After decades of surviving the rigorous conditions of slave labor in Brazil, Cícero Guedes was shot and killed on Jan. 25, 2013. Guedes had been organizing an occupation for the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) across seven sugar plantations.
Guedes, 58, left behind a wife and three children. He also leaves behind a legacy interwoven into the tapestry of Brazil’s ongoing slave labor problem.
“I worked hungry many times, without anything to eat. No one can work a whole day without eating a thing,” Guedes told the Inter Press Service some time before his death. “My lunch was sucking on sugar cane; the suffering is marked on your face. I worked in plantations, sugar mills, factories, and the pay was next to nothing.”
Slavery was banned in Brazil in 1888 but nearly 130 years later the country is still grappling with slave-like working conditions in many rural areas. To fight this phenomenon, Brazil has concocted a creative new plan to send camera-equipped drones to inspect properties suspected of violating the law.
The Brazilian government will deploy six drones to rural areas surrounding Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second most populous city.
“Drones don’t substitute the inspector’s physical presence, but they will be useful out in the country, in the case of farms that are hard to reach by road, for example,” Bruno Barcia Lopes, coordinator of Rural Supervision at Rio de Janeiro’s Labor Secretariat, told Reuters on Tuesday.
The issue of slave labor has been ongoing for years but the Brazilian government has made an increased effort at fighting it over the last decade. In 2012, the U.S. government gave $5.3 million to Brazil and Peru to combat forced labor. Nonetheless, the problem is still pervasive throughout the country particularly on cattle ranches, logging and mining camps, and on plantations for soybeans, corn, and cotton. In 2013 alone 1,500 workers were freed — most of whom worked in urban areas.
In fact, last year one of Brazil’s leading construction companies Odebrecht was accused of “human trafficking” and forcing 500 Brazilian workers in Angola to work in “slave-like conditions.” Prosecutors in Brazil sought $220 million in compensation for the workers. OAS SA, a company that built two of the stadiums used during the 2014 World Cup, was also blacklisted last year by the government for using slave labor.
The slave laborers are not property as slaves during the days of the transatlantic slave trade were, but there are remnants from that period in how workers are treated today.
“The common denominator between slavery from the 16th to the 19th centuries and today is the way order is kept: through threats, psychological violence, physical constraint, punishments and even assassinations,” Leonardo Sakamoto, founder and president of Repórter Brasil, a journalism and education project founded to expose and denounce human rights violations of rural workers in Brazil, told the Catholic Relief Service.
Such conditions are driven by the high levels of unemployment in Brazil, causing workers to accept whatever they can to simply get by. Statistics are also sparse as there is no reliable data on slave labor there.
“The person is obliged to provide a service without or with an insufficient remuneration, having to pay for food, housing and other personal expenses directly to the employer, generating debts that they cannot pay with their salaries,” Caio Magri, Executive Director for Public Policies at the Ethos Institute for Business and Social Responsibility, wrote in the Huffington Post last year. “Furthermore, labor relations are marked by conflict, coercion and threats, and working conditions are extremely precarious. Thus, slave labor is the most serious form of exploitation, and it is not only a threat against the fundamental principles and rights at work, but also confronts the most basic human rights.”
Before his death, Guedes used his experiences to try and address the issue by organizing workers. Many workers continue to toil under similar conditions.
“I worked and worked and couldn’t see any way to improve my situation,” Guedes once said. “Slavery is when a person’s dignity isn’t respected, and when they are humiliated.”