The Secret World of Modern Slavery

`No Choice'

``I want to leave, but it's hard, because if you try to leave, you don't get paid,'' he says. ``You really have no choice. They treat us like slaves.''

Hurtado says the camp foreman, Walter Chungue, told him to be patient. He says he's afraid to leave because Chungue could then claim he abandoned his job and never pay him.

Chungue, 35, says some of the men at the camp haven't been paid because they aren't working as hard as they should. ``We'll pay those who are really working,'' he says.

The 91-degree-Fahrenheit tropical heat is turning the June morning's rain into steam, and Hurtado won't have a work break until 1 p.m., two hours away. He's directing the driver of a Volvo truck to dump 15 tons of gold-flecked mud into a chute atop a 40-foot-high mud heap.

Goteborg, Sweden-based Volvo AB, Europe's second- largest truckmaker, supplies most of the machinery used in the gold camps near Huepetuhe, says Jean Falvy, who until August was sales manager at an independent Volvo distributor in Lima, Peru.

Important Market

Volvo spokesman Marten Wikforss says the company has sold 71 Volvo trucks and 135 pieces of heavy equipment in the area from 1992 to 2003. Mine operators using that equipment buy about $100,000 in spare parts monthly, Falvy says. ``It's an important market for Volvo in Peru,'' he says.

Wikforss says the company can't keep track of how its equipment is used, and it hasn't heard of forced labor being used by its customers. ``In some instances, there are deplorable working conditions in Peru, but none of our employees has heard anything to the effect of slave labor,'' he says. ``It's possible that independent Volvo dealers have sold to them. I can't rule that out.''

Climaco, the judge in Huepetuhe, has collected 39 complaints in the first half of this year from mineworkers who haven't been paid. ``This kind of thing is widespread,'' Climaco says at the Cuatro Amigos mine. ``The labor conditions are truly horrible. It's staggering to witness.''

Choking Ooze

At Cuatro Amigos, two mud-drenched men crouch in wooden stalls on each side of a chute and direct fire hoses onto the mud to liquefy it. The mud races down the wooden slide, leaving behind specks of gold. The rest oozes into a 1-square-mile mud flat that's choked every tree and plant it touches.

A few hundred miles to the north, in a swath of the Peruvian Amazon near Brazil, an estimated 33,000 people work as forced laborers in logging camps, according to a 2005 report by the ILO. The report was endorsed by the Peruvian government.

On Sept. 25, 2004, Ramon Pizango lost his footing while hauling a mahogany log across a slippery trail in the Amazon, says his brother, Geyner, who was working with him. A 330-pound timber slammed onto Ramon's back.

Ramon, Geyner, another brother, a half brother and three friends were illegally felling mahogany. They had been recruited in July 2004 by a logging broker in Pucallpa, a mahogany port, and hadn't been paid for two months.

Jailed in Brazil

Ramon lay in pain from the injury at the camp for a month without any medical attention, his two brothers say. Then, on Oct. 22, 2004, a Brazilian army patrol raided the camp and accused the workers of being in Brazil, not Peru, to log mahogany illegally.

The troops dynamited the mahogany logs, burned the camp and jailed the men in Brazil for more than two months, Geyner, 29, says. His mother, Casilda Shapiama Martinez, says Ramon was gaunt, jaundiced and bedridden when he was deported to Peru on Jan. 7, 2005.

Eight months later, Ramon died at the age of 22 after being treated at the Regional Municipal Hospital in Pucallpa, according to medical records. He'd been diagnosed with AIDS, the records show.

``It's hard to think of worse exploitation than what we went through,'' says Geyner, who has sunken cheeks and a wiry frame. ``The Brazilians called us modern slaves, and they were right. We were sent into the jungle, imprisoned for trying to make an honest wage and treated like animals.''

African Mahogany

Andersen window maker spokeswoman Maureen McDonough says the company stopped using Peruvian mahogany on Oct. 1. ``We are aware that business dealings in Peru are challenging, at best,'' she says. Bayport, Minnesota-based Andersen is now buying mahogany from Africa because the company can better trace its source, she says.

An investigation conducted in 2005 by Peru's environmental regulator found that Maderera Bozovich SAC, Peru's largest timber exporter, and two rivals had bought 53 shipments of mahogany with falsified permits during a six-month period.

The government has revoked the right to log from 28 groups after discovering they were selling hardwood that was felled illegally. ``There is a lot of rain forest to watch over,'' says Carlos Chamochumbi, president of the Peruvian government's Multi-Sector Commission to Fight Against Illegal Logging. ``There is a lot of corruption.'' He says slaves are used in illegal logging operations.

Nearly all of the 70,000 guitars that Nazareth, Pennsylvania-based C.F. Martin sells annually contain Peruvian mahogany, CEO Christian Martin says.

`Do the Right Thing'

Martin says he will still use the wood because his main importer, T. Baird McIlvain International Co., says it's legally harvested. Dick Boak, a Martin spokesman, says the company will work to clean up its supply chain.

``We want to do the right thing,'' he says. ``It's our desire to participate in any way we can to clean this up.''

Hugh Reitz, who oversees imports at TBM Hardwoods Inc. in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, says he knows of no slavery in Peru. TBM and T. Baird McIlvain International, which are part of the same company, imported about 3 million board feet of mahogany last year, making it the largest U.S. importer of the wood in 2005.

``I've never seen it in Latin America in my entire life,'' Reitz, 33, says. ``To be honest, I don't think that slavery exists in Latin America.''

Throughout Latin America, slave drivers resist government crackdowns. In Peru's mahogany province of Ucayali, there's been only one attempt to inspect a suspected slave camp, says Luis Alberto Oballe, the chief labor ministry inspector in the province.

`Widespread Forced Labor'

Miranda, of Peru's anti-slavery commission, says slave labor is most common in illegal logging. ``The use of forced labor appears to be widespread, and there's very little anyone can do about it,'' Miranda says.

The illegal logging commission estimated in 2003 that 95 percent of all mahogany is exported illegally. Chamochumbi, the commission's president, now puts that figure at 40 percent. On its Web site, the commission says mahogany logging is run by a ``mafia that operates across the country and is sustained politically and economically by big exporters.''

In Peru, the government makes an effort to stop slavery, and almost no one notices. In Brazil, the government sends out its task forces, and when the inspectors return to camps they've closed, they find them reopened, with new slaves, says Brazilian anti-slavery official Campos.

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