The prosecutors who have rescued tens of thousands of people from slave labor in Brazil

His body collapsed under the tree trunk. The crash foreshadowed doom: Francisco Araújo Maciel, 45, thought he was dying. He didn’t see it coming and he doesn’t remember exactly how it happened. On the morning of April 24, a large piece of the tree he was sawing tore at his collarbone as it fell on him. This set off an ordeal lasting more than seven hours, stretching from the heart of the forest to the nearest hospital in the remote southern Brazilian state of Amazonas.

Men working alongside him found his body slumped on the ground, unconscious. They removed the trunk from his chest and placed Araújo on a mattress in the back of a small, makeshift tractor. His broken bones creaked as the group drove through the dense jungle to take him to a nearby river, where they would put him on a boat bound for the town of Manicoré. Shortly before they arrived, federal labor inspectors found them. “When we saw him, we thought he had a punctured lung. I thought he wouldn’t survive,” recalls Magno Riga, one of the inspectors. “I can’t imagine how much he suffered. He was very lucky to survive.”

The inspectors had traveled from the national capital of Brasilia to rescue 50 people from slave labor in the jungle. Araújo — along with the other men — had been lured by recruiters to work in what became one of the largest illegal deforestation operations in the region this year, which has destroyed nearly 1,300 hectares of Amazonian forest between January and April. Nothing the men were promised materialized: they ended up being subjected to conditions comparable to modern slavery.

“These people were put under the worst working conditions by criminal groups that are dedicated to exploiting the region’s wealth. [These criminals] exploit many people from vulnerable communities,” says Riga, who coordinated the rescue operation after a complaint was made by local authorities. The workers — who hailed from various cities in the northern states of Amazonas and Rondônia — were on-site for almost three months. They slept under canvas tents, worked long hours without protective equipment and — lacking access to drinking water — had to cook, bathe and drink red water from a small stream, which was polluted by the deforestation process.

The men also went into debt to buy the chainsaws they used to cut down the trees, for which they were charged 3,000 reais (about $500), which was deducted from their wages, without prior consent. The same thing happened with their food rations.

“We suffered humiliation. They treated us badly,” laments Francisco Araújo Maciel, who underwent surgery in a hospital in Porto Velho. He has since returned to his home in Humaitá, where he lives with his sister and close to his children, who are five and eight-years-old. While he was recovering in the hospital, Riga visited him on a couple of occasions. To this day, the inspector supports him so that he can regain his dignity and his rights. This is a fundamental part of the work done by Riga and his team.

Araújo obtained special unemployment insurance for three months, due to having been subjected to slave labor. However, he’s now unable to work in the field of forestry because of the disability caused by the accident. He’s trying to get a disability certificate. But, as he doesn’t have a signed employment contract, he finds it difficult to receive state benefits. “I can no longer work. And I don’t know how I’m going to rebuild my life, because I have no education. I don’t know how to read, I don’t know how to write. I only know how to do manual labor,” he laments.

Work that’s comparable to slavery is a reality in many regions of Brazil. Although the exact numbers surrounding modern slavery are difficult to measure, the authorities rely on reports of labor abuse: in 2023, there were 3,422 reports filed, or 61% more than in 2022. This is the highest recorded number since the creation of a specific hotline for this purpose in 2011. According to data from the Ministry of Labor and Employment in the largest South American country, in 2023, 3,190 workers were rescued from such circumstances — the highest number since 2009, when 3,765 people were rescued.

Brazil has been actively fighting against this problem since the 1990s. In 1994, the Organization of American States (OAS) filed a petition against Brazil for human rights violations in the case of José Pereira, a worker who was shot after trying to flee a farm in the state of Pará, where he and a colleague — who was killed — were being held as slaves. In response, a year later, the South American country created the Special Mobile Inspection Group (GEFM) at the Ministry of Labor and Employment. And, in 2003, it created the National Commission for the Eradication of Slave Labor, which puts out the so-called “dirty list” of companies and individuals convicted of slave labor practices. The penal code was also updated, to toughen sentences for this type of crime.

Magno Riga — who has been working in the field of labor rights for 12 years — is one of the officials who coordinates the GEFM. This team works throughout the country via field operations, intervening in places where there are suspicions of violations of the penal code for slave labor. The group has faced death threats, direct attacks and even restrictions on their movement. But none of this has stopped them. Over the last three decades, the organization has rescued more than 60,000 people. Their cases range from domestic slave labor in southern Brazil and mistreatment on soy plantations in Goiás, to the exploitation of people in gold mines in the Amazon and the trafficking of vulnerable migrants — from countries such as Bolivia — to illicit garment factories in São Paulo.

One of GEFM’s recent focuses is expanding its presence in the western Amazon, where reports of slave labor are rare. This problem is exacerbated in areas where the Brazilian state has the most difficulty accessing populations. In such regions, it’s difficult to inspect and punish the owners of illegal mining and deforestation sites, who — in addition to profiting from the trafficking of wood and minerals — tend to illegally sell deforested land to cattle ranchers.

“Many of these criminals act indirectly, through various intermediaries. This makes it difficult to punish the main offenders, even more so in regions that are difficult to access,” says Commissioner Adriano Sombra, head of a special team from the Brazilian Federal Police that combats crimes against the environment in the state of Amazonas. “The only alternative to protect these communities is to completely stop illegal activities. But the territory is very large. This remains a challenge.”

The lives of many workers like Araújo are deeply marked by the history of exploitation of the Amazon rainforest. In the first-half of the last century, the Brazilian government encouraged population migration to the deep Amazon. The intention was to develop the region — which was already inhabited by Indigenous communities — by exploiting its riches.

Large highways such as the Trans-Amazonian were created by destroying part of the forest to connect the region with the rest of Brazil. Mining, cattle ranching and logging were the economic roots of many of the new cities. Built without much planning, some of these cities condemned their inhabitants to poverty. Deforestation drove away animals and reduced the production of fruits such as açaí, while illegal mining polluted the waterways and killed the fish. Therefore, most of the jobs available in these lands are the same ones that destroy them.

“I had to work to support myself, to buy food and things for the house, that’s why I worked illegally,” says Araújo, who warns that nature takes its toll on your body. “If you destroy it, sooner or later, it will charge you for what it has endured.”

In many deforestation sites — such as the one that Riga’s team raided at the end of April — satellite dishes (from companies such as billionaire Elon Musk’s Starlink) are even being used to quickly call for reinforcements and warn of inspection operations, delaying the authorities’ efforts. In law enforcement operations in the south of the state of Amazonas, it’s increasingly common for the leaders of illicit activities to disappear before the arrival of inspectors.

Riga believes that the value of his work is in the lives it changes. The real challenge is to bring about a significant shift that will take these people out of the vulnerability that leads them into slavery. “Brazil is perhaps the most unequal country. This is a construction of centuries based, above all, on the [institution of] slavery that formed the country and its population,” he explains. “As long as we’re a country of enslaved people and enslavers, it will be necessary for us to strive to change this reality.”