Brazil slaves freed - Currents - Brief Article

New Internationalist, Nov, 2003

Brazilian authorities announced in September that they had freed about 800 slave workers at a coffee farm in Bahia state, the largest discovery since a clampdown on the practice began in the 1990s. Some 200 workers were also found at another farm with appalling conditions, including no proper housing and inadequate food and sanitary conditions. The practice usually involves landowners hiring poor workers in a different region of the country and then transporting them thousands of miles to their isolated farms. The workers are not paid and have no money to return to their homes. Sometimes they are prevented by armed guards from leaving the farms, where they are often not given proper food or housing. Since coming to power in January, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has pledged to end the practice. An estimated 25,000 people still live in slave-like conditions in the country that was the last in the Americas formally to abolish slavery, in 1888.

Reuters