By: Priscila Néri, Posted: Nov 18 08

Brazil

Bonded labor, Impunity, Slavery & forced labor

Bound by Promises, CEJIL, CPT, Debt Bondage, slave labor, WITNESS

Every year, more than 25,000 workers are enslaved by landowners in rural Brazil, mainly in the Amazon region. They are generally men between the ages of 18-35 who are lured into forced labor with false promises of good pay and job security. Taken to remote ranches, their documents are confiscated and they are told they owe the landowners money for their travel, food, equipment, and other supplies.  As the unending and unpayable debts mount, these workers are held under the constant watch of armed guards, unable to escape or ask for help.

Silvano Rezende grew up in the Amazon region of Brazil witnessing the hardships faced by rural workers. But even he couldn't quite fathom how (and if) slavery could be happening right before his eyes.  "I thought people were talking about underpaid, tough, physically exhausting jobs...I never thought they were actually slaves," he says.

That all changed on the day he witnessed it with his own eyes. "The bodies of six workers were being returned to their families after they had died in 'work-related accidents' on the remote ranches where they were working," he remembers. "When I attended the funeral and saw these workers, it became obvious they had been executed." It was then, he says, that he really understood how rural enslavement works.

From then on, Silvano started working on a campaign led  by the Comissão Pastoral da Terra's (CPT) to end slave labor in rural Brazil, an initiative supported by the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL). Together with WITNESS, CPT and CEJIL produced Bound by Promises, a video that tells the story of these workers and that has been integrated into CPT's advocacy campaign as a tool to help raise awareness about rural slavery.

Bound by Promises has been screened to key policy makers in Brazil and abroad and has also been used by organizations like Business for Social Responsibility to help companies detect and eliminate slave labor in their supply chains. Watch these excerpts from Bound by Promises and then see the full version of the film.