Impressed Workers Fell Amazon Forest, Then Killed To Avoid Paying Wages

[hatrack]

"The knock on the door Valdemir Maria de Jesus had been hoping for came at 3am. The early hour was strange but after three and a half months of clearing rainforest, the salary owed to him and his friend Antonio was finally to be paid. It was a moment for celebration. Like thousands of Brazilian labourers working in the Amazon, the meagre £800 the two men had earned from their back-breaking efforts in the frontier state of Para would provide them with the means to start new lives, enough to build a new house, marry or support their families.

But when Valdemir went to the door, it was not a wad of banknotes but a gun that his boss, Maciel, was brandishing. "I opened the door and he shot me," said Valdemir, a slight man in his twenties who still has the bullets lodged in him. "When the first hit me, I fell down and pretended to be dead. He shot me a second time. Then he went over and shot my friend. After he finished with him, he came back and kicked me several times in the head to check if I was dead. After he left, people found me and they somehow got me to hospital."

EDIT

The labourers, illiterate and deeply impoverished, are recruited from Brazil's north-eastern provinces with offers of well-paid jobs to clear the land and tend crops and livestock or work in charcoal plants. Although a few of the offers turn out to be genuine, the harsh reality is that they will find themselves on remote farms, watched by armed guards and under the power of landowners, some of whom will kill rather than pay the most vulnerable. Valdemir, from an isolated village in north-eastern Brazil, was among eight labourers recruited by Maciel, a gato or cat, meaning a gangmaster. On 16 August this year, the day before the shooting, Maciel had told the men to go to the town of Novo Repartimento in Para, the vast Amazonian state where much of the slavery is concentrated. The gangmaster owed Valdemir 1,588 reais, £300. Antonio, who had worked for Maciel for longer and came from another far-off state, Maranhao, was owed 2,500 reais. Although six of the eight men, all from Novo Repartimento, were paid, the gangmaster refused to pay Valdemir and Antonio. Instead, he set the 3am rendezvous for the two men. Valdemir said the reason for the shooting was plain. "I am sure Maciel wanted to kill us so he did not have to pay us. We were not from there. Nobody would have known it was him. Everybody would think a thief came for the money."

EDIT

To complete the degradation, each peáo becomes nameless, a working machine stripped of individuality. Instead of being referred to by their names, they are referred to by their state of origin, such as Maranhao or Piaui. If there are several workers from the same state, they are simply numbers, Piaui 1, Piaui 2 and so on. A large part of the reason that Antonio's family have not been informed of his murder is that he was known to his colleagues only as Maranhao 2. Ms Berndt said: "The men have no value to their captors other than as workers. They are treated worse than livestock. At the least the landowners care if their animals are hurt or injured." But this humanitarian scandal has not gone unnoticed by Brazil's government, and President Luiz Ignacio "Lula" da Silva, the trade unionist and former shoe-shine boy who was elected on an anti-poverty ticket in 2002. In an unpublished report this year, the Geneva-based International Labour Organisation praised the government for its efforts to tackle slavery. But the report, an in-depth survey of Brazil's slave-labour market, has remained secret amid claims that it shows America is benefiting from the work of slave labourers by importing crude pig-iron produced in rainforests for use in American mills."

EDIT

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=578098

[DuctapeFatwa]

1. business-friendly kick

[hatrack]

2. I wonder if Brazil is a "Right-To-Work" country?

Sure sounds like it, Lula notwithstanding.

Depressing fucking story.