The knock on the door that 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 £600 (R6 750) 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.
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But, when Valdemir opened the door to the house where he was staying, it was not a wad of banknotes that his boss, Maciel, was brandishing, but a gun.
| 25 000 men working as slave labourers |
With the bullets still lying under his skin, Valdemir, a slight young man in his early 20s, said: "I opened the door and he shot me. When the first shot 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."
The first bullet hit Valdemir in a lung and the second lodged in his back. But, despite being critically wounded, his instincts saved him. He is in now in hiding at his father's home, hundreds of kilometres away in another province, awaiting surgery to remove the bullets.
Antonio was not so fortunate. The wife and children he left behind to seek his fortune in Para probably do not even know he is dead. His ID card was stolen by his murderer and nobody knows his surname.
Perhaps the most shocking element of this tale is that, far from being an isolated incident of greed and inhumanity, it is part of the dark secret that lurks in Brazil's rural heartlands.
| 'For each murder or incident of violence, many more go unrecorded' |
Valdemir - whose real name has been withheld to protect him from reprisals - and Antonio are among about 25 000 men working as slave labourers, forced to destroy thousands of hectares of virgin rainforest or work in Dickensian conditions to pay off debts that can never be paid in full.
In an era of increased awareness of the global trafficking of human beings - from the victims of Chinese "snakehead" gangs to women from eastern Europe forced into prostitution in London's massage parlours - the peao, or bonded labourers of Brazil, are an example of an even more ingrained injustice - an enslaved underclass whose forced labour is aggravating the problem of global warming.
Illiterate and destitute, the labourers are recruited from Brazil's northeastern provinces with offers of well-paid jobs to clear the land and then tend crops and livestock or work in charcoal plants.
Although a small minority of the offers turn out to be genuine, the reality for the vast majority could not be more different.
They find themselves on remote farms, watched by armed guards and under the power of landowners who will kill, if necessary, rather than pay the most vulnerable.
Valdemir, from an isolated village in the country's northeast, was one of eight labourers who had been recruited by Maciel, a gato or "cat", meaning a gangleader.
On the day before the shooting, on August 16, 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 gangleader owed Valdemir 1 588 reals (about R17 870). Antonio, who had worked for Maciel for longer and came from another far-off state, Maranhao, was owed 2 500 reals.
Although six of the eight men, all of them from Novo Repartimento, were paid, the gangleader refused to pay Valdemir and Antonio.
Instead, he set the 3am rendezvous and, bizarrely, asked to borrow Valdemir's new trousers, explaining that his were too dirty.
Valdemir said the reason for the shooting was plain: "I am sure that Maciel wanted to kill us so that 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."
The Brazilian government maintains that, despite its recognition of the scale of slavery in the country, murder and bloodshed remain rare in the nation's labour camps.
Campaigners disagree. They point to figures showing that in south Para, 534 rural workers were recorded as killed in the 30 years to 2001 - 26 times the national murder rate.
Xavier Plassat, of the Pastoral Land Commission, the charity campaigning to end the slavery that brought the attack on Valdemir and Antonio to light, said: "Cases such as this are just the ones we hear about. For each murder or incident of violence, many more go unrecorded, uninvestigated or unnoticed.
"These are people who have no choice other than to believe in the false promises made to them. They come from places where survival is a daily struggle to work to destroy the Amazon or as slaves in the richer south.
"The promise of saving a good sum of money is the cruellest trick of all. It says to them: 'There is hope, this is the chance of my life.' The captors are preying on the naivety and hope of their victims."
In 1888, Brazil became the last in the Americas to abolish slavery, and a lack of land reform means that, despite boasting one of the world's richest agricultural outputs, with exports ranging from cattle to coffee, very few of the country's 30 million rural poor own smallholdings or farms. The result for the 25 000 peao is a life of profound impoverishment.
After being recruited from their homes, the labourers travel by bus or lorry for up to a week to reach their destination, more often than not a remote farm or plantation at the end of a muddy road.
Once there, the men are told that they have incurred a debt to pay for their travel expenses, food, tools and any other provisions, including toothbrushes.
The working day lasts from dawn until dusk and consists of cutting through swathes of rainforest. Accommodation consists of shelters and hovels scraped together from plastic sheeting and timber.
Angelika Berndt, a worker for the London-based Anti-slavery International, said: "The men have no value to their captors other than as workers. They are treated worse than livestock. At least the landowners care if their animals are hurt or injured."
For Valdemir, half-hearted attempts at law reform mean there is little prospect that the man who left him for dead will ever be prosecuted. These days he spends all his time hiding in his father's home, dreading another 3am knock at the door, and the sound of falling timber continues to echo around the Amazon. - Foreign Service
- This article was originally published on page 17 of Sunday Independent on November 07, 2004
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