Slavery in Today's Brazil: Law and Public Policy

The abolition of slavery in 1888 failed to eliminate the repressive and compulsory use of labor in Brazil. When pressure to reduce slave trafficking made African labor scarce, coffee producers in SAo Paulo recruited European migrants to replace it. Through indebtedness and compulsory work, migrants became captive to the landowners who hired them. As the occupation of the Amazon frontier became state policy in the 1960s, debt bondage was used against the thousands of migrant workers hired to clear the areas for agribusiness projects. Slavery had been prohibited since 1940, and in 1965 the Congress entered into two international agreements on slavery that included debt bondage. With the end of the military government in 1985, the category slave labor was incorporated into the regulatory framework for employment practices, and since then it has been broadened to include labor forced by violence, debt bondage, exhausting labor, and degrading working conditions. Tensions around the definition remain, however, and prosecutions under the law and guilty verdicts have so far been few.