Brazil

What Can Be Done?

excerpted from the book

Disposable People

New Slavery in the Global Economy

by Kevin Bales

University of California Press, 2004, paper

Brazil

p123
From the beginning of colonization until late in the nineteenth century slaves were transported from Africa to Brazil in huge numbers. As many as ten times more Africans were shipped to Brazil than to the United States: something on the order of 10 million people. But because the death rate on the sugar plantations was so high, the slave population of Brazil was never more than half that of the United States In the eighteenth century the discovery of gold helped carry slavery deeper into the interior and the Amazon. By the nineteenth century Brazil was locked in a struggle over slavery, but unlike the United States, it did not suffer a civil war. For Brazil the key antislavery forces were the British, on whom the Portuguese had become increasingly dependent for economic support and protection. From 1832 the British navy patrolled the oceans off Brazil, intercepting and freeing African slaves. Inside Brazil the slaveowners worked constantly to whip up the racism and fear necessary to preserve slavery; the government enacted laws para Inglês ver (for the English to see), a phrase that is still used to mean doing something by subterfuge. In 1854 the importation of slaves and the international slave trade were abolished, but not slavery within the country. The power of the British had its limits, and in the end it was the Brazilian antislavery movement, led by Joaquim Nabuco, which forged a coalition of nationalists, anticolonialists, and liberals that defeated the landlords and slaveholders after twenty years of political conflict. Full emancipation came in May 1888, when Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish legal slavery.

p124
...the bust of the 1980s and the uneven development of twenty years crashed. Hyperinflation (1980s) wiped out savings, and servicing the foreign debt, now $120 billion, crippled the economy.

... Today, Brazil (along with its neighbor Paraguay) suffers the greatest economic disparities of any place L on earth. On one end of the scale are the 50,000 Brazilians (out of a population of 165 million) who own almost everything, especially the land. At the other end of the scale are 4 million peasants who share 3 percent of the land. Most of them, of course, have no land at all. In the cities and the slums are millions more without work. The austerity programs that brought the hyperinflation under control all but shutdown the health and education systems. And in the times of instability state corruption, already serious, grew worse.

***

India

p230
Honesty is something of an imponderable in government. How do you guarantee it? Government officials, especially in poor developing countries, are constantly tempted. Around the world slavery grows out of official dishonesty and greed.

p230
When democracy works well, politicians have to be more careful-and even a handful of honest bureaucrats can be the downfall of a corrupt political machine.

p230
The best of the NGOs like Free the Slaves or the Red Cross, are respected throughout the world.

***

What Can Be Done?

p240
For many years campaigners in India tried to free and rehabilitate these bonded laborers with only partial success. But a few years ago the Rugmark Campaign set out to put the pressure not on the makers but on the buyers of carpets. Working from a tiny office with little funds, these activists proposed that people should look for a special tag on handmade rugs that guaranteed that they were not made by slaves. To earn the Rugmark, producers had to agree to only three things: not to exploit children, to cooperate with independent monitoring, and to turn over 1 percent of the carpet wholesale price to a welfare fund for child workers. Special effort was put into building up a sophisticated monitoring team that can detect fake labels, knows carpet making inside and out, and can't be corrupted. Today the German, U.S., and Canadian governments have recognized the Rugmark. The biggest mail order company in the world, the Otto Versand Group, plus major retailers in the United States, Germany, and Holland, now import only Rugmarked carpets. In Europe the market share of "slavefree" carpets is 30 percent and growing. Of course there is a long way to go: some British retailers, including Liberty and John Lewis, have refused to stock Rugmark carpets, and southern and eastern Europe are only now being introduced to Rugmark, but the campaign continues to strengthen.

Most important is its impact on the lives of bonded child laborers. The 1 percent contribution from the producers has now built and staffed six Rugmark schools in India, which serve a total of 1,400 students. The campaign itself has drawn the attention of other organizations, and so the German government and UNICEF (the United Nations Children's Fund) now fund other schools in the areas that were once the recruiting grounds for the carpet belt. Helped to stay in school, the children aren't lured away to bondage. Confronted with buyers from the retail chains who insist on "slave-free" goods, the worst of the slaveholders leave the business and the other producers do what is necessary to earn the Rug-mark. It is a tremendous example of positive consumer power.

p243
Only in the most severe situations, such as the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, is the UN authorized to carry out work inside countries. Reports from in-country informants flow to the UN from the International Labor Organization, but the UN does not normally take action or impose sanctions; it only discusses and announces the results of those discussions. In the face of persistent denials of slavery by national representatives, the UN can only persist in asking questions. In spite of the important work it does around the world, the UN is supported by its member states and will bend over backward at times to avoid upsetting them. The UN also operates on a philosophy of inclusion at all costs, on the assumption that it is better to have countries that violate human rights inside the UN and talking than outside the UN and answering to no one. To keep countries within the fold, the UN works hard to avoid confrontation. Like it or not, the UN can never be truly independent in its operation-that independence necessarily is left to the activist organizations of the voluntary sector.

p244
In much of the developing world, governments are equally chaotic. Their core motive, however, is not Nazi anti-Semitism but greed. Globalization means that values dominating the Western economies have been injected into developing countries. The idea that profit is its own justification, that success conveys respectability, drives new businesses, which therefore ignore the human cost. State activities that were previously nonprofit (everything from law enforcement to famine relief) are being turned into profit-making businesses. As politicians and businesspeople share the new revenue, corruption sets in. When rulers begin to chase the vast potential wealth of the global economy, the order of the state breaks down.

p247
One effective path is followed by groups like Anti-Slavery International, Free the Slaves, and Amnesty International. Watching and listening, studying and monitoring, they investigate abuses of human rights by corrupt regimes.

p249
Today the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) oversee governments, businesses, and industries around the world. They both wield enormous power by issuing trade credits, which could be linked to human rights guarantees. But human rights and the use of slavery are so low on their agenda as to be invisible. Greider puts it well:

The terms of trade are usually thought of as commercial agreements, but they are also an implicit statement of moral values. In its present terms, the global system values property over human life. When a nation like China steals the property of capital, pirating copyrights, films or technology, other countries will take action to stop it and be willing to impose sanctions and penalty tariffs on the offending nation's trade. When human lives are stolen... nothing happens to the offenders since, according to the free market's sense of conscience, there is no crime.

p249
In 1997 at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Bosnian Serb military leaders were charged with genocide and other war crimes. In the same year the WTO threatened Britain with fines and penalties for refusing to import American beef treated with steroids. Also in 1997 the United Nations maintained economic sanctions against Iraq while its inspection teams searched the country for biological and chemical weapons. But what country has been sanctioned by the UN for slavery? Where are the UN inspection teams charged with searching out slave labor? Where are the penalties from the WTO for exporting slave-made goods? Who speaks for slaves in the International Court of Justice? Viewed objectively the situation is bizarre: block the free movement of dead cows between countries and be penalized; buy and sell live humans across national borders and no one cares. The tremendous power of the IMF and the WTO has to be brought to bear Lon slavery."

Disposable People

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