A charcoal camp is an isolated world. Imagine a ‘concentration camp’ in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil. Today, men are being lured out of city slums with the too-good-to-be-true job offer. It’s an opportunity to feed their family, so they go readily – no questions asked. A few days later, they realize things are not quite like they expected…
Renaldo shares his story:
My parents lived in a very dry rural area and when I got older there was no work, no work at all there. So I decided to go to the city. I want to Sao Paulo (Brazil) but that was even worse; no work and everything was very expensive, and the place was dangerous – so much crime! So then I went up to Minas Gerais because I heard that there was work there. If there was, I didn’t find it, but one day a gato (recruiter) came and began to recruit people to work out here in Mato Grosso. The gato said that we would be given good food everyday, and we would have good waged besides. He promised that every month his truck would bring people back to Minas Gerais so that they could visit their families and bring them their pay. He even gave money to some men to give to their families before they left and to buy food to bring with them on the trip. He was able to fill up his truck with workers very easily and we started on the trip west. Along the way, we would stop for fuel, the gato would say, “go on into the café and eat as much as you like, I’ll pay for it.” We had been hungry for a long, so you can imagine how we ate! When we got to Mato Grosso we kept driving further and further into the country. This camp is almost fifty miles from anything; it is just raw cerrado for fifty miles before you get to even a ranch, and there is just the one road. When we reached the camp we could see it was terrible; the conditions were not good enough for animals. Standing around the camp were men with guns. And then the gato said, “You each owe me a lot of money; there is the cost of the trip, and all that food you ate, and the money I gave you for your families -so don’t even think about leaving.”
When workers like Renaldo begin their trip, the gatos take both their state identity card and their “labor” card. Freedom has disappeared. As one Brazilian researcher put it, “From this moment the worker is dead as a citizen, and born as a slave.”
Individuals who work in these Brazilian charcoal camps are disposable. Most slaves last anywhere from 3 months to 2 years due to their working conditions. Once they are no longer able to work full strength, it is more cost-effective to discard them and recruit fresh workers.
Kevin Bales, while researching about slavery in Brazil, describes his experience in a charcoal camp:
All the charcoal workers cough constantly, hacking and spitting and trying to clear lungs that are always full of smoke, ash, heat, and charcoal dust. If they live long enough most will suffer from black lung disease. Most of the ovens are oozing and belching smoke and the heat is tremendous. As soon as you enter the batteria (charcoal-making camp) the heat bears down. This part of Brazil is already hot and humid; take away any protection from the sun that the trees might offer and add the heat of thirty ovens, and the result is a baking inferno. For the workers who have to climb inside the still-burning ovens to empty charcoal the heat is unimaginable. When I got inside an oven with a man shoveling the charcoal, the pressure of the heat had my head swimming in minutes, sweat drenched my clothes, and the floor of hot coals burned my feet through my heavy boots. The pointed roof concentrated the heat and in a few moments I was addled, panicky, and limp. The workers hover on the edge of heatstroke and dehydration. Sometimes in their conversation they were confused as if their brains had been baked…
Right now, as you are reading this, men are working in these ovens.
Inequality runs rampant in Brazil. Other than Paraguay, Brazil suffers from the greatest economic disparity of any place on earth. It is believed that only 50,000 Brazilians (out of 165 million) control most of the power, money and land! Unfortunately, as long as this inequality exists, so will slavery. And there is no lack of ‘disposable people’ who are both eager to provide for thier families and ignorant to the harsh reality that lies ahead…
Most of the information in this blog I gathered from Disposable People by Kevin Bales.
