BARRONS
It sounded like a good job: picking grapes at a vineyard in southern Brazil.
It was only when workers were awakened with electrical shocks, beaten and threatened with death that they realized they had been recruited into the nightmare of modern-day slavery.
One hundred thirty-five years after Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888, stories like this are disturbingly common — and have been growing more so.
“There are more and more people in Brazil working in conditions resembling slavery,” says Italvar Medina, a prosecutor on the national anti-slave labor task force, CONAETE.
The number of workers freed from slave-like conditions in Brazil has more than doubled in two years, from 936 in 2020 to 2,075 in 2022, official statistics show.
Last year’s figure was the highest since 2013, when there 2,808.
And the trend appears to continue: late last month, Brazilians were shocked by news of a police operation that freed 207 people from slave-like conditions at three vineyards in the seemingly idyllic southern region of Bento Goncalves, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, a picturesque area known for its sparkling wines.
The government said the vineyard workers had been recruited 3,000 kilometers (more than 1,850 miles) away, in the northeastern state of Bahia — home to the largest black population in Brazil.
Authorities were alerted after a group of them escaped. They told harrowing stories of supervisors using electrical shocks to wake them at dawn and beating them with clubs and broomsticks.
“The only good Bahian is a dead Bahian,” workers remembered being told.
Forced to sleep in an overcrowded…
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