The Secret World of Modern Slavery

Impossible to Leave

Modern-day slaves in Latin America aren't bought and sold as slaves were in the U.S. before the Civil War. They're lured from impoverished cities in Brazil's northeast or from the Andean highlands of Bolivia and Peru.

Recruiters dispatched by slave camp owners promise steady-paying jobs, Campos says. Once at the Amazon camps, some workers are forced -- at times at gunpoint -- to work off debts to their bosses for food and clothing bought at company stores.

Many go months without pay or see their wages whittled to nothing because of expenses such as tools, boots and gloves. Lack of money, an impenetrable jungle and a long distance to get home make it impossible for the slaves to leave.

At camps visited by Bloomberg News in Brazil and Peru, slaves live where they work, in clearings surrounded by miles of jungle. They make charcoal, mine for gold, log mahogany and clear trees for cattle pastures.

Many spend their nights in lean-tos they make from plastic sheeting they throw over branches, in places open to rain and snakes. They may drink contaminated water from stagnant pools shared with cattle. Their bathrooms often are open holes they dig in the earth. And they eat rancid scraps of meat along with rice, beans or watery stews.

Cold, Muddy Water

Death is a part of the job. Gregorio Maguin, a physician in the Peruvian gold-mining town of Delta 1, near Huepetuhe, says slaves and their children die because they don't receive timely or adequate medical treatment.

 From Slaves to Cars

Maguin says he examines about 10 miners a day who have malaria. He estimates that about three miners will get tuberculosis each month as they work in the cold, muddy water that pools in the mines.

Slavery has long been entrenched in Brazil in the making of charcoal used to create pig iron, Campos says. Pig iron helps to increase the iron content of steel made by melting recycled steel in electric arc furnaces, a process used in more than half of U.S. production.

The material was originally made by pouring molten iron into molds that somewhat resembled suckling pigs. Today, pig iron producers remove oxygen from iron ore in a blast furnace process that adds carbon.

In most parts of the world, producers use coke, derived from coal, as both a fuel for the furnaces and a source of carbon.

Bloodshot Eyes

In Brazil, pig iron manufacturers use charcoal instead, says Donald Sadoway, a professor in the department of materials science and engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. The charcoal comes from places like Transcameta, the camp raided in September.

The scene at Transcameta is primitive. A man stoops to light a pyre of wood he's packed into a kiln, and he winces from the smoke. The wood will smolder for eight days until it turns into charcoal. Another man is on his knees, panting, his eyes bloodshot. He claws with callused hands at fist-sized chunks of charcoal in a kiln and throws them onto a pile.

As the raid unfolds, five labor inspectors, six police officers and prosecutor Lopes fan out across the jungle clearing. In a five-day inspection, they photograph the areas around the kilns and barracks, and they interview workers.

Stagnant Water

Dos Reis, the laborer from Teresina, watches from the windowless, tin-roofed shack where workers live, 100 feet from the kilns. ``Sometimes it gets so hot in here you don't want to come in,'' he says.

Dos Reis coughs up a glob of black spittle. In July, he contracted malaria from the mosquitoes that swarm the camp, medical records show, and he says he gets exhausted early in the day and has to stop work. Twenty feet away, a man walks by a patch of ground covered with human excrement that serves as a camp bathroom.

Dos Reis came to the area in August 2005, following a brother who had found work in Tucurui. Dos Reis started working at Transcameta in November 2005. The laborer is trying to support a 9-year-old daughter he left at home. He says he hasn't been paid in more than three months.

He says he's working anyway because he's afraid he won't see any wages if he leaves.

`I Don't Understand'

As dos Reis tells his story, two men come up a steep, slippery trail, carrying buckets filled with water from a shallow well. It's the only drinking water the workers have. In the same gully, two young women who serve as the camp cooks and laundresses wash ripped shirts and pants in stagnant green water.

Two men stand in the waist-deep water, scrubbing black charcoal off their chests.

At a nearby charcoal camp called Carvoaria do Jorge, raided on the same day, inspectors find Pedro da Silva Conceicao tending kilns. Conceicao, dressed in shorts and flip-flops and caked in dust, says he hasn't been paid in four months.

He says his boss told him he'd accumulated 9,000 reais ($4,186) in debt for food and shelter. ``I don't understand where all that debt comes from,'' Conceicao, 63, says. ``I guess I just have to pay it off little by little, but it will take a long time.''

The Transcameta and do Jorge raids are peaceful. Not all of them are. During a Feb. 8 inspection of a cattle ranch in the southwestern Amazon, Inspector Silva says, he cowered in a bathroom as six gunmen opened fire, sparking a 10-minute shootout with police.

`Defend Slavery'

On Jan. 28, 2003, gunmen shot and killed three labor ministry inspectors and their driver execution style at a farm near Unai, Brazil. ``You can't underestimate what's at stake here,'' Silva says. ``People are willing to defend slavery by force.''

Labor prosecutor Lopes concludes that Cosipar is responsible for conditions at Transcameta. On the fourth day of the inspection, a representative of Cosipar and the camp's owner sign an agreement with the prosecutor. Cosipar, without admitting it was the formal employer of the workers, agrees to pay back wages and damages and to improve bathrooms and barracks at the camp.

Dos Reis was paid $2,253 (4,920.94 reais) for back wages and damages, according to the labor ministry. The agreement, dated Sept. 5, says there are ``absolutely degrading conditions'' at the camp, with ``total violation of minimum principles of human dignity for the workers.''

Brazilian Law

Cosipar's Monteiro says the agreement doesn't use the word slavery. ``If it were slavery, why don't they put it in here?'' he says, pointing to the document. Lopes says that his inspectors did find slavery at the camp. He says he didn't write that Cosipar used slavery because he wanted the company to sign the agreement immediately, pay the workers and make improvements.

He says he routinely words documents that way in order to help workers as quickly as possible.

Brazilian law defines slavery as severely degrading work conditions. In almost all cases, inspectors found workers hadn't been paid in months.

The ILO defines forced labor as work performed involuntarily under threat of penalty. Workers are paid little or no money and face physical or psychological coercion, the ILO says.

In the making of charcoal, illicit deforestation and illegal work conditions go hand in hand, says Silas Zen, forestry director at Ferro Gusa Carajas, a pig iron plant in Maraba, Brazil.

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