has long expressed his opposition to the landless workers’ movement, and likened its participants to terrorists.

“We have to fight these land invaders, these criminals, these thugs. Anapu has become a place of thugs. You are our hope,” Silvério Fernandes said in the video, which went viral on social media among Bolsonaro supporters. Fernandes accuses Luciano’s murder on social movements, whose actions, he says, are locally led by Father Amaro.

This view, however, is not confirmed by the police investigation of the killing. According to the Chief of the Xingu Civil Police Superintendence Walison Damasceno, the motive behind Luciano Fernandes’ killing is allegedly a dispute between loggers. Damasceno, who is in charge of the nearly finished investigation, says the current crime suspects have no connection whatsoever with Brazil’s social movements.

A month after the murder, the police arrested a person alleged to have ordered the killing. Later, they also arrested Josiel Ferreira de Almeida, aka “The Booted Cat,” accused of acting as a middleman in the crime. In October, Almeida’s two sons were murdered in an Anapu bar.

When asked by Repórter Brasil if he had any involvement in the Almeida sons’ deaths, Silvério Fernandes denied it: “We don’t endorse this terrorism of taking anyone’s life. We are good people. We were defending our property. My brother was murdered and now I become a suspect?”

Instead of sacred images and a cross, the altar of the local church in Anapu displays a painting of a rural worker crucified on a cut tree. Sister Dorothy Stang and Father Josimo Tavares, both members of the CPT, both assassinated, stand on either side. The altar divides the town and even the church, since some parishioners want the painting replaced by a conventional altar.

The Amazon: a tinder box, ready to explode

The disputes in Anapu echo ideological struggles between the left and the right that in recent years have polarized Brazil as a whole, and which some say helped put leading presidential Workers Party presidential candidate Lula behind bars, while catapulting far right candidate Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency.

Now analysts fear that these tensions, especially between Amazon land-grabbers and agrarian reform settlements, could explode into violence in 2019.

In Anapu, most believe that Silvério Fernandes will become the next head of the INCRA Xingu regional branch sometime after Bolsonaro takes office on 1 January. Asked about this possibility, Fernandes says he isn’t aware of it, but he did reveal his intentions if appointed: “I want to solve the land problem in the region. We came here to guarantee the sovereignty of the Amazon.” In his view, the 1970s land contracts need to be honored, whether their requirements were fulfilled or not, with the land settlements claimed by landless workers handed over to the outsiders.

The dream of accomplishing land reform in Anapu will be more distant if Fernandes is appointed as head of INCRA, according to 78-year-old Sister Jane Dwyer. Born in the United States, she decided to become a missionary when she participated in the historic 1963 March on Washington led by Martin Luther King. Dwyer is still active in the struggle for land democratization, despite the prosecution of Father Amoro, escalating violence in Anapu, and Bolsonaro’s threats against rural activists.

Attending a baptism ceremony in Mata Preta – occupied land expected to become a land reform settlement – the nun, who belongs to the same order as Stang, expresses resistance: “We cannot panic. We have to be patient, keep a cool head and at least preserve what has already been achieved.” Dwyer sees no solution, however, if parishioners paint over the controversial altar in the church: “If they do that, I’ll never set foot in there again.”

As for Father Amaro, he remains outspoken and unbent: “It’s time for a united struggle; for believing in life even when everyone is losing faith; for resisting wherever we are; for believing in the small, because they have their strategies for struggle and resistance.” Amaro is also resolved to follow through to the end: “Suddenly these people [have] found a piece of land. If I have to die defending them, I guess I’m ready.

This story was written by Repórter Brasil with support from DGB Bildungswerk, and is co-published with Mongabay.

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The financial sector has played a key role in the fight against contemporary slave labour and trafficking in persons in Brazil since the Federal Government began to provide quality information about the issue, making it possible to conduct risk management procedures with clients and partners. This has contributed to implementing compliance and due diligence policies and consequently to improving workers’ quality of life.

The seminar “The financial sector’s role in the fight against slave labour and human trafficking” – the first of its kind in Brazil – gathered representatives from  the banking and financial sectors, companies, and government agencies working to regulate that industry and to fight slave labour, and from the organized civil society, as well as from the United Nations. It discussed how the financial sector is fighting slave labour in Brazil and worldwide, and the challenges and perspectives for developing corporate policies and regulatory frameworks in this area. The event took place on March 15, in São Paulo.

The seminar was organized by Brazil’s Labour Public Prosecutor’s Office and NGO Repórter Brasil, and it was co-sponsored by the United Nations University and the Liechtenstein Initiative – Global Financial Sector Commission on Modern Slavery and Trafficking in Human Beings. The event also seeks to works with the Liechtenstein Initiative to create a global recommendation for financial institutions and investors to combat that crime.

Brazil was one of the first countries to recognize the persistence of modern slavery before the United Nations. It was the first country to create an effective national public policy focused on freeing workers in 1995 and to launch an integrated plan to combat that crime in 2003, when it also started publishing a periodical list of offenders. It created the first cross-sector business pact against modern slavery in 2005 and implemented pioneering repression and prevention measures that have become benchmarks worldwide.

Nevertheless, in 2017 it also became the first country to be convicted of omission by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in a case of slave labour – an example of the challenges faced by government, businesses and civil society to eradicate that crime from its territory and improve the quality of the national production. Therefore, we believe that it is necessary to improve communication among these sectors and to seek new tools and strategies to combat slave labour and human trafficking.

The main debates during the three panels of the event are described below:

Panel 1 – Despite of existing public and corporate policies, it will be difficult to eradicate slave labour by 2030

Meeting the target of the 2030 Agenda will require improved mapping of production chains as well as companies and governments being more engaged than they have been so far

The challenge to eradicate slave labour in the world by the end of the next decade – in order to meet one of the targets of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – is a hard one. It will require increased mapping of supply chains as well as more action by both businesses and governments, in addition to regulation and enforcement that encourage the business sector to adopt better standards.

These were some of the opinions provided by experts present at both the opening section and the first panel of the seminar “The financial sector’s role in the fight against slave labour and human trafficking” – the first of its kind in Brazil. It was organized by Brazil’s Labour Public Prosecutor’s Office and NGO Repórter Brasil, and co-sponsored by the United Nations University and the Liechtenstein Initiative – Global Financial Sector Commission on Modern Slavery and Trafficking in Human Beings. The event took place on Friday, March 15, in the city of São Paulo. The first panel was mediated by Caio Magri, president of the Ethos Institute of Business and Social Responsibility.

According to the International Labour Organization, about 40 million people work in conditions analogous to slavery. Zeroing that number by 2030 is equivalent to eliminating about nine thousand forced jobs a day for 11 years. The Brazilian context can exemplify the magnitude of the challenge. From 1995 until the beginning of 2019, Brazil freed 53,607 people from slave labour, according to Chief Labour Public Prosecutor Ronaldo Fleury. “That’s official data, but the figures could be higher, and budget issues may have an impact [on that number in the future]”, he said. Brazil’s fiscal crisis has tightened ministries’ budgets – which may have an impact the number of labour inspections and consequently the number of people freed from conditions analogous to slavery.

According to James Cockayne, director of the Centre for Policy Research of the United Nations University and head of Secretariat for the Liechtenstein Initiative, “Brazil, which has broken records in terms of workers freed, has done [the equivalent of] ten days of what the world will have to do until 2030 to eliminate forced labour, which shows the size of the challenge ahead of us”. Brazil faces both challenges and opportunities.

The investment cycle expected in the country, which includes concessions and privatizations of infrastructure and sales of shares in state-run companies, may cause foreign investors to begin looking into the socio-environmental risks when they conduct business analysis. The Federal and state governments are discussing concessions of roads, ports, airports, railroads, which may attract over 50 billion reais in investments. In early March, in an auction of 12 airports, two international groups acquired positions in Brazil. This movement occurs amid approval of international legislation in which procedures of social risk analysis gain ground in corporate agendas for negotiating with suppliers or customers. “France and Germany already have laws that require human risk analysis”, said Cockayne. Canada and Norway are discussing similar legislation.

According to Flávia Scabin, head of the Research Group on Business and Human Rights of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV-SP), these international regulatory movements are in contrast with what is seen in Brazil.

Last November, Decree 9571 set national guidelines for businesses and human rights. The legislation establishes that companies are voluntarily responsible for implementing them. “In other countries, legislation has been pushing the issue forward. According to a study currently under way in Brazil, conducted in partnership with the International Labour Organization, the country is moving against the trend. And the changes in the Ministry may also have an impact”, Scabin said.

The current government extinguished the Ministry of Labour, which used to supervise labour conditions and punish companies that broke the law. Its functions were transferred to and divided among the ministries of Economy, Citizenship and Justice. Scabin also pointed out that analyses of sustainability reports of large Brazilian corporations indicate that few of them address the human rights issues in their discussions and their businesses within value chains – “Child labour in the chains is hardly discussed, for instance.”

The challenges include increasing the engagement of the whole value chain in the debate and increasing the dissemination of transparent information on the issue, said Denise Hills, chief sustainability advisor at Itaú and Global Compact Network Brazil president. Today Brazilian banks cannot operate with companies included in the ‘dirty list’ – the registry of employers caught using slave labour, which was created by the Ministry of Labour in 2003 and is now maintained by the Ministry of Economy. She also recounted that during trips abroad, issues of human rights and working conditions are increasingly raised by clients.

More accurate information is essential to minimize the problem. “If we evolved from a list to a system, the information would spread further and gain complexity”, she said. In the value chain, the challenge is also to scale up adoption of mechanism to assess and monitor companies. “This is more difficult in smaller companies because it requires independent assessment, which has its costs. Statistics show that corporations have 154 of the world’s top 200 highest GDPs, so this pressure for regulation and self-regulation tends to grow.”

Banks have been looking for more information on the issue, even when it is not publicly available. An example is the ‘dirty list’, whose publication was suspended by the Brazilian Supreme Court (STF) between 2014 and 2016 at the request of an association of real estate developers which questioned the list’s constitutionality. During that time, large financial institutions followed the initiative of Repórter Brasil, Ethos Institute and the Institute for the National Pact to Eradicate Slave Labour (InPacto). They used the Right to Information Act to know the names of employers caught by the government using slave labour and who had their sanctions confirmed by two administrative jurisdictions.

“Banks realized that the list was useful for risk management and have adopted measures that impact on credit”, said Repórter Brasil’s director Leonardo Sakamoto, who is also a board member of the United Nations Fund for Contemporary Forms of Slavery and a Commissioner to the Liechtenstein Initiative. Sakamoto also points out that the inclusion of companies in the ‘dirty list’ has caused the values of their shares at B3 – formerly known as the São Paulo Stock Exchange – to drop. He showed data describing how this happened with companies from the sugar-alcohol and construction industries, for example.

Panel 2 – The financial sector in Brazil and the world still has much to evolve in the fight against slave labour

The sector’s discourse of concern for social issues has not fully translated into practice, experts say

As funders of companies from various industries, banks and financial institutions still have much to evolve in order to contribute to reduce slave labour in Brazil and the world. An example of the challenges can be seen in the Corporate Sustainability Index of B3 – formerly known as the São Paulo Stock Exchange –, which includes publicly traded companies with recognized sustainability practices.

The most recent B3 CSI portfolio was announced on November 29, 2018 and is valid from January 7, 2019 to January 3, 2020. It comprises 34 shares of 29 companies, four of which are financial institutions: Banco do Brasil, Bradesco, Itaú and Santander. Brazilian mining company Vale was excluded from the current index in February, following the environmental disaster in Brumadinho, Minas Gerais.

The basis for the indicator is self-declaration, that is, companies voluntarily respond to a questionnaire presented by experts. In the questionnaires, the four banks said they considered the issue of forced labour in their decisions, but that percentage dropped to 80% when dealing with acquisitions and mergers and to 20% when assessing investments.

“This points to a weakness: the discourse has not yet become practice”, said Aron Belinky, a researcher and consultant who participates in the development and application of instruments such as the B3 CSI, Exame magazine’s Sustainability Guide, and ISO 26000. Workshops will be held on March 27-29 as part of the process of periodic review of the B3 CSI questionnaire sent to companies that want to be included in the Index. This process aims to improve and legitimize with companies and society the criteria and indicators used in the methodology of the Corporate Sustainability Index. Proposals for adjusting changes in the questionnaire will be presented and discussed during the workshops. These proposals will also be available for public consultation on the B3 CSI website.

“This opens up the opportunity for everyone to help improve these questionnaires and it is important to stress that they are available on the website for anyone to consult them and see what companies declare in their human rights policies. This interaction allows raising the bar”, said Belinky.

The gap between discourse and practice was also pointed out by Rafael de Araújo Gomes, a Labour Public Prosecutor and coordinator of the Working Group on Economic Instruments and Governance of the Labour Public Prosecutor’s Office. He said that negotiations between the Office and the banks to suspend loans to companies using forced labour show the difficulties that still remain to make progress on the issue.

“We discussed it for a year; the counterproposals pointed out that the banks were focusing on suspending credit in rural and BNDES’s [The Brazilian Development Bank] credit operations – that is, low-interest money. They took the issue of slave labour into account when granting credit, but this still does not mean automatic suspension of loans”, said Araújo Gomes. Clauses suspending credit for involvement with slave labour are still a minority in loan contracts.

The prosecutor said that civil public lawsuits have increased the debate on the issue in the Judiciary and that is when one realizes that few institutions include clauses interfering with loans when social issues are found. “Top management involvement in these matters is essential and still rare.”

Araújo Gomes was one of the experts present in the second panel of the seminar “The financial sector’s role in the fight against slave labour and human trafficking” – the first of its kind in the country – organized by the Labour Public Prosecutor’s Office and NGO Repórter Brasil, and co-sponsored  by the United Nations University and the Liechtenstein Initiative – Global Financial Sector Commission on Modern Slavery and Trafficking in Human Beings. The event took place on Friday, March 15, in São Paulo.

According to Labour Public Prosecutor Luís Fabiano de Assis, head of the Smart Lab Initiative on Decent Work and a Human Rights and International Justice Research Fellow at Stanford University, it is essential to have more involvement by the financial and other business sectors as well as more data on the subject. He was the mediator of the second panel.

“Dissemination of data contributes to empowerment and to spreading metrics”, he said.

For Anita Ramasastry, director of the Sustainable International Development Graduate Program at the University of Washington’s School of Law, another challenge for companies is to think about how to structure programs for those rescued from forced labour so that these workers can survive in a new situation and support themselves and their families.

Banks can make an important contribution here. “They have financial information and provide credit; they can help structure solutions for these workers to be able to support themselves after they have been freed”, said Ramasastry, who is also a member of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights and a commissioner of the Liechtenstein Initiative for the Financial Sector. Creating these conditions is essential, since an estimated 40 million people work under conditions analogous to slavery in the world nowadays, which requires scaled-up measures to support those who are freed.

In addition to the role of preventing the proliferation of slave labour, Ramasastry points out that banks can still act at the foundation of the problem, helping with their data to identify what has contributed to companies hiring labour under these terms.

Panel 3 – Global initiatives and agreements have contributed to the debate about the financial sector’s joint responsibility in the fight against slavery

There is a tendency in Brazil’s and the world’s Judiciary to discuss social and environmental accounting and the participation of value chains

The environmental disaster in Brumadinho, MG, in January this year, may help to foster discussions about the joint responsibility of value chains and financial institutions in Brazil. This occurs in the face of a tendency in the country’s and the world’s Judiciary to discuss environmental accounting, that is, the adoption of a holistic view on accidents, reflecting on future generations, multiple ecosystems, various communities, involvement of value chains, and creation of funds for recovering degraded areas in the medium and long terms.

The European Union is discussing a directive to appraise environmental assets in the GDPs of its member countries. In the Judiciary, in turn, the discussion on joint responsibility is strengthened, with concepts such as that of indirect polluters. This has increased interest in the issue in various links along the chain such as financial institutions and investors.

“Financial institutions play a major role with great capillarity; they could be asked to be more transparent with their data because they have a multitude of information and this can contribute to measuring the impact of actions and establishing metrics”, observed Caio Borges, head of Conectas’s Business and Human Rights Program, noting that banks can be often seen as having joint responsibility, since most projects are based on loans rather than businesses’ own capital.

Resolution 4327 of Brazil’s National Monetary Council sets guidelines for financial institutions to establish their socio-environmental responsibility policies. “The financial system sees itself as a major social agent, and soundness is an important value, so it has sought ways to avoid social and environmental risks”, said Rodrigo Porto, head of division at the Financial System Regulation Department of the Central Bank of Brazil.

This debate was part of the third panel of the seminar “The financial sector’s role in the fight against slave labour and human trafficking”, the first of its kind in the country, organized by the Brazilian Labour Public Prosecutor’s Office and NGO Repórter Brasil, and co-sponsored by the United Nations University and the Liechtenstein Initiative – Global Financial Sector Commission on Modern Slavery and Trafficking in Human Beings. The event took place on Friday, March 15, in São Paulo. The panel was mediated by Repórter Brasil’s Natália Suzuki, who is a member of the State and Municipal Commissions for the Eradication of Slave Labour in São Paulo.

According to Borges, it is necessary to think about the next step after the publication of Resolution 4327, which celebrates its fifth anniversary in April this year. “The requirements could be intensified, it will depend on the regulators”, he said. The international arena has raised new issues. In the Netherlands, an agreement has been recently signed between the government, trade unions, NGOs and human rights bodies to establish concrete actions. “That’s how we should set deadlines and build governance.”

That is not an isolated initiative. Across the globe, the financial sector is beginning to look at ways to get more involved in reducing forced labour in order to meet the targets of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Estimates indicate that such crime, along with human trafficking, yields about 150 billion dollars annually.

The United Nations University, in partnership with the governments of the Principality of Liechtenstein, Australia and the Netherlands as well as banks, joined a Financial Sector Commission on Slavery and Human Trafficking. In addition to encouraging more information on the subject, the idea is to discuss the adoption of mechanisms to speed up its eradication. Members will meet in April in Australia to discuss financial innovations that could be used to eradicate slave labour and human trafficking.

The meeting is another step forward in the initiative, which has been working since September 2018 to design measures to eliminate the problem. A UN meeting in September 2019 in the United States will launch a report with concrete measures that could be adopted. “There is an effort to create solutions and for each actor to know what each country is doing”, said James Cockayne, director of the Centre for Policy Research at the United Nations University and head of Secretariat for the Liechtenstein Initiative for the Financial Sector.

Another initiative is the platform of Alliance 8.7, which gathers institutions working to combat forced labour, modern slavery, human trafficking and child labour to eradicate them worldwide by 2030. The tool was devised by the United Nations University in partnership with international organizations such as the International Labour Organization and Brazil’s Labour Public Prosecutor’s Office. The project includes data gathering, analyses, a discussion forum, news and studies on the four themes. It aims to spread public policies that contribute to eradicating the problem. “Having more information is essential”, Cockayne said.

At the end of the seminar, Anita Ramasastry, director of the Sustainable International Development Graduate Program at the University of Washington’s School of Law, said that the financial sector could provide more information to improve mapping of value chains. Since banks fund several links – from suppliers to construction companies to shareholders and investors – they have data that may help assessing the role of each agent and its impacts, which, in turn, may help to create tools, either to avoid forced labour or to develop policies to support the lives of those who have been freed.

“Precise information is very important in the fight,” she said.

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Eight months after slave labor was discovered at the Cedro II farm in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, Starbucks and Nestlé-controlled brand Nespresso — both of whom had quality certified the farm — said they would stop sourcing coffee there.

The decision by the two transnational companies came after the publication of the government’s April “Dirty List” of employers — those caught with labor conditions analogous to slavery. The Dirty List is released biannually by what was previously the Ministry of Labor, now part of the Ministry of Economy, and the the first update under President Jair Bolsonaro.

The April Dirty List includes 48 new employers. One of them is coffee producer Helvécio Sebastião Batista, who had been certified with Nespresso and Starbucks quality seals and used to provide coffee for both brands.

Nespresso responded: “In the light of the last report of the Ministry of Labor, we immediately suspended business with the producer in question and we will investigate the case. Farms providing coffee to the company are rigorously evaluated and inspected every year to meet the program’s criteria. We will not accept otherwise and there will be no exception.”

Starbucks responded, saying it will look into the incident and that it has suspended the farm from its supplier list because of the charges. The company, which boasts the world’s largest chain of coffee shops, says the farm’s practices previously complied with the C.A.F.E. certification seal, which follows “ethical and sustainable standards” developed in partnership with Conservation International and overseen by SCS Global Services. The next evaluation of the farm included in the Dirty List is expected to take place in September 2019.

This wasn’t the first time that auditors found slave labor at a Starbucks-certified coffee farm. In August of 2018, Repórter Brasil reported that 18 workers had been found in conditions similar to slavery at the Córrego das Almas farm, also known as Fartura. In September, Mongabay co-published that story.

The operation carried out by labor inspectors at the Cedro II farm in July 2018 found six employees in dire working conditions. Some were forced to work 17-hour shifts, from 6am to 11pm, and slept in substandard unhygienic housing, according to the government inspectors who rescued them.

Cedro II farm owner and manager, Helvécio Sebastião Batista, claims the charges filed against him are unfounded. “I’ll do what I have to do. I filed a petition for a writ of mandamus, and I paid no fine,” Batista said regarding his intention to appeal the Ministry’s decision through the judicial system. A writ of mandamus is an order seeking to remedy defects of justice.

Meanwhile, at Cedro II and other properties managed by Batista, labor inspectors have found 19 more workers in slavery-like conditions, in addition to the six that caused his property’s inclusion on the Dirty List. Those properties lacked proper toilets and had no kitchen facilities. The workers also reported working exhaustive hours, in some cases until 11pm, often without their mandatory weekly day off.

In addition to holding Nespresso and Starbucks seals of good practice, Batista said that his farm was certified by Rainforest Alliance, which in turn informed Repórter Brasil that it would suspend its certification.

Cases of labor conditions analogous to slavery on coffee farms are recurrent. In 2018 alone, 210 workers were found in such conditions by inspectors. The number of workers toiling in slave-like working conditions in Brazil’s coffee industry is now at the highest level in 15 years, according to Ministry of Labor statistics.

More about the Dirty List

With its new additions, the Dirty List” now includes 187 employers caught exploiting labor in conditions similar to slavery. According to Article 149 of Brazil’s Criminal Code, four elements define contemporary slavery: forced labor (which involves restricting freedom of movement); debt bondage (captivity linked to debts, often fraudulent ones); degrading conditions (work that denies human dignity, endangering a worker’s health, safety and life); or exhausting working hours (leading workers to total exhaustion as a result of extreme exploitation of labor, also endangering their health, safety and lives).

The 48 companies newly included on the April 2019 Dirty List were monitored between 2014 and 2018. Before being added to the list, employers have a right to defend themselves with the Ministry of Economy.

Employers whose appeals fail remain on the list for two years. When they strike deals with the government, employer names are placed on a “watch list,” and they may be excluded altogether after a year if they honor their commitments.

Investors, along with public and private banks, use the Dirty List to conduct risk analyses. Some Brazilian and international companies choose to avoid doing business with listed firms.

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Cândido Matias da Silva, 64, proudly shows everything he has planted over the last 11 years on a 30-hectare plot in Eldorado dos Carajás, in the Brazilian state of Pará. He walks through the vegetable gardens and points to sprouts of cale, lettuce, onions and scallions. In the orchard, he picks a tangerine, peels it and offers segments. Further ahead there are passion fruit, cocoa, cupuaçu, acerola and others, totaling more than two dozen crops.

The sales of that produce – grown without any pesticides – provide the income that supports the small farmer’s family. But that is scheduled to end on September 17*, to give way to the pastures of a livestock giant. The date was set by a judge of the agrarian court of Marabá, Amarildo Mazutti, who upheld the injunction for repossession of land filed by Agropecuária Santa Bárbara Xinguara, known as AgroSB.

The company belongs to the Opportunity group, controlled by banker Daniel Dantas, which in 2017 was on the Bloomberg list of billionaires. AgroSB has 500 thousand hectares (more than three time the size of the city of São Paulo) and 170 thousand heads of cattle in the South and Southeast of Pará.

If the repossession decision is enforced, 212 families (more than 1,000 people) that have lived at the Dalcídio Jurandir camp, on Dantas’s Maria Bonita farm since July 2008, will have to leave their land. The Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), which is responsible for the camp, is trying to reverse the court decision by requesting the annulment of the injunction.

Another possibility to reverse the decision would be through political action. The MST has secured the support of the mayor and councilors of Eldorado dos Carajás, who fear a rise in the city’s unemployment rates if families are evicted. With the federal government, however, there is no dialogue, according to the MST.

Three days after the inauguration of President Jair Bolsonaro, the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) ordered the suspension of any ongoing procedure for land purchase and expropriation. After Repórter Brasil revealed the decision, Incra reconsidered the measure. In late March, however, the agency once again suspended land reform in the country.

Since Bolsonaro took office, there has been no expropriation under the land reform program. No settlement project was created either. Repórter Brasil obtained the data by filing an appeal under the Access to Information Law, since INCRA had refused to provide the information.

INCRA has only acted in the second stage of land reform, when already expropriated land is legalized, and final land titles are issued: 852 final titles and 14,868 concession agreements were issued from January to September. The strategy, in practice, means the end of land reform as it promotes individual titles over the creation of the infrastructure needed for settlements.

The court decision was based on the end of land reform. During the hearing that decided for the eviction, Judge Amarildo Mazutti said he was sensitive to social issues but could not ‘carry out public policies that are the federal government’s and INCRA’s responsibility’.

Mazutti’s ruling left out the area where the houses are concentrated. Thus, according to the MST, about half of the families should not lose their homes but will lose the plots where they plant. The judge declined to grant an interview.

INCRA and AgroSB began negotiations to expropriate the farm and use it for land reform in 2011. However, according to the agency’s superintendency in Marabá, the company could not prove it had the mandatory environmental reserve area at ​​the Maria Bonita farm, which blocked the negotiation.

Negotiations have lost effect with the Bolsonaro government’s determination to suspend land reform, according to a statement sent by INCRA to Repórter Brasil, in which the agency says it wants to avoid ‘the expectation of commitments that cannot be met’. AgroSB said that after seven years of talks, the negotiations were closed, and the court’s decision confirms ‘that the company is the legitimate owner of the properties’. ‘Attempting to present AgroSB as ‘the dream-breaker of landless rural workers” does not match the facts’, the statement said.

Rural workers occupied the Maria Bonita farm when Daniel Dantas was targeted by the Federal Police’s Satiagraha operation in 2008. Dantas was arrested twice in the same week on charges of corruption and money laundering. On both occasions, a ruling by Supreme Court Minister Gilmar Mendes freed the banker.

Federal courts even ordered the seizure of 500,000 hectares of land of the Opportunity group. Operation Satiagraha was annulled in 2011 by the Superior Court of Justice on the understanding that the evidence was obtained from illegal telephone recordings.

Faith is all we have left

‘I have no pension, I’m illiterate and I don’t know how to live in the city. Sometimes I can’t even sleep at night. I keep looking at the skies and asking God to open the hearts of people at Santa Bárbara’, says Silva. Since he left São Domingos do Maranhão in the early 1970s, he has worked as a bricklayer and as an employee on rural properties in southern Pará. After participating in the occupation 11 years ago, he was able to build his house and plant the vegetable garden and orchard that now support his family. ‘This is our daily bread.’

A visit to the camp on a Sunday near lunchtime conveys a sensation of tranquility. The smell of sautéed garlic and onions can be felt from afar. Kids run on dirt streets flying kites.

The Carlito Maia Camp’s school is attended by almost 200 students and it is there that Enivaldo Alves do Nascimento, one of the members of the camp and the MST state board, receives the reporters. ‘We want to sensitize society, to show the difference between the two projects. Agropecuária Santa Bárbara’s project aims at monopoly. Our project is different’, he says.

A study conducted by a team from the Federal University of South and Southeast Pará (UNIFESSPA) shows that the eviction of families may affect the economy of Eldorado dos Carajás. In one year, camp members produce more than one million liters of milk, 120,000 tons of flour, as well as the fruits and vegetables that supply the region’s markets.

The eviction may increase the town’s urban housing deficit by over 22% and decrease Eldorado dos Carajás’s milk production by 10%, besides an increment of up to 30% in its unemployment rate, according to UNIFESSPA Professor Amintas Lopes da Silva Júnior. ‘In 11 years, they have created bonds to the territory and a whole productive infrastructure’, says the professor.

‘The town has no structure to receive these people’, says Councilman Edson Vieira (MDB), who presides over the City Council. ‘We have to reverse the eviction ruling’, he adds.

AgroSB states that, with the occupation, the company’s land ceased to ‘produce, export and hire labor’. The company reports generating 900 direct and 10,000 indirect jobs in nearly two dozen towns in southern and southeastern Pará.

Its statement raised several questions: ‘How many more jobs could AgroSB have created if the farms had continued the production that was interrupted by the invasions? What would be the volume of AgroSB’s animal and vegetable production to be sold in the domestic and foreign markets if production had not been interrupted by land invaders? What would be the economic growth rates of dozens of municipalities in southern/southeastern Pará with the increase in animal and vegetable production that cannot be done because the land was invaded?’. Read the full statement here in Portuguese.

A history of massacres 

Eldorado dos Carajás became known nationwide on April 17, 1996, when 19 rural workers from the MST were executed by state police. The site of the massacre is 30 kilometers from the Dalcídio Jurandir camp. ‘It was the first time I heard about MST’, recalls Nascimento, who was 23 at the time of the murders.

A father of four, he has been camped on the farm that belongs to AgroSB for 11 years and always wonders: ‘Why do some people have so much land while others have nothing?’. He says that the camp residents are all poor people. ’Some were starving when they arrived here. They are all disenfranchised and working the land is all they can do.’

During last year’s election campaign, Bolsonaro visited Eldorado dos Carajás and defended the policemen convicted as a result of the massacre. At the scene of the deaths, known as the S-curve on the BR-155 road, the now president said: ‘The people from the MST were the ones who should’ve been arrested, they are scoundrels and bums. The cops reacted not to die’. A group of police officers accompanying the speech applauded, according to newspaper O Estado de São Paulo.

Also speaking that day was Luiz Antônio Nabhan Garcia. During the campaign, he was the president of the Rural Democratic Union (UDR). ‘When you become president, you will see what you’ll do with these people from FUNAI, IBAMA, Public Prosecutors, who do not respect private property’, he said.

Garcia is now the Secretary of Land Affairs of the Ministry of Agriculture, to which INCRA reports. In April, Repórter Brasil showed the connection between a UDR hired gunman and the murder of a MST member in Paraná.

Calling it terrorism

The President’s open hostility towards the MST is a matter of concern to José Carlos Teixeira, who lives in the Dalcídio Jurandir camp. ‘Bolsonaro calls us terrorists, but he speaks without knowing the weight of being a terrorist’, he said. ‘Terrorism is something else. He [Bolsonaro] shouldn’t say that.’ In 2004, when terrorist attacks took place in Madrid, Teixeira lived in Spain, where he worked for six years on dairy farms.

Today he lives at the camp with his wife Mikaelli Aparecida de Lima and their two children. They met when they worked at a meatpacking company in Rio Maria. After losing their jobs and having no place to live, they decided to go to the MST camp. ‘If we have to leave this place we’ll have nowhere to go. We can’t afford to buy a piece of land’, Lima says.

* Editor’s note: Amarildo Mazutti, judge of the agrarian court of Marabá, postponed the injunction for repossession of land to November 5.

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Three major supermarket chains bought products from meatpackers whose suppliers include ranchers caught using slave-like labor. These are the Carrefour, Pão de Açúcar (GPA) and Cencosud groups, which together have over 2,000 stores throughout the country.

An investigation by Repórter Brasil found three meatpacking companies that sell meat to supermarket chains but bought cattle from farms included in the ‘dirty list’ of slave labor – a federal government registry of people and companies caught perpetrating that crime.

Carrefour, GPA and Cencosud are among the four largest retail groups in Brazil. In the past, all three chains have pledged not to buy products from employers on the ‘dirty list’. Carrefour and Pão de Açúcar signed the 2005 National Pact for the Eradication of Slave Labor while Cencosud signed a letter of commitment last year.

Of the three companies, Pão de Açúcar was the first to suspend its suppliers (the meatpackers Frigotil and Frigoestrela), as GPA’s Sustainability Department told Repórter Brasil.

Carrefour initially stated that it would await its supplier’s stance. When the report was published, it informed that ‘after an internal investigation and clarification from the supplier, it decided to suspend purchases of Frigoestrela’s products’. The group also sustainded that ‘all of its commercial contracts have specific clauses obliging suppliers to strictly comply with all the current labor legislation, thus preventing any use of slave-like labor”.

Cencosud denied buying meat from meatpackers that deal with ranchers on the ‘dirty list’ of slave labor.

Frigotil and Frigoestrela

Frigoestrela purchased cattle from a ‘dirty list’ rancher on different occasions between 2018 and 2019. The company said it monitors ranchers constantly and stated that in the specific case there was still no court decision against the supplier. Frigoestrela has slaughtering units in Rondonópolis, Mato Grosso, and Estrela D’Oeste, São Paulo.

Located in Timon, Maranhão, Frigotil also bought cattle from two ranchers on the ‘dirty list’ between 2018 and 2019. The company replied to Repórter Brasil that ‘it discourages purchase of cattle under these conditions’ and that it is considering hiring a consulting company to enable greater socio-environmental control of its suppliers.

See the full statements sent in Portuguese by Pão de Açúcar, Carrefour, Cencosud, Frigotil and Frigoestrela.

Boi Brasil supplies Chilean group

The Boi Brasil meatpacking company, which has three slaughtering plants in the state of Tocantins, also bought cattle from a ‘dirty list’ rancher in 2018. Repórter Brasil found meat from the company being sold at the Bretas supermarket chain in Goiânia, Goiás, also in 2018. Boi Brasil did not respond to the questions sent by the reporters.

Bretas is one of Chilean group Cencosud’s companies. The company denied maintaining commercial relations with Boi Brasil and claimed that the meatpacker has been blocked in its purchasing management system since 2015.

The business relationship between the Cencosud group and Boi Brasil was pointed out in a report by the Chain Action Research initiative published in October 2018 in partnership with Repórter Brasil. The study found beef from Boi Brasil being sold by Bretas in August last year – that is, three years after the date when Cencosud claims to have blocked the supplier.

Cattle ranchers on the ‘dirty list’

Carlinhos Florêncio, a PCdoB state deputy in Maranhão, was one of the ranchers identified in the investigation as a supplier of the meatpacking company selling to Pão de Açúcar stores.

He was fined for subjecting nine workers to slavery at his Tremendal Farm in Parnarama, Maranhão. The politician was included in the ‘dirty list’ in April 2018 and remained on it until November of that year, when his name was excluded by a court injunction. Prior to that, between May and September, he supplied cattle to Frigotil’s slaughter unit in Timon.

Repórter Brasil tried to contact his office by telephone and email but received no answer. In an interview to UOL in 2018, his lawyer claimed that Florêncio’s inclusion in the ‘dirty list’ was unfair because, while he did own the farm, his brothers were in charge of management. The same argument was accepted by the court in its decision to remove his name from the ‘dirty list’.

José Rodrigues dos Santos – also a Frigotil supplier – sold cattle to the company on several occasions between 2018 and 2019. He was included in the ‘dirty list’ in October 2017 and remains in the register. His inclusion was due to the rescue of 22 employees at the Lago Azul Farm, in Brejo de Areia, Maranhão.

Pão de Açúcar, Carrefour and Cencosud have pledged in the past not to buy products from employers on the ‘dirty list’ of slave labor.

This was not the first case of slave labor involving Santos. In 2007, he was charged with exploiting 48 workers at the Ilha/Veneza Farm in Capinzal do Norte, Maranhão. Two years later, a new inspection on the same property led to a new rescue, this time involving 29 workers. At the time, the inspectors learned that Santos had leased the land to his brother. Repórter Brasil spoke with the rancher’s lawyer and sent questions by email, which were not answered.

In Mato Grosso, another ‘dirty list’ employer, Hélio Cavalcanti Garcia, was caught supplying cattle to Frigoestrela in 2018 and 2019. He was included in the federal government register in October 2017. He also went to court to exclude his name, to no avail. It remains on the list today.

Garcia was mayor of Rondonópolis in the 1960s and, besides being a rancher, he is also a notary public. Labor inspectors found five workers in a slave-like conditions at his Rio Dourado Farm in Poxoréu, Mato Grosso. He told the G1 website that he had been set up by an employee who owed him 17 thousand reais. He also said that the workers were not his employees – one of them was a contractor and the other four were subcontractors.

Repórter Brasil tried to contact Garcia in his notary office and through his lawyer but there was no answer.

A supplier of Boi Brasil, Eronice de Souza Borges was included in the ‘dirty list’ in October 2018. A month later, he sold cattle to Boi Brasil’s slaughtering plant in Alvorada, Tocantins. He was charged with subjecting a worker to slave-like conditions at his Umuarama Farm in Aliança do Tocantins, Tocantins.

The inspection was motivated by a complaint made to the Federal Police reporting that the workers would be working under coercion. According to the complaint, the owner threatened them ‘by saying he would shoot any worker who left the farm in the face’. During the operation, the inspectors of the former Ministry of Labor did not confirm the death threats. However, they identified a worker in degrading conditions – living in precarious housing without access to safe drinking water or mandatory protective equipment.

Called by phone, Borges said he would not speak.

This report was made with the support of DGB Bildungswerkunder the project PN: 2017 2606 6/DGB 0014, and its content is the sole responsibility of Repórter Brasil.

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A 24.7-million-real fine was not enough for JBS to stop buying cattle from companies that contribute to destroy the Amazon. Despite being punished by Operation Cold Meat for illegal practices in 2017, the company that owns the Friboi, Seara and Swift brands continues sourcing cattle from farms involved in deforestation, according to a joint investigation by Brazilian news agency Repórter Brasil, British newspaper The Guardian and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The reporters were in São Félix do Xingu, in south-eastern Pará, and found cattle being raised in a deforested area embargoed by IBAMA – which is an environmental crime. The area is part of the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch, which has been fined for illegal deforestation and is part of the Agro SB group, formerly known as Santa Bárbara Xinguara and controlled by banker Daniel Dantas. Agro SB is a traditional supplier of JBS.

In addition, the investigation also confirmed that, last year, Lagoa do Triunfo transferred hundreds of cattle to another ranch belonging to the same business group but which had no environmental liability. Then the cattle were sold for slaughter at JBS’s meatpacking units.

By buying these animals, JBS breaches a Conduct Adjustment Agreement (TAC) signed 10 years ago with Federal Prosecutors in which it pledged to buy cattle only from farms that do not engage in environmental crimes. The company controlled by brothers Wesley and Joesley Batista also disregards what it told Repórter Brasil and The Guardian after Operation Cold Meat – that it had stopped buying cattle from ‘all ranches related’ to the Santa Bárbara Xinguara group (Agro SB).

This is not the first time that JBS supplier Agro SB is involved in environmental or labour law violations. In 2012, a ranch belonging to the group was caught using labour ‘analogous to slavery’. A worker has been reported murdered inside a ranch belonging to the group – allegedly for demanding his labour rights – and Prosecutors are investigating the company for land grabbing. Agro SB’s environmental history of is also bad. In Lagoa do Triunfo alone, the group has been fined 70.4 million reais by IBAMA for illegal deforestation in the last 10 years.

A Lagoa do Triunfo employee said he was aware of noncompliance with environmental regulations, as he knew that cattle grazed in embargoed areas. ‘We can’t cut the vegetation’ [in embargoed areas], said the employee whose name will not be revealed to avoid retaliation. ‘The vegetation grows and then we work with the cattle inside them.’

The embargoes are imposed by IBAMA as a measure to recover deforested areas – therefore, any economic activity is banned in the land. They also serve as punishment to ranchers who do not comply with the law, since they often fail to pay environmental fines. Any economic activity in areas under embargo is subject to fines of up to 1 million reais, according to Presidential Decree 6514 of 2008.

Triangulation between ranches

More than an environmental crime, raising cattle in areas under embargo reveals  a scheme that consists of livestock relocations amongst different ranchs in order to obscure the true origin of the cattle. The cattle grow in an embargoed area, then they are sent to a ‘clean’ ranch without environmental liabilities, from where they will be sold to meatpacking companies.

Public documents on animal transportation consulted by the reporters reveal that, between January and October of last year, Agro SB transferred at least 296 cattle from the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch to the Espírito Santo ranch, which it also owns. At the same time, Espírito Santo sold at least 1,977 cattle from July to December to two JBS meatpacking units in the state of Pará. Other consignments were made by Espírito Santo in January 2019, when 936 cattle were sold to JBS’s meatpacking unit in Redenção.

Transferring cattle from one ranch to another for fattening is common practice in the industry, but it makes it difficult for companies to monitor their indirect suppliers and keep their commitments not to source cattle from farms involved in deforestation.

A JBS statement said that ‘the facts pointed out do not meet the standards’ adopted by the company. It stated that it does not purchase animals from ranches involved in deforestation, invasion of indigenous lands, agrarian conflicts and labour ‘analogous to slavery’, or which are under embargo by IBAMA.

The company also says it works with Federal Prosecutors ‘to regulate the industry on the issue of illegal deforestation’. For more than a decade, meatpacking companies and state agencies have been communicating to find ways to monitor indirect suppliers or those practicing ‘laundering’, but they have not yet found a definitive solution.

Audit firm DNV.GL, hired by JBS, found that the company ‘does no systematic monitoring’ on its indirect suppliers but points out that cattle purchases were regular in 99.99% of the cases it assessed, according to a report published in October 2018. Read JBS’s full response here in Portuguese.

Agro SB said in a statement that ‘there is no irregularity in the trading/transfer of livestock from the Lagoa do Triunfo ranch’ since its ranches are divided into breeding, fattening and rearing facilities. The company said that it bought Lagoa do Triunfo in 2008 and that it ‘has never cut any vegetation in the property’.

However, the embargoed area where the reporters found cattle grazing was fined 4.53 million reais by IBAMA for deforestation on November 10, 2010.

The area was embargoed about 1 month later – when Agro SB had already purchased the ranch. In addition, satellite monitoring by Global Forest Watch shows that it lost 796 hectares of native vegetation between 2009 and 2018.

Agro SB did not respond to questions about the presence of cattle grazing in that location. The company also denies having used slave labour and claims it is unaware of the land grabbing investigation by Prosecutor’s Office. (Read the company’s full statement here in Portuguese).

Forest Turning into Pasture

JBS is one of the companies accused by Swedish consultancy TRASE (Transparent Production Chains for Sustainable Economies) of being complicit in deforesting the Amazon. The multinational company is the world’s largest producer of animal protein and it slaughters nearly 35,000 cattle per day in Brazil alone. It is responsible for destroying between 28,000 and 32,000 hectares of forest per year to export meat, according to data compiled by TRASE and provided exclusively to this report. These figures do not include production meant for Brazil’s domestic market.

In the whole Amazon region, an area ​​the size of Brasilia (580,000 hectares of forest) is deforested annually to be converted into pasture for livestock, according to TRASE.

Besides having the largest number of cattle in Brazil – 18 animals per resident – São Félix do Xingu also has the third largest deforested area in the Amazon, after Altamira and Porto Velho, according to the National Institute of Space Research (INPE).

Until the late 1970s, São Félix do Xingu used to be a fishing village by the Xingu River. The arrival of miners and loggers triggered the deforestation cycle later consolidated by livestock. The number of animals in town grew exponentially. They were 91 in 1977 and 217,000 twenty years later, until they reached today’s 2.2 million, according to IBGE data for 2017.

One of the main attractions in a cattle town is horse racing. Ranchers are gathered at the Negão Horse Club on a Saturday afternoon in early June. Some of them show off 100-real-bills for informal bets. The official betting bank accumulated 200,000 reais on that day.

Arlindo Rosa and Francisco Torres are authorities there. President and vice-president of the Rural Producers’ Association of São Félix do Xingu respectively, they voice ranchers’ – and President Jair Bolsonaro’s – views against environmental controls.

‘Some fines will never be paid. They [Ibama’s inspectors] apply them without hesitating’, says Rosa, who has already been fined four times for deforestation, in a total of 5.6 million reais.

The two association leaders estimate that 90% of properties in São Felix do Xingu include areas embargoed by IBAMA for deforestation. Ranchers’ complain that even a small area embargoed in a huge farm, for instance, prevents producers from selling to meatpacking companies. ‘We are having a hard time selling our cattle because the companies won’t buy from embargoed areas’, Rosa acknowledges.

However, their math does not add up. While they estimate that a large part of producers in São Félix do Xingu cannot sell to meatpacking companies because of environmental problems, they readily list the slaughterhouses that buy livestock from local ranches. Another destination, according to Rosa, is the international market: ‘Lots of cattle leave this town in ships. We wouldn’t make it without exports’.

With or without embargoes, in the town with the largest number of cattle in Brazil, the local popular saying seems to make sense: “Oxen don’t die of old age”.

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Large Brazilian meatpacking companies operating in both the domestic and foreign markets buy cattle from ranchers fined in top deforestation areas, which are now at the epicenter of burnings in the Amazon.

Fire – one of the stages of deforestation – is used to open space for pastures, as has been recognized even by authorities in the affected areas. ‘Those are forest burning to make pastures’, said Pará governor Helder Barbalho (MDB) about the recent fires in his state. Nine out of ten fires in agribusiness areas occurred on cattle pastures, according to estimates made by Greenpeace using data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE).

The Triunfo do Xingu Environmental Protection Area (EPA) in Pará provides evidence of the relationship between deforestation, burnings and livestock. It was the conservation unit with the largest number of forest fires this year. The two municipalities that overlap its territory – São Félix do Xingu and Altamira – rank 1^st and 3^rd in number of burnings respectively. The former town has the largest number of cattle heads in Brazil (2.2 million according to 2017 IBGE data).

It was precisely in this area that Repórter Brasil found two examples of how farmers charged with environmental crimes link deforestation and burnings in the Amazon to global meat processing companies.

One of the cases involves rancher Adriano José de Mattos. In January 2019, IBAMA inspectors found animals from his property grazing on a 106-hectare illegally deforested area within the EPA. The site had already been embargoed three years earlier for illegal deforestation. According to the inspectors, the Limeira Ranch – Mattos’s property located three kilometers away from there – served as the operational base for exploring the area.

In the month following the charges, meatpacking company Marfrig’s slaughtering unit in Tucumã, PA, received cattle from Mattos’s property. The animals were registered as coming from the Limeira Ranch, according to official cattle control documents consulted by the reporters. Another major player in the industry, Frigol, also purchased cattle from Mattos between March and July this year.

Marfrig said to Repórter Brasil that public information on the charges and embargoes against Mattos was still unavailable at the date of purchase, although the inspection had taken place 26 days earlier. ‘We depend on information from IBAMA’s website. This should happen in real time’, said the company’s sustainability director Paulo Pianez. Marfrig says it is committed to zero deforestation in the Amazon, to monitoring all suppliers via satellite, and to not purchasing cattle from areas embargoed for environmental crimes (see Marfrig’s full statement).

Currently, IBAMA’s website reports that the embargo against Mattos entered the public list of embargoed areas on January 29 – before Marfrig’s purchase. Repórter Brasil contacted IBAMA to learn its view on the company’s claim but received no response until this report was finished. Frigol, in turn, told the reporters that it adopts ‘all necessary controls to prevent any purchase of animals that are not in conformity with standards from being slaughtered in its industrial plants’ and that there are no illegalities in the purchase of cattle from Adriano Mattos (see Frigol’s full statement). The ranchers could not be reached for comment.

Clear Cutting and Fines

The largest company in the industry – JBS – also operates in Terra do Meio, a vast area in southeastern Amazonia that includes the territory of EPA Triunfo do Xingu. Rancher José Ronan Martins da Cunha is one of its suppliers and was fined by IBAMA in April this year. He was held responsible for destroying 50 hectares of native vegetation within the conservation area. In addition, he was charged with preventing the natural regeneration of the forest in an area previously embargoed for illegal deforestation.

In July 2019, JBS’s unit in Tucumã purchased cattle from Cunha. Repórter Brasil found out that the animals came from another property – the Barro Branco Ranch, according to official records. The property is located outside the EPA.

In 2016, a Ministry of Labor inspection charged Cunha with using slave labor at the JK Farm in São Félix do Xingu. Because of that, he was included in the federal government’s ‘dirty list’ of slave labor – a public registry with names of employers caught perpetrating that crime. They remain in the list for two years and then their names are removed if there is no recurrence.

Several companies – including JBS – publicly pledge not to buy raw materials from producers included on the ‘dirty list’. Cunha remained in the registry until April 2019. Therefore, JBS purchases found by Repórter Brasil occurred after Cunha had left the list.

Questioned by the reporters, JBS stated that it does not buy animals from farms involved in deforestation or invasion of indigenous lands, embargoed by Ibama, or using child labor or slavery-like conditions. The company also said that ‘it maintains one of the largest private monitoring systems for suppliers in the world, which covers about 450,000 km² by analyzing satellite images of the properties’.

Lack of Control

JBS and Marfrig are global leaders in production of animal protein. In addition to dozens of slaughterhouses in Brazil, they also have plants in North America, Europe and Australia. Internationalization of those companies gained momentum during Worker’s Party administrations through million-dollar loans provided by BNDES. The Brazilian government is one of the main shareholders of both companies.

Frigol, in turn, is Brazil’s fourth largest meatpacking company, with slaughterhouses in the states of Pará, Goiás and São Paulo. The company says it exports to over 60 countries.

The three companies say they adopt policies to abolish the so-called ‘pirate cattle’ from their purchases – that is, cattle from areas deforested without any license. However, this goal poses challenges. Lack of animal traceability allows ranchers to use legalized farms to conceal sales of cattle raised in illegal areas through false declarations of origin – a practice is known as ‘cattle washing’.

In addition, several deforesters sell cattle to other ranchers who specialize in the final pre-slaughter fattening. Meatpacking companies do not have effective mechanisms to ascertain where such producers have purchased their animals. In the state of Pará, JBS and Frigol signed an agreement with Federal Prosecutors pledging to observe a series of criteria to avoid cattle from areas with illegal deforestation, slave labor, invasions of public lands or traditional communities. The latest audit on the deal published by the agency found evidence of irregularities in approximately 19% of JBS’s purchases. In the case of Frigol, the irregularities reached 31% of total purchases. Marfrig, on the other hand, did not sign the agreement and therefore did not undergo audits. The company, however, states that other external audits ensure its practices are in conformity with its sustainability commitments.

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A cocktail of a number of pesticides was found in the drinking water of 1 out of every 4 Brazilian cities between 2014 and 2017. In this period, supply companies in 1,396 municipalities detected the presence of all 27 pesticides which they are obligated to test for by law. Of these, 16 are classified by Brazil’s sanitary authority (Anvisa) as extremely or highly toxic, and 11 are associated with the development of chronic diseases such as cancer, fetal malformations, and hormonal and reproductive dysfunctions.

Among the cities with multiple contaminations are the state capitals São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Fortaleza, Manaus, Curitiba, Porto Alegre, Campo Grande, Cuiabá, Florianópolis, and Palmas.

The data is from the Ministry of Health and was obtained and analyzed in a joint investigation by Repórter Brasil, Agência Pública, and Swiss organization Public Eye. The information is part of a public database on drinking water quality, known as Sisagua, which gathers results from tests carried out by supply companies.

The numbers show that water contamination is increasing constantly and significantly. In 2014, 75 percent of tests detected the presence of pesticides. This level rose to 84 percent in 2015 and 88 percent in 2016, reaching 92 percent in 2017. At this pace, in the next few years it could become a struggle to find any water free of pesticides in Brazilian taps.

While the data is public information, the tests are not published in a comprehensive manner, leaving Brazilians in the dark about the risks they run drinking a cup of water. In a joint effort, Repórter Brasil, Agência Pública and Public Eye put together an interactive map with the pesticides found in each city. The map also shows which are above the safe limits according to Brazilian law and European regulation.

Click on the image below to find out the level of contamination in Brazilian cities.

The nationwide scenario of water contamination caused alarm among health professionals. “The situation is extremely worrying and certainly represents risks and impacts on the population’s health,” stated toxicologist and occupational physician Virginia Dapper. The concerns were shared by Aline Gurgel, a researcher in public health at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) in Pernambuco: “alarming data, representing a serious risk to human health.”

Among the pesticides found in over 80 percent of the tests, five of them are classified as “likely carcinogens” by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the United States, and six are listed as endocrine disruptors by the European Union. Of the 27 pesticides found in Brazil’s water, 21 are banned in the EU due to the risks they offer to health and the environment.

The lack of monitoring is also a serious problem. Of Brazil’s 5,570 municipalities, 2,931 did not carry out tests on their water between 2014 and 2017.

Pesticides: a poisonous cocktail

The mixture between these chemicals was one of the aspects which created the most concern among the consulted specialists. The danger is that the combination of substances could multiply harmful effects or even create new dangers. These reactions have been demonstrated in tests, according to chemist Cassiana Montagner. “Even if one pesticide has no effect on human health, it could develop one when mixed with another substance,” explained Ms. Montagner, who researches water contamination in the Institute of Chemistry of the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), in São Paulo state. “The mixture is one of our main worries about pesticides in water.”

Inhabitants of São Paulo drank this cocktail more than anyone else in recent years. The state topped the list of the number of municipalities where all 27 pesticides were found in the water—over 500 cities, including Greater São Paulo and the state capital itself. The state of Paraná came in second, with the full cocktail present in 326 cities, followed by Santa Catarina and Tocantins.

The specialists speak at length about the “invisibility” of the cocktail effect. Public policy does not monitor the interaction between the substances as the studies justifying these policies does not highlight the risks of this phenomenon. “Chemical agents are evaluated in isolation, in laboratories, and they ignore the effects of the mixtures which happen in real life,” said Ms. Dapper.

She laments that the people already developing diseases as a result of this multiple contamination will probably never know of the cause of their illness, nor will their doctors.

Asked about the measures being taken to this end, the Ministry of Health replied via email reinforcing that “exposure to pesticides is a serious public health problem” and listing the harmful effects which could cause “premature puberty, altered breastfeeding, reduced female fertility and quality of semen, as well as allergies, cancer, and gastrointestinal, respiratory, endocrine and neurological disorders.”

The response, however, highlights that control and prevention actions may only be taken when test results surpass the limits established by law. And herein lies the problem: Brazil has no fixed limit to regulate the mixture of substances.

This is one of the demands of the groups requesting stricter pesticide regulation. “It is absurd that this problem remains invisible in the monitoring of water and that there are no actions to control it,” stated Leonardo Melgarejo, production engineer and member of a national campaign against pesticides. “If you find several pesticides, but each below their individual limit, then the water will be considered drinkable in Brazil. But this same water would be prohibited in France.”

Mr. Melgarejo is referring to the EU rule which seeks to restrict the mixture of substances: the maximum allowed is of 0.5 micrograms in each liter of water, adding up all the pesticides found. In Brazil, there are only individual limits. Therefore, adding up all the permitted limits for each pesticide being monitored, the mixture of substances in Brazilian water could reach up to 1,353 micrograms per liter without causing any alarm. This is equivalent to 2,706 times the European limit.

The risk of small quantities

Even when we look at the contamination of each pesticide in isolation, the situation is worrying. Of the 27 pesticides being monitored, 20 are listed as highly dangerous but the Pesticide Action Network, a group of hundreds of non-governmental organizations which work to monitor the effects of pesticides.

However, according to Brazilian law, the problem is small. Only 0.3 percent of all detected cases between 2014 and 2017 went over the safe limit established for each substance. Even considering the cases in which 10 banned pesticides are monitored, there are seldom situations when their presence in water causes any alarm.

This is the second warning made by the researchers: the individual limits are too permissive. “This legislation has gone for over ten years without review, it is such a setback from a scientific point of view,” said Ms. Montagner. “It’s like using an old black-and-white TV, when you can have access to something high definition.”

Here, Ms. Montagner is referring to the most recent studies on the risks of frequent consumption of small quantities, a form of contamination which does not cause immediate reactions. “Perhaps a given pesticide in the water doesn’t take 15 percent of the city to hospital in the same day, but its continuous consumption could cause even more serious effects, such as cancer, or thyroid, hormone, or neurological problems,” she warned. “We already have scientific evidence, but contaminated water keeps being considered drinkable because we don’t look at smaller quantities,” she said.

In response to this, a working group was put together by the Ministry of Health to review contamination limits. “We are doing a thorough job,” said Ellen Pritsch, a chemical engineer and the representative of the Brazilian Sanitary and Environmental Engineering Association in the group. According to her, international studies and regulations from other countries are being taken into account. Created in 2014, the expectation is that the work will be finished in September.

At least 144 cities detected the same pesticide continuously throughout the four years studied, according to the data. Once more, São Paulo leads the way in this type of intoxication. Specialists highlight the use of pesticides in the production of sugarcane as the probable origin of the widespread contamination in the state. “Sugarcane production has the most registered herbicides. As São Paulo is one of the biggest sugarcane producers, this would justify the elevated presence [of pesticides in the water],” stated Kassio Mendes, coordinator of the environmental quality committee of the Brazilian Association of Weed Science.

Diuron, one of the main herbicides used by the sector, was detected in all tests carried out in spring water of the regions where sugarcane is most present, according to 2017 data of the Environmental Company of the State of São Paulo (Cetesb). The substance is one of those listed as a likely carcinogen by the EPA in the United States.

Who is responsible?

Once contaminated, there are few available treatments to remove pesticides from water. “Some filters are able to remove some types of pesticides, but there are none which can take care of all of them,” said Mr. Melgarejo. “Mineral water comes from other sources, but they are supplied by water which runs on the surface, so potentially they will be contaminated too.”

Preventive work—in other words, stopping pesticides reaching water sources—must be primordial, said Rubia Kuno, manager of the human toxicology and environmental division of Cetesb. “Efforts should be on prevention, because the conventional treatment system is unable to remove pesticides from the water,” she stated.

There is a large debate on the complexity in facing the problem, but there is a lack of anyone taking responsibility.

The reporting team consulted the departments of the Environment, Agriculture, and Health, and the Basic Sanitation Company of the State of São Paulo (Sabesp) to find out which actions are being taken in the state with the highest levels of contamination. The replies came from Sabesp and the press office of the environment department with technical information about monitoring. Neither the departments of Sabesp clarified what is being done to control or prevent the problem.

The Ministry of Health said the sanitary surveillance of municipalities and states should alert water supply service providers so that they may take measures to improve water treatment. “If the data show that the problem is systematic, solutions must be sought by articulation with other involved sectors, such as environmental agencies, service providers, and rural producers,” said the agency’s statement.

Asked about which actions are being taken, the National Union of the Plant Defense Product Industry (Sindiveg, representing pesticide producers) came out in support for the safety of pesticides. In a statement, the group said that evaluations carried out by Anvisa, the environmental protection agency (Ibama), and the Agriculture Ministry ensured that the substances are safe for workers, rural producers, and the environment “when they are used in accordance with the technical recommendations approved and printed on their labels.”

The union stated that the proper application of the products on fields is a challenge, and that the responsibility lies with the workers applying the pesticides. “The pesticide sector carries out initiatives to ensure the proper application of its products, as some structural problems in agriculture—such as the lack of the habit to read labels and illiteracy—bring an additional challenge to compliance with the recommendations for use.”

Contrary to what happens in other countries, in Brazil, companies which produce pesticides are not involved in water monitoring, which is funded by the public treasury and supply companies.

In Santa Catarina, one of the three most contaminated states, prosecutors have called on municipal governments, state departments, water companies, regulatory agencies, and unions of rural producers and workers to take responsibility. The initiative came from the results of a groundbreaking study which found pesticides in the water of 22 municipalities. “We have alerted all public and private agencies involved to look for solutions, we must apply corrective measures to reduce the risk for citizens,” said prosecutor Greicia Malheiros, responsible for the investigation. The initiative began in March this year and has yet to produce results.

Beyond mitigating water contamination, the study’s coordinator, chemical engineer Sonia Corina Hess, supports prohibiting the use of the highest-risk pesticides. Of the substances found in its study in Santa Catarina, seven are banned in the EU due to posing a risk to human health. “We must ban what has been banned abroad, we must ban what is dangerous. If it causes harm to them, why is it allowed in Brazil?” she asked.

Dangerous in Europe, permitted in Brazil

Brazil’s water control is also far from EU parameters. Aiming at eliminating contamination, the continent established the maximum concentration in water as 0.1 micrograms per liter—the minimum detectable amount when the regulation was created.

To discover how water in Brazil would be evaluated by European standards, Public Eye classified the data supplied by the Ministry of Health following EU criteria. Some of the most dangerous pesticides went over European limits in over 20 percent of tests. Among them were glyphosate and mancozeb, both associated to chronic diseases, and aldicarb, banned in Brazil and defined by Anvisa as “the most toxic pesticide recorded in the country, among all active ingredients used in agriculture.”

Glyphosate is the most revealing case about the peculiarities of Brazil in pesticide regulation. Classified as a “likely carcinogen” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an agency of the World Health Organization, the pesticide is being debated all over the world. Thousands of cancer patients are winning lawsuits against manufacturers in the United States, while protests and petitions have demanded its banning in Europe. There is no consensus about its classification among regulatory agencies. In Brazil, which officially put the substance up for revision in 2008, the Ministry of Agriculture cleared new licenses for the sale of glyphosate at the start of this year. The pesticide is now being sold in new forms, quantities, and by a larger number of manufacturers.

In tests on water around the country, the controversial substance was the one which most surpassed the safety cutoff established by the EU: 23 percent of cases were above the limit. By Brazilian law, glyphosate was among the pesticides which caused least alarm, with only 0.02 percent of tests going over Brazilian limits.

“This is a public health scandal. We’ve put the limit high up in the stratosphere, and we say that we have safe water,” complained researcher Larissa Bombardi, a geography professor at the University of São Paulo and author of an atlas comparing Brazilian and European pesticide law. Her study shows that Brazil’s limits are up to 5,000 times higher than those in the EU. The most serious case is glyphosate: while in Europe only 0.1 micrograms per liter are permitted, in Brazil, the law allows for up to 500 micrograms per liter.

As glyphosate is the best-selling pesticide in Brazil and has the most generous limit for presence in water, Ms. Bombardi is suspicious of the criteria being used: “in the case of glyphosate, it is really difficult to find scientific justification, it seems to be more of a political and economic decision.” The pesticide was the most consumed in 2017 in Brazil, with 173,000 tons sold, according to Ibama. The volume corresponded to 22 percent of sales estimates for the whole world in that year, making Brazil an important market for manufacturers, among them giants Syngenta and Monsanto—acquired by Bayer last year.

Generous limits for pesticides

The broad difference between the limits established by the EU and Brazil is one of the main arguments used by critics of the use of the substance in Brazil. “This difference could only happen for two reasons. Either our society is stronger and we are more resistant to pesticides. Or we are stupider, because we are being naïve about the risks we are running,” says Mr. Melgarejo, of the Campaign Against Pesticides.

Ellen Pritsch, of the working group to review limits of pesticides in water, disagrees. In her opinion, the current limits are safe and were established with scientific justification. “Brazilian criteria are ten times less than the effect which would create the problem. So, even if a percentage above this level is found, it would still be below [the level of risk],” she stated.

Before approving pesticide licenses, manufacturing companies submit studies with tests on animals in laboratories. Sindiveg argues that these studies suffice to evaluate the risk of substances. “These are bioconcentration studies on fish and micro-organisms, algae and soil organisms, bees, microcrustaceans, fish and birds,” read a statement sent by Sindiveg in response to questions.

The main demand of groups campaigning for the control of pesticides is for more restrictions and the banning of some pesticides already approved in the country, such as atrazine, acephate, and paraquat, which are top sellers in Brazil but banned in the EU.

However, the governor is pulling in the opposite direction. Agriculture Minister Tereza Cristina was the president of the special committee in the House of Representatives which approved, last June, a bill to speed up the approval of new pesticides in the country. Nicknamed the “poison bill,” it caused some controversy, being criticized by a letter signed by over 20 groups from the scientific community.

With no expectation of managing a majority in Congress to approve the bill, the strategy appears to have changes. Since the beginning of the year, the Agriculture Ministry published new licenses for 152 pesticides, a record speed of 1.5 approvals a day. Invited to clarify these licenses in a House hearing last month, the minister said there was no “general clearance” and that long approval procedures only hinder Brazilian agribusiness.

She dubbed studies highlighting the risks of these substances as “disinformation” and, using the same argument as the pesticide producers union, declared that intoxication occurs in accordance with the way workers apply the substances. One day after the hearing, the government approved the sale of another 31 pesticides in Brazil.

Translation: The Brazilian Report.

O post “Cocktail” of 27 pesticides found in water of 1 out of 4 Brazilian cities apareceu primeiro em Repórter Brasil.

Imagine starting out the year having to pay your property taxes, your car taxes or any other taxes. Imagine getting to the supermarket and receiving a 40% discount on shampoo and 30% on tomato sauce. Imagine being able to take out a bank loan with interest well below that of the market.

This is more or less what companies that manufacture and sell pesticides operate in Brazil, protected by a package of benefits that, counting just tax exemptions and reductions, add up to nearly R$10 billion (US$ 2.2 billion) every year, according to an unprecedented study carried out by ABRASCO, the Brazilian Association of Collective Health, executed by researchers from the Oswaldo Cruz foundation and the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro.

The amount that the Brazilian government fails to collect because of tax exemptions on pesticides is nearly four times as much as the Ministry of the Environment’s total budget this year (R$2.7 billion, or US$ 600 milllion) and more than double what the nation’s national health system [SUS] spent to treat cancer patients in 2017 (R$4.7 billion, or US$ 1 billion).

“Our study clearly showed that it’s time for society to begin to reflect on subsidies for pesticides. First, because we are in the middle of a fiscal crisis in which many sectors are re-evaluating subsidies. But mostly because of the high amount the State is unable to levy,” affirms study coauthor, Wagner Soares, economist and graduate level professor in the Sustainable Development Practices program at UFRRJ.

The “pesticide grant” even includes public funding in the millions for transnational giants in the sector. The study carried out by Repórter Brasil and Agência Pública shows that over the last 14 years the BNDES (Brazilian National Development Bank) granted loans of R$ 358.3 million (US$ 80 million) to companies in the sector (interest was also subsidized by the government). They also found that FINEP (the Ministry of Science and Technology’s Funding Authority for Studies and Projects) transferred R$ 390 million (US$ 86 million) to large pesticide manufacturers for research and development.

The investments and maintenance of the exemptions contradict promises made by Minister of the Economy Paulo Guedes that fiscal incentives would be reviewed  in order to reduce the deficit on government balance sheets. During the 2018 presidential campaign (when President Jair Bolsonaro was elected), Guedes proposed up to 20% cuts in exemptions. The proposed scenarios include reintroducing taxation on food given out in the “cesta básica” [basket of basics] federal food distribution program. When asked if it intends to review the tax waivers, the Ministry of the Economy did not respond.

Supreme Court queries

The exemptions and other benefits granted the pesticides sector are a point of question among those who keep a watch on the Brazilian public budget. “It is as if you lived in a condominium and your neighbor didn’t have to pay the condominium fees. And that they got the pool dirty, and the shared gym space, generating costs for everyone else. These benefits give large agribusiness companies a break while throwing the cost back on society,” explains Marcelo Novaes, São Paulo State public defender, who has investigated the issue for years.

The fiscal waivers are upheld by laws implemented decades ago that consider pesticides as fundamental for Brazil’s development and that for this reason, need stimulus—as is provided for the cesta básica [basket of basics] federal food distribution program.

But this scenario of benefits for pesticide manufacturers could change starting February 19, when the Federal Supreme Court (STF) decides on a Direct Action of Unconstitutionality (ADI 5553) questioning the logic of considering pesticides fundamental for the nation’s development. The Action compares pesticides with products like cigarettes, considered harmful to health and which generate costs that are paid by the entire population—and for which reason are subject to extra taxes instead of tax breaks.

The comparison with cigarettes—where up to 80% of the price is composed of taxes—is precise according to Professor Andrei Cechin from the Economics department at the Universidade de Brasília (UnB). “Cigars are bad for those who smoke them, and smokers will rely on SUS [public health system] to treat them for resulting illnesses. This cost comes back on society, because the population pays for SUS. So high taxes on cigarettes are justifiable,” explains the professor.

The same logic holds for pesticides, says Cechin, because the costs of treatments for contamination cases are also paid by SUS, justifying extra taxation for the sector: “But instead, we give them exemptions and even foment farming with pesticides.” The Ministry of the Economy has already endorsed extra taxation for cigarettes and alcohol, called “the sin tax”. However, no such word has come out about pesticides.

In 2017, the Attorney General’s Office emitted a statement about the Direct Action of Unconstitutionality in which then-Attorney General Raquel Dodge defends the unconstitutionality of granting tax benefits and exemptions for pesticides, as the “international constitutional order shows concern with the use of agrochemicals, imposing severe restrictions on production, registration, marketing and handling, with a view to protecting the environment, health and, above all, workers.”

In addition to whether or not they fall under the legislation, economist Cechin also warns that, as with cigarettes, more money is spent on treating pesticide poisonings than on purchasing the product itself. A study published in “Saúde Pública” magazine reveals that for every US$ 1 spent on the purchase of pesticides in the state of Paraná, US$ 1.28 is spent on the SUS public health program for the treatment of acute intoxications poisonings—those that occur immediately after application. The calculation left out spending on chronic diseases, those that appear over time due to constant exposure to pesticides, such as cancer.

2.2 Billion dollars a year

Even in the face of pesticides’ impact on the  health of the population and the environment, companies ceased to pay nearly R$ 10 billion (US$ 2 billion) in federal and state taxes in 2017—and the ones that most failed to collect were the states, according to the study “ “Tax incentive policy for pesticides in Brazil is unjustifiable and unsustainable” by ABRASCO, the Brazilian Association of Collective Health.

Renouncement of only the ICMS (VAT on goods and services) waiver in the state of Rio Grande do Sul would be generate enough to cover over half of the state budget in 2017. In the state of Mato Grosso, the amount would represent 66% of the entire state health budget.

State ICMS tax exemptions, which were introduced in 1997, account for the largest slice of the exoneration pie, with 63% of the total; it is followed by the IPI (tax on Industrialized Products) with 16.5%; the PIS/PASEP and COFINS (Federal Unemployment and Social Security funding contributions) with 15.6% and, lastly, the II Importation Tax with 4.8%, according to the ABRASCO study, also signed by Marcelo Firpo, FIOCRUZ National School of Public Health researcher and by environmental scientist Lucas Neves da Cunha.

According to the authors, the thesis that reducing the value of pesticides is necessary to maintain the price of food doesn’t hold up. “It would be more reasonable to subsidize not the use of pesticides, but directly the consumption of food,” concludes the study, which considered pesticide-related expenses reported by rural producers in the 2017 Agricultural Census.

Buddy loans

Although direct federal investment to the sector amounts to considerably less than the tax exemptions, it is noteworthy that the giant pesticide producers benefit the most. Between 2005 and 2019, the federal government invested R$ 749 million (US$ 165 million) through BNDES and FINEP in 18 pesticide manufacturers, including Monsanto, Syngenta, Ourofino and Dow Agrosciences (today Corteva).

Of the resources invested in research in the entire pharmaceutical industry since 2005, pesticide manufacturer Ourofino was the third most benefited, behind only Hypera Pharma and Aché, which produce medicines for human health. Manufacturer of more than 30 pesticide products including glyphosate and fipronil, the company received R$ 334.6 million (US$ 74 million) in public resources for their pesticides and agricultural research divisions. Ourofino had not responded to inquiries for comment when this article was concluded.

FINEP, on the other hand, recognizes direct financing in pesticides, but also says it selects projects that seek to replace pesticides with biological products and supports “innovative projects with the premise of increasing their efficiency.” See FINEP’s full response here. The BNDES (Development Bank) did not comment.

More expensive food?

Entities representing the pesticide industry argue that suspending tax exemptions for the sector would lead to higher food prices and lead to inflation.

“The end of the benefit will impact the prices of inputs and, consequently, increase the cost of the cesta básica. The exemption, therefore, is much more beneficial to society than to industries,” says Christian Lohbauer, president of CropLife Brasil, an association that represents pesticide-producing companies such as BASF, Bayer, Corteva, FMC and Syngenta.

According to APROSOJA (Brazilian Soy Producers’ Association), the end of tax benefits would increase production costs. “Part of the Brazilian production of grains, fruits, fibers and vegetables would be rendered unfeasible, because when computing the tax increase in the costs of agricultural pesticides, added to the cost of transportation logistics, climatic risks and other taxes and contributions from the sector, many inland regions would no longer be viable,” was the written statement.

The Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply informed that it will wait for the decision of the STF to manifest itself. The National Agriculture Confederation (CNA) declined to comment. Meanwhile the National Association of the Vegetal Defense Products Industry (SINDIVEG) stated that “taxation would increase food costs and reduce the competitiveness of Brazilian products on the international market.” See the full statements of the Association, of Croplife and of APROSOJA.

For economist Cechi from UnB, it is difficult to affirm that reducing pesticide industry benefits would be felt at Brazilian tables, as a large part is used for commodities like soybean and not food items.

“Pesticides are used mainly in non-food crops, that is, commodities whose prices are set by the international market. It is not the producers who choose the price. If the benefits are lost, producers will have to spend more on pesticides, meaning a lower profit margin. The impact [of the reduction in benefits] would be for agribusiness companies.”

Soybean plantations were the destination for 52% of all agrochemical sales in Brazil in 2015. Corn and sugar cane ranked second, with 10% each, followed by cotton, with 7%. These four agricultural commodities alone represented 79% of the pesticide used in the country, according to data from SINDIVEG.

The “pesticide grant” is more controversial if one considers that Brazil is the world’s largest consumer of pesticides in terms of value, and that the sector grew 190% between 2000 and 2010, while on the global market this number was 93%. In addition, President Jair Bolsonaro’s government approved a  record number of these products in 2019, benefiting mainly multinationals.

All this within the context where there is a market concentration that, in the view of public defender Marcelo Novaes, harms public coffers, since without competition, companies can manipulate prices and increase their profits. “We are dominated by five large multinationals—Syngenta, Bayer-Monsanto, BASF, Corteva (ex-Dow) and DuPont—who rule over everything because they own 80% of the sector,” says Novaes, who denounced what he considers to be an oligopoly at the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE).

Translated by Maya Johnson from Mongabay

O post Tax exemptions on pesticides in Brazil add up to US$ 2.2 billion per year apareceu primeiro em Repórter Brasil.

UK armed forces in the Middle East are being served beef from a Brazilian company whose suppliers have illegally cleared more than 8,000 hectares (ha) of land – including swathes of the Amazon and Cerrado biomes. The case was revealed by a new Earthsight report, resulting from an investigation in partnership with Repórter Brasil.

The report shows that beef used by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) in Bahrain is supplied by, among others, Frigorifico Sul Ltda (Frigosul), a part of the FugaCouros group – one of Brazil’s largest leather producers.

The company bought thousands of cattle from farmers who were fined a total of 33.5 million Brazillian real (about $6 million) by various authorities for malpractice, including illegal land clearance, falsifying documents and pollution.

Frigosul told Earthsight it uses a third-party to monitor suppliers and therefore it is not possible that the firm could purchase from ranches sanctioned by IBAMA: “Frigosul, by conviction and by the principles itself, does not buy cattle from rural properties that are on the embargo list, as the company does not agree with the attitudes of those on the embargo list.”

However, the investigation claims that, since 2018, two of the company’s slaughterhouses sourcedbeef from suppliers that had previously deforested almost 9,000 hectares (19,768 acres). Two-thirds of the roughly R$33.5m (£6m)in fines accrued by Frigosul’s suppliers over the past two decades remain unpaid, says the report.

Lack of traceability

As well as Frigosul, the Brazillian firm Minerva was also named as a supplier to the UKarmed forces in Bahrain.

Minerva told Earthsight that cattle purchases in the Amazon biome are “100% made on monitored farms”. “If any irregularity is identified,” the statement added. “The Company’s sustainability department blocks suppliers in non-compliance with any of the criteria, eliminating the possibility of purchasing raw material from such producers.”

However, the investigation has identified a known Minerva supplier in the Amazon state of Rondônia seemingly moving cattle from aranch,with embargoed areas due to illegal deforestation, to another farm in order to evade Minerva’s policy.

From his ‘clean’ farm, shows the investigation,he would then send the animals to Minerva’s Rondônia facility in Rolim de Moura – a slaughterhouse Earthsight has found to be supplying the MoD’s subcontractor in Bahrain.

Minerva told Earthsight thar does not have effective means of verifying and tracking indirect suppliers. When informed of the case, the company said they would investigate and take “appropriate measures” if any irregularity were found.

Its statement added that the problem of monitoring indirect suppliers is deep-rooted in the sector: “There is currently no accessible and reliable data and statistics on the complete livestock traceability chain to determine the number of indirect suppliers in Brazil.”

O post UK military beef supplier buys from sanctioned Brazilian farmers, investigation shows apareceu primeiro em Repórter Brasil.