Day and night the men roll up outside the Correntao supermarket, a roaming army of impoverished workers, searching for a better future and for work. Any work.
Wearing rubber flip-flops, ragged T-shirts and carrying their possessions under their arms in plastic bags, they gather at the meeting point on the outskirts of Maraba, a gritty Amazon city, at Kilometer Six of the Trans-Amazonian highway and wait.
Some are picked up almost immediately and transported to remote jungle camps and farms where they are often forced to work by cattle ranchers and illegal loggers in dangerous and squalid conditions for little or no pay.
Others string hammocks up around the local bus station, waiting for a possible employer to arrive. The rest pile into dozens of tatty boarding houses, known in the Amazon as “pioneer hotels,” where they await recruitment.
“They are adventurers,” said farmhand Jose da Costa, 49, as he sits outside one of the many pioneer hotels at Kilometer Six, or “Six” as locals call the area. “They come from all over [Brazil] — all of them looking for work. People say, ‘If you are looking for a job go and look for a farmer at Six.”
While some pioneer hotels are legitimate flop houses, human-rights activists believe many are effectively slave houses; places where impoverished workers are exploited by unscrupulous hotel owners and middlemen known as gatos, or cats, who force them to work until they have off paid their debts for food and housing.
Last year the Brazilian government’s anti-slavery taskforce freed 4,634 workers from “slave-like conditions,” about 600 of them here in the often-lawless Amazon state of Para. Officials believe many of the men began their life in slavery in such hotels — cramped, mosquito-ridden dens that can be found in most corners of the Amazon. The government calls such places pontos de compra, or “buying points.”
“People say, ‘Go there because you’ll find a job,’” Claudio Secchin, a work ministry labor inspector, said during a recent anti-slavery operation in Maraba. “They put themselves up in these guesthouses and people take advantage of their fragility and trick them [into going] to the farms where they find a hostile environment of abandon and exploitation.”
In recent years, Brazil’s government has made efforts to stamp out modern-day slavery, sending teams of inspectors on regular missions to the Amazon accompanied by rifle-toting federal police officers.
Secchin said progress was being made: The raids were helping the government gradually claw back control of a region that had become a place of “virtual anarchy.”
But the practice of debt slavery continues across the Amazon and Brazil’s mid-west. Activists say there could be as many as 40,000 workers living in slave-like conditions across the country and hundreds of pioneer hotels continue to operate.
In 2007, the owner of one pioneer hotel in the Amazon town of Paragominas was charged with involvement in a slavery network, but activists say few such cases are ever heard.
“[These workers] go anywhere they hear there might be a chance of work to support their families,” said Jose Batista, a Maraba-based anti-slavery campaigner from the Pastoral Land Commission of Brazil’s Catholic Church. “They are people who arrive thinking there is work for everyone, drawn by the propaganda. But they arrive, can’t find work and don’t have anywhere to go and they end up staying in the hotels waiting for someone to hire them.”
There is little that cannot be bought on the muddy streets around the Correntao: satellite dishes, mobile phones and truck tires, toilet seats and goats, class A drugs and underage prostitutes. Day and night, battered open-backed trucks clatter past, packed with supplies, spattered with terracotta-colored mud and carrying migrant workers to surrounding farms.
“The only people here who are from Maraba are our children,” said Joao, a former gold miner and the owner of one of the city’s pioneer hotels where bunk beds cost between 5 reais and 15 reais (US$2.20 to US$6.60) a night.
Walmir dos Santos, 39, a migrant worker from Maranhao state, began his path into slavery at Kilometer Six: “I went out looking for a job and I met this guy and we went off.”
Dos Santos said he arrived at the Correntao one morning, found work in a charcoal furnace by noon, but had to wait a month to be rescued from his heavily armed employer by the anti-slavery taskforce.
“They said Para was good for work. It hasn’t been very good so far,” he said.
Eugenio Pereira da Silva, an illiterate chainsaw operator who was also recently freed by the government, said many of his fellow workers started life in pioneer hotels.
“People come from all over and stay in the hotels. When they find a patrao [boss] they can get out and go and work for him. This kind of thing happens a lot,” he said.
The hotels are one part of a chain of exploitation that took root in Brazil in the 1960s as the government sought to occupy the world’s largest tropical rainforest. Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians poured into the Amazon region and landowners looked to the impoverished northeastern workers as cheap labor to help them profit from the rainforest’s destruction.
“We were treated like slaves,” said Francisco Raimundo Mendes, a 48-year-old from the northeastern state of Maranhao, who claims his employer refused to provide him with medical treatment after he suffered a hernia while loading tree trunks onto a truck for 7.50 reais a day. “It was the greatest suffering in the world.”
But da Silva was upbeat after being told by government officials that he would receive several thousand reais in compensation from his former employer.
“We were drinking the water from the river and the animals drank there too,” the father of five recalled. “If they [the government inspectors] hadn’t turned up we’d still be working there now,”
What would he do now, without his job?
“I don’t have any studies, I can’t read and things just keep getting more difficult for me,” he sighed. “I have to work. I’ll have to find another job in a farm or something.”
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