At its Santana do Araguaia ranch in southeastern Pará state — the subject of a Washington Post investigation last month — Volkswagen used “debt labor, violence and submitted workers to degrading conditions,” Judge Otávio Bruno da Silva Ferreira wrote in his decision, saying that those conditions met “the definition of contemporary slave labor.” The ruling also called on Volkswagen Brazil, one of the largest carmakers in Latin America, to apologize to the mistreated laborers.
In a statement Friday, Volkswagen Brazil announced it would appeal the decision, saying it “has consistently defended the principles of human dignity and follows all applicable labor laws and regulations.”
The case opened a window into a largely forgotten chapter of Brazilian history, when the country’s former military dictatorship rushed to develop the Amazon in partnership with multinational corporations. Human rights researchers say tens of thousands of impoverished laborers were lured to ranches in the middle of the rainforest and made to toil against their will. Their job was to destroy the Amazon to make room for raising cattle.
To find these workers, many of the ranches turned to local labor recruiters, known as “gatos.” They scoured small towns throughout the countryside for unwitting laborers, many of whom were enticed by false promises of high pay.
Two of the gatos employed by the Volkswagen ranch were among the most notorious and brutal figures on the Amazon frontier, according to contemporaneous records. They trapped workers in a scheme of debt, workers alleged, and employed armed guards who forced men to work under threat of violence.
One of the recruiters, Francisco Andrade Chagas, died in 2014, according to a Brazilian registry of death notices. The other, Abílio Dias Araujo, 82, didn’t respond to a request for comment. He previously told The Post that he was “an old man” and didn’t “remember anything.”
Volkswagen is the first company to be held liable for the abuses in the Amazon during this period, a landmark ruling that rights advocates and prosecutors hope could open the door to similar cases. In Brazil, the crime of “reducing someone to conditions analogous to slavery” has no statute of limitations.
“It is without doubt a historic mark,” said Ulisses Dias de Carvalho, a federal prosecutor who worked on the case. “This sentence will serve as an example for the next cases and open up the opportunity to hold to account other companies.”
Many of the details of what happened on the Santana do Araguaia property were preserved only because of Ricardo Rezende Figueira, 73, a Catholic priest who has spent his life documenting modern slave labor. He was a young man living in a distant Amazonian outpost when he first heard the rumors about the Volkswagen ranch.
At first, the complaints from workers who’d escaped — detailing forced labor, privation and torture — had seemed extraordinary to Rezende. But the allegations multiplied, and the testimonies he gathered from dozens of laborers over years of methodical investigation began to align.
In 1983, Rezende took his case to the public. “Priest says there are slaves on Volks farm,” read the headline in the Correio Braziliense newspaper. Over the following years, authorities would affirm the existence of forced labor on the ranch at least four times, but no action was ever taken to rescue the workers or charge any of their alleged abusers.
The priest never gave up. And when he moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he now works as a human rights professor, he brought his records with him.
In early 2019, after seeing that Volkswagen Brazil had accepted responsibility for the political persecution of its factory workers during the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985, Rezende decided it was time to try again.
He sent his 1,000-page dossier, identifying 69 alleged victims alongside notarized declarations, police statements, court filings and lawmaker reports, to a federal labor prosecutor.
Soon after, the Labor Ministry opened an investigation that ultimately culminated in the federal lawsuit against Volkswagen Brazil, which alleged that there were “hundreds” of victims. The ranch had been owned by a Volkswagen subsidiary, but prosecutors argued that the parent company bore ultimate responsibility for what they said was the systematic exploitation of slave labor and human trafficking.
Now, nearly half a century after Rezende began his investigation, a Brazilian judge has substantiated his findings. Rezende told The Post on Friday evening that he’d never lost hope: “I knew that one day there would be something,” he said.
“This is a lesson: Justice is slow, slower than it should be,” Rezende said. “May this also be a warning so that this crime doesn’t repeat,” he added. “People cannot be treated as things, as objects.”
Federal prosecutor Rafael Garcia, who led the case and directs the Brazilian Labor Ministry’s slave labor division, called the decision “historic” for a country that has never reckoned with the prolific human suffering that occurred during the development of the Amazon.
“This conviction is for the country,” he said. “It is a day to celebrate the struggle for human rights.”
The judge ordered that the $30 million in damages be paid not to the former laborers but to a fund in Pará that is focused on promoting dignified working conditions and eradicating slave labor in the state.
Laborers who told The Post they had been enslaved on the Volkswagen property, and who testified against the company at trial, said they were disappointed that they wouldn’t receive any compensation, but they expressed relief that their ordeal had finally been recognized.
“It’s extremely gratifying,” said Raul Batista de Souza, 67, who was trafficked onto the farm in 1986 with his brothers and then sold by a gato to another Amazon property. “There was so much suffering that we went through.”
Batista de Souza said there were many victims whose names would never be known.
“We were lucky,” he said. “I’m thinking of the mothers who never knew what happened to their children, who never had the dignity of burying their loved ones. I just have to thank God.”