Learning all we can

If we are going to be committed to the abolition of slavery, we need to learn all we can about it and its companion-in-evil, human trafficking. By the way, these two terms are different ways of expressing pretty much the same thing. Slavery, of course, describes the condition of a person’s life when he or she is under the control of someone else; trafficking is when fraud, force or coercion is used to make people work or have sex against their will.

Anyway, I’ve found another video that I think is worth watching. It is called “Bound By Promises: Contemporary Slavery in Rural Brazil.”

This 17-minute documentary, produced in part by Witness, looks at men who have been promised good jobs but then have been enslaved in the charcoal industry. They are taken to camps deep in the jungle where they can neither escape nor be found. They are informed that they have incurred a debt that must be paid before they can leave. But as usual, the slaveholder finds all kinds of charges to add to the slave’s bill so it never can be paid.

One man’s wife obtained the phone number of the man who had enslaved her husband. She called, asking for her husband. The slaveholder threatened to change the number to stop her from calling and said that if she called again, he would tell her where to find her husband’s body.

The video gives statistics on the Brazilian government’s campaign to wipe out slavery. From the information presented, it looks as if the government is sincere in its effort but is falling far short of its goal.

The U.S. State Department’s 2007 Trafficking in Persons report, with which we Abolitionists should all become familiar, lists Brazil as a “Tier 2” country (Tier 1 is best, Tier 3 is worst). The report says that although Brazil has made clear progress in efforts against sex trafficking, progress has not been so good in the area of labor trafficking, which is the focus of this video. Although the criminal penalties for sex trafficking are commensurate with sentences for rape, the sentences for labor trafficking are only one-to-three years, which is not stringent enough.

On the positive side, the report notes that the government’s Mobile Enforcement Groups rescued a total of 3,390 victims of forced labor in 2006 and that victims were given immediate medical care, counseling and some compensation.