A rural worker on a cassava plantation in Pesqueira, Pernambuco in northeast Brazil holds out his damaged hands, testimony to the appalling slave labour conditions he was forced to work under. Credit: Alejandro Arigón/IPS
- The upcoming mega sporting events in Brazil are paving a new route for slave labour among those migrating from rural areas to the cities in search of work.
The dream of a good job draws many rural migrants from Brazil’s poorest regions, as well as neighbouring countries, to try their luck in big cities. But sometimes their dreams turn into nightmares.
Slave labour remains largely a rural phenomenon in Brazil, where it still occurs on cattle ranches, sugar cane plantations and charcoal farms in remote areas. But it has been growing more recently in the textile and garment industry as well.
The shift to urban areas has made it difficult to fight, said experts consulted by IPS.
Cícero Guedes survived several decades of work in slavery conditions, like thousands of other rural workers in Brazil who move around the country in search of work and fall victim to forced labour.
Born in the state of Alagoas in Brazil’s impoverished Northeast, Guedes started to work at the age of eight and never went to school. He began to travel around the country in search of work on sugar cane plantations.
“I worked and worked and couldn’t see any way to improve my situation,” he said. “Slavery is when a person’s dignity isn’t respected, and when they are humiliated.” CONTINUES
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My concern and issue with the Reparation Movement in the USA and the Caribbean is that it, seems to me,that Slavery is spoken of and viewed in the past tense - and that the Reparation is self absorbed in its own victimization.
Slavery is not a thing of the past.
Millions are enslaved today across the world.
It is time the Reparations Movement take a stand for those currently enslaved.