120 Years After Abolition, Legacy of Slavery Still Haunts Brazil’s Racial Politics
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Related subjects: Americas, Brazil, Evelyn Winston Pérez, Fair Trade, Rights & Freedoms Comments Off
Socio-economic issues linked to the disparate treatment of racial groups still plagues much of Brazil’s population and impedes the modernization of its economy. Though the Amazon nation is booming, and has become a world leader among developing market economies, the current president, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, took office promising to finally rid the dense, remote rainforest of de facto slavery.
13 May 2008 was the 120th anniversary of the Lei Áurea, the “golden law” of emancipation, decreed by Princess Isabel, just one year before her empire was replaced by the Republic of Brazil. In fact, while Isabel is given credit in the written history for signing emancipation into law, she was under extreme pressure from Britain and from enclaves of escaped slaves —the ‘quilombo’ communities—, the most renowned of which resisted the institution of slavery for over one hundred years.
The leader of that community, Zumbi dos Palmares, died on 20 November 1695. In 2003, the anniversary of his death was made a day of national black recognition, and now —according to Worldpress— some 260 cities across Brazil have made the day an official holiday. In Brazil, slavery was more a matter of practice than of law, as individual laborers were trapped into slave conditions, a practice which has persisted in some form up to the present day in remote parts of the Amazon rainforest.
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Agricultural laborers are at times forced to work without pay, under brutal conditions, and whole communities can be dependent on local tyrants for protection or sustenance. Kevin Hall, writing for Knight Ridder, reports on the plight of José Silva:
Silva was a modern slave, working with 46 other men and a boy to clear jungle with machetes, chain saws and tractors from sunup to sundown in the tropical heat, seven days a week, for no money. He and the others got one meal a day of rice, beans and a little chicken or beef, which they were made to eat standing up to discourage resting. There were no toilets or latrines at the workers’ camp, only bushes.
Brazilian “hardwoods, pig iron and processed meats” are among products stemming from slave labor that go to market in the US, where there is virtually zero consumer awareness of the gravity of conditions at the point of origin. Soybeans and related products, which may be produced on farms where enslaved workers do the cropping and harvest work, are commonly sold on world markets, in direct competition with American-produced soy products —Brazil and the US are the world leaders in soy production—, also with little consumer awareness of the underlying slave conditions.
In 2004, the government of Brazil officially recognized before the UN that some 25,000 citizens suffer “conditions analagous to slavery”. Hall reports that “The top anti-slavery official in Brasilia, the capital, puts the number of modern slaves at 50,000.” President “Lula” da Silva’s promise to finally abolish slavery once and for all in Brazil is still, tragically, a project in the works.
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