ONE OF BRAZIL’S MOST significant slave labor cases reaches the Labor Court in Redenção, in the south of the Amazon state of Pará, this week. Volkswagen Brasil stands accused of recruiting rural laborers and subjecting them to slave-like conditions at the Vale do Rio Cristalino ranch in Santana do Araguaia, Pará, from 1974 to 1986.
After decades of reports from the Land Pastoral Commission (T) and labor unions—and repeated failed settlement attempts—the federal Labor Prosecutor’s Office (MPT) filed human rights violation charges against Volkswagen in December 2024.
This Friday (May 30), four former laborers alleging enslavement will testify. A court decision is expected in the second half of this year. The lawsuit demands a public apology and $29.2 million for collective moral damages.
“When I was at Volks, there were no days off—we worked even on Sundays. I swung a sickle and lived beneath a tarp. During a storm, everything would collapse,” recalled Raul Batista de Souza, 66, one of the witnesses, in an interview with Repórter Brasil.
The lawsuit stands out for its wealth of ing evidence gathered over 40 years: documentation, photos, parliamentary inquiries, journalism from Brazil and , and extensive testimony. These reveal violence, torture, debt bondage, harassment, and threats allegedly carried out by Volkswagen employees and intermediaries at its Amazon ranch, which operated as a major cattle and logging operation.
Court filings state the case covers all four practices that—under Brazilian law, even individually—constitute slave labor: forced labor, debt bondage, degrading living conditions, and exhausting work hours.
The number of workers affected remains uncertain. The complaint states laborers were recruited from distant towns and taken deep into the forest to clear land for pasture. Every year, up to a thousand workers were employed simultaneously across deforestation sites. The T estimated at least a thousand victims during this period.
“The cattle had everything—a team of agronomists, electronic tracking, pristine pasture—care that ensured their health and fattening. But the men had nothing. Just makeshift shelters, and debts that grew with every purchase for work or for home. Attempts to leave were blocked by armed guards, death threats, and recapture,” summarized Father Ricardo Rezende Figueira, then T coordinator for Araguaia and Tocantins. “To make it worse, these workers were also far from home,” he added.
Rezende, now a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and head of the Contemporary Slave Labor Research Group (GPTEC), was among the first to document these complaints, beginning in the 1970s. He will also testify this week.
Before pressing charges, the Labor Prosecutor’s Office met with Volkswagen five times to seek a settlement. The firm withdrew from talks in 2023, maintaining it was not responsible.
Three years earlier, Volkswagen signed a Conduct Adjustment Agreement (TAC) with the Labor Prosecutor, Federal Public Prosecutor, and São Paulo’s state prosecutor, acknowledging reprisals and torture of workers at its São Bernardo do Campo plant during the military dictatorship (1964–1985). It agreed to pay $6.4 million in compensation, but denied guilt for the allegations at the Pará ranch.
ed by Repórter Brasil, Volkswagen Brasil said it “does not comment on ongoing legal proceedings.”
Fugitives from Volkswagen
Companhia Vale do Rio Cristalino, known as Fazenda Volkswagen, was acquired in 1974 as part of a consortium with Brazil’s military regime, enabled by tax incentives and low-interest loans from the Superintendence for the Development of the Amazon (Sudam). Prosecutors estimate public funds for the project, in today’s values, reached $88.5 million.
Spanning 139,000 hectares—almost the size of the city of São Paulo —the ranch had hundreds of kilometers of roads and fencing. It employed over 300 as direct employees, covering istration, livestock care, facilities such as a school, health clinic and recreational club, as well as security guards and cowboys. Workers clearing forest, however, were informally employed and outside the legal structure.
Internal documents indicate the project began in the early dictatorship years, part of a push for corporate investment in agriculture in the Amazon. Official records show Fazenda Volkswagen operated under annual deforestation targets set with Sudam.
However, what began as a flagship rural development model became a police case and an international scandal in the early 1980s when trade union leaders and Catholic clergy shared s of fleeing workers and families seeking news.
Workers described being approached in remote towns—mainly in the nearby states of Mato Grosso, Goiás, and Tocantins—by intermediaries officially called “contractors,” but commonly known as gatos (cats, literally translated into English). The workers accepted advances and promises of houses, good working conditions and free healthcare.
But, sent up to 80 kilometers from the ranch entrance, they soon faced mounting debts and found themselves trapped at worksites by gunmen employed by the gatos.
“In April 1981 I went to work on the farm. The only water was from a filthy well swarming with mosquitoes. We all got sick, feverish with malaria. As I was weak, I left midway through the logging. Seventeen of us sought the pay we were owed. But they didn’t want to pay,” Manoel Gonçalves Lima told the T in July 1983.
The group tried to escape, but were stopped by the gatos and forced back. He and six colleagues only left five months later. “We left penniless—and gravely ill,” he recalled.
T and trade unionists painstakingly collected testimony, writing stories by hand, typewriter, or field notes. Families often visited police stations or army barracks seeking information.
“He worked four months clearing the land through rain and biting flies. On Sundays he walked sixteen kilometers for meat and other food for himself and his companions. At the end of the felling he didn’t get a single cent; The gato Hermínio said he still owed 13,160 cruzeiros,” recalled João Elias do Carmo in November 1983, in a statement to the Rural Workers’ Union of Rio Maria, Pará.
Some workers filed sworn statements with notaries. That was the case for Raul Batista de Souza’s case, who suffered slavery for six months at Fazenda Volkswagen and similar ranches, returning home with no compensation.
De Souza’s last time at the ranch was in 1986, after which Volkswagen sold the property. He and others were then transferred by the gatos to another farm. At the job’s end, seeking pay, they learned they were in debt and had been “sold”.
“There were four or five payments, and the gato insisted we still owed him. When we tried to leave, he replied, ‘You’re not leaving—you’ll repay what I spent buying you first.’ Then we realized we’d been sold.”
Their “debts” covered basic goods: rice, beans, meat, oil, a sickle, boots. “With bills growing, we ate açaí with flour to keep our costs down.”
Debt peonage was central to the operation. “All I did was work to pay for jeans, flip-flops, and a little food. Nine months of relentless labor—cutting trees for the multinational, under the orders of the contractor—and I was trapped with no way out,” an unnamed worker told São Paulo legislators. A fact-finding delegation visited the ranch in July 1983, at Volkswagen’s invitation, to investigate.
A parliamentary delegation and a team of journalists spotted slave laborers firsthand
Father Ricardo Rezende says he went public only after a failed attempt to press Pará’s then-governor, Jader Barbalho, to send police. “Next, urged by Dom Luciano Mendes, then-general secretary of the National Conference of Bishops (CNBB), I called a press conference in [the federal capital] Brasília, ed by a survivor of the slave labor.”
This happened on the first day of a fact-finding mission by legislators from São Paulo to the ranch, which was spurred by Rezende’s denouncement and led by state deputy Expedito Soares (PT), a former Volkswagen worker at São Bernardo who had himself suffered retaliation for demanding better conditions at the manufacturing plant.
In July 1983, with two lawmakers, unionists, and a reporter and photographer from the O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper, Soares traveled to the ranch on a Volkswagen company plane. First, they went to meet Father Ricardo and some workers in a nearby town. On the way, they saw a truck with the ranch logo and stopped.
“There were three men tied up in that truck, whom we freed,” Expedito Soares, who is also testifiying this week, told Repórter Brasil. The fact these workers had been caught fleeing was confirmed on the spot by the gato Abílio Dias de Araújo, or Abilão, a Volkswagen contractor for the deforestation crews. Asked about forcing the men back, the gato allegedly replied he was recovering “those who owed money,” Expedito says.
This event, witnessed by the Estadão team, was detailed in a newspaper report ten days later, which is available at this link. The article describes how two gatos and a military policeman handled the capture of the escapees as if it were routine.
“In their vehicle were newly-recruited workers, including Antonio Andrade dos Reis, 37, but who appeared 50, who had been hauled back after escaping. The gato hesitated when asked how he manages to convince fugitives to return,” the reporter wrote.
“If someone refuses to return, I call the police. They do the convincing,” Abilão is quoted as saying. Even the police deputy in a neighboring town openly itted intervening to “solve” escapes, explaining, “Some don’t want to work Saturdays and Sundays, so they try to run. But I assure you, there’s no violence. Of course, some firmness is needed—if one succeeds in leaving, the others will try too.”
Forcing people back to work under threats constitutes slave labor under Brazilian law. In 2003, Article 149 of the Penal Code expanded to cover four aspects of contemporary slavery: restrictions on freedom of movement, debt bondage (often on fraudulent ), degrading or dangerous conditions, and exhausting work hours.
The Labor Prosecutor’s indictment notes that these elements—and even human trafficking—were widely documented at Fazenda Volkswagen. “Until 1995, slavery was only deprivation of liberty. The Volkswagen case, beyond restricting freedom, also had other factors that were common in the Amazon: such as exhausting working hours and degrading working and living conditions,” says Father Ricardo Rezende.
“The Volkswagen Farm case is iconic among decades of documentation and protest by Brazilian civil society since the time of the dictatorship—from Dom Pedro Casaldáliga’s 1971 pastoral letter denouncing violence and modern-day slavery in the Amazon, to the José Pereira case [a worker who escaped slavery on a farm in Pará in 1989].
“Such incidents led the Brazilian state to formally recognize slavery as a nationwide issue,” says labor inspector André Roston, general coordinator of Labor Inspection and the Promotion of Decent Work at the Ministry of Labor and Employment.
Roston notes that Volkswagen evaded liability at the time largely because Brazil lacked public anti-slavery initiatives. Such policies only began in 1995, when president Fernando Henrique Cardoso officially acknowledged the issue.
Did Volkswagen know?
Volkswagen at the time denied slavery on its land, publicly blaming the gatos in its statements in the 1980s. Prosecutors now argue company leadership knew in detail about their contractors’ practices.
“All evidence shows Volkwagen had a strict surveillance system of who entered and left the ranch—with guard posts and armed security. Workers could not leave unless it was approved by the gatos,” case prosecutor Rafael Garcia told Repórter Brasil.
Father Ricardo Rezende’s archives include what he calls “letters of release,” a reference to Brazil’s original slave-release papers, to describe authorization notes from gatos for workers to leave—a step allegedly only allowed after their debts were paid.
“Volkswagen strictly monitored operations—pasture clearing, fencing, deforestation—all done under slave conditions. Contractors were only paid once the work was in order. The company couldn’t not know how laborers were treated. Ignorance is not credible; it’s absolutely impossible; as the ranch was orderly and efficiently run,” Garcia states.
This aligns with findings by German historian Christopher Kopper, of Bielefeld University, whom Volkswagen hired as part of its 2020 Conduct Adjustment Agreement to investigate company ties to the dictatorship. Kopper’s report describes strict worker surveillance by security staff, operating under Volkswagen’s directives—including a ban on alcohol access.
“Volkswagen farm managers were certainly aware of the realities of the rural labor market, the exploitative practices of the gatos, and treated the itinerant labor force as second-class. These men got no reliable shelter, no sanitation, no proper medical care. Instead of fixing this, management kept ing the gatos,” Kopper wrote.
The historian notes that even if Volkswagen didn’t directly orchestrate abuses, it “took no action to mitigate the inhumane conditions faced by workers.”
Witness Raul Batista de Souza now hopes Volkswagen will “pay for the harm done to us.” He added: “We don’t understand the law, but I can tell you what happened there.”
Deixe o Seu Comentário