Luana Lourenço (2)     Special Correspondent for EBC (World Social Forum)

Mariana Jungmann      Reporter Agência Brasil

Porto Alegre – Saturday, January 28, was National Day to Combat Slave-Type Labor (“trabalho análogo à escravidão”). A special session at the World Social Forum last month was dedicated to the issue. In Brazil, nowadays, any discussion of slave-type labor inevitably takes place against the background of a controversial case of murder and impunity.

It was on January 28, eight years ago, in 2004, that three inspectors from the Ministry of Labor and their driver were assassinated. The inspectors were looking into charges of slave-type labor on farms in the area. Now the area in question is not some isolated place in the Amazon or the arid backlands of the Northeast. And the victims were not hardscrabble environmental activists eking out a living in the woods. They were federal agents, ambushed and killed near the city of Unai, in the state of Minas Gerais, only 150 kilometers from Brasilia.

The crime shocked the nation and since then the nation has remained shocked as the years go by and the perpetrators of what has become known as the “Chacina de Unai” (massacre) have never gone to trial.

Nine people have been formally accused of involvement in the crime. Four of them are free on writs of habeas corpus (among them the present mayor of Unai, Antério Mânica, and his brother, Norberto Mânica, aka “the bean king,” as he is one of Brazil’s biggest bean (“feijão”) farmers). The five others are in custody (“prisão preventiva”).

The fact that at least one of the accused is an elected official has bogged the case down. In Brazil, authorities in office, appointed or elected, can only be tried at the Supreme Court. This, along with smart legal maneuvers by smart lawyers, tends to slow due process to a snail’s process. Suffice it to say that at this moment, no less than 20 senators and over 100 deputies have cases pending before the Supreme Court (and that is only at the federal level).

However, in the case of the Chacina de Unaí, the Superior Appellate Court (“Superior Tribunal de Justiça – STJ”) has just ruled that at least one of the accused (one of the gunmen) should go on trial immediately. The ruling was based on the principle of separate trials (“desmembramento”) when there is a large group of accused.

The activist group, Commissão Pastoral da Terra (“CPT”), which is linked to the Catholic Church, points out that the case of the Chacina de Unai has “… raised serious questions about the credibility of the Judiciary system, a system that is hostage to procedures that force it to move at a turtle pace, unable to respond adequately to the anxieties of society.”

The CPT recognized that some progress has been made (around 2,200 people were released from slave-type labor situations in Brazil in 2011; since 1995, over 41,000 workers have been “rescued”). The CPT praised the release of a pamphlet on the subject that emphasizes the protection of human rights (“Manual de Combate ao Trabalho em Condições Análogas às de Escravo”), but calls for more action (insisting, among other things, that the government also release what has become known as the “dirty list” (“lista suja”) naming farmers and companies that use slave-type labor).

Meanwhile, the minister of Human Rights, Maria do Rosária, promised that this legislative session one of the priorities will be a constitutional amendment (“Proposta de Emenda Constitucional 438/2001,” known as the “PEC do Trabalho Escravo”). She pointed out that the problem of slave-type labor is now found frequently in urban areas, especially in the areas of clothing and civil construction. And she adds: “The slave labor agenda is more and more often mixed up with the question of immigration. Here in Brazil, we see this in the case of Bolivians and, most recently, Haitians.”

Allen Bennett – translator/editor The News in English – content modified

Link - STJ determina julgamento imediato de um dos réus da chacina de Unaí

Link - No Dia de Combate ao Trabalho Escravo, CPT lembra Chacina de Unaí e cobra justiça

Link - Maria do Rosário diz que aprovação da PEC do Trabalho Escravo é prioridade