NGOs estimate that 75,000 Brazilian women and girls, many of them trafficked, are engaged in prostitution in neighboring South American nations, the United States, and western Europe. Because of the covert nature of both prostitution and trafficking it is difficult to know exact numbers. The United Nations Office in Drugs and Crime states that the main victims of international human trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation in Argentina and Europe are women from Brazil (U.S. Department of State, 2006, 2007a). These women usually have modest educational backgrounds and are between the ages of 18 and 30 (People’s Daily Online, 2006). It is unknown whether these estimates have changed since the release of these two reports. What is known is that Brazil is a major source nation for both sex trafficking and forced-labor trafficking. In France, Brazilians account for 24 percent of identified forced-labor victims (UNODC, 2009b).
Victims who manage to escape their trafficking situations are vulnerable to reentry into the informal economy and even re-trafficking when they do not have access to work visas. One such case is that of a 28-year-old Brazilian woman, Elsa, trafficked from Brazil to Madrid, Spain: “In the beginning, I did not work for 15 days for the gang because I could not stop crying and [was] begging them to let me go back to Brazil,” Elsa told the BBC. None of the clients wanted to go with me because of that. Then they [the traffickers] threatened to kill me and to kill my whole family. It was so horrible that after that I lost my fear, I lost my dignity, I lost everything” (Infante, 2009).
Elsa was able to escape her trafficking experience and found legitimate work as a manicurist. She returned to prostitution when the money she was earning as a manicurist simply was not enough. But although Elsa knew that she would be working as a prostitute she did not realize that she was returning to a situation of human trafficking. She received death threats from her traffickers if she did not cooperate and was guarded 24 hours a day. She escaped again and received shelter and counseling through the Association for the Prevention, Reintegration and Attention of Prostituted Women in Spain. When the salon where she worked closed she again returned to prostitution. “The beauty parlor closed its doors. Without proper documents, I did not have much chance of finding another job. I did what I could, but without a working visa, I had to go back to prostitution” (Infante, 2009).
WHAT HAPPENS TO VICTIMS AFTER TRAFFICKING
The Ministry of Social Development provides female victims of sex trafficking with shelter, counseling, and medical aid through a network of 187 centers and 72 shelters for victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence. It is unclear how many of the persons helped by the centers and shelters are trafficking victims. NGOs state that many centers are underfunded, have limited services, and are simply not equipped to handle trafficking cases, and long-term shelter is not typically available. Forced-labor victims—who are predominantly domestically trafficked adult men—are not eligible for government-provided shelter assistance, and assistance for transgender sex-trafficking victims is lacking. The only government-funded shelter specifically designated for trafficking victims is in Salvador; it aids female minors (U.S. Department of State, 2010, 2012). There are government-funded regional anti-trafficking offices in 14 states: Acre, Algoas, Amapa, Bahia, Ceara, the Federal District, Goias, Minas Gerais, Para, Parana, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul, and São Paulo. The offices are designed to coordinate victim assistance, and prevent and combat human trafficking, but experts report that the quality of services vary and that some offices are more focused on public awareness than on victim assistance. In 2011 the São Paulo office aided 179 victims, 114 of whom were transgendered Brazilians. In the same year the Fortaleza office helped 241 victims. NGOs also provide aid to victims, such as helping them file charges against traffickers and obtain police protection, sometimes with limited government funding (U.S. Department of State, 2010, 2012).
Not all victims are treated equally. Internal forced-labor victims of trafficking do not have access to government-provided shelters. However, internal forced-labor victims are allegedly provided with three months’ minimum-wage salary, job training, and travel assistance (when available). The Ministry of Labor also awards forced-labor victims a portion of fines charged against offenders. According to the ministry $2.9 million was paid in labor compensation to slave-labor victims in 2011 (U.S. Department of State, 2011, 2012; Lehman, 2012). That said, according to NGOs, many forced-labor victims do not receive services, and only half of complaints of slave labor that are referred to authorities are investigated. The result is that a significant number of rescued slave-labor victims (some of whom are forced-labor victims) are re-trafficked. An NGO in Maranhao stated that none of the 70 forced-labor victims it aided from 2009 to 2011 received government assistance with lodging, education, or job training. Victims of sex trafficking are eligible for short-term protection under a program for witnesses in some states, but the program lacks sufficient resources. In December 2010 the national immigration council issued a decree granting permanent visa status to foreign victims of trafficking, although no victims were reported to have received this status in 2011 (U.S. Department of State, 2011, 2012).
Procedural or referral issues are not the only obstacles. Dalila Figueiredo, the founder of the Brazilian Association for the Defense of Women and Youth, says some marginalized women face multiple instances of trafficking. “Sometimes we pick up the same woman from the airport twice,” Figueiredo said. The reason some women return to their life of being trafficked abroad is because “they get paid. It’s more money than they [would] make in Brazil and they can even send money home” (Ross, 2005). Figueiredo believes that inequality and poverty are partly to blame for the trafficking situation in Brazil: “While investments in social problems are helping there’s still a long way to go to create conditions that would stop Brazilians from taking such risks in the first place” (Ross, 2005).
Although people continue to be marginalized in Brazil, it does appear that the federal initiatives—and an economy that is relatively unaffected by the global financial recession—are helping to improve the trafficking situation within Brazil, particularly when it comes to child labor. “Child labor has been steadily declining (in the early nineties, there were around eight million underage workers in the country),” Regina Scharf, journalist and former Social and Environmental risk analyst for Banco Real, said on her blog
Deep Brazil
. “One of the reasons is that the Brazilian economy and middle class are growing. Many families that had to find their kids a job [can] now afford to keep them in school” (Scharf, 2009).
WHAT HAPPENS TO TRAFFICKERS
Transnational and internal trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation are criminalized under Sections 231 and 231-A of the Brazilian Penal Code. Accused persons face 3 to 8 years in prison. The sentence can be increased to 12 years in cases that involve fraud, violence, or threats, or if the victim is a child (U.S. Department of State, 2010). Article 207 of the Penal Code prohibits fraudulent recruitment of workers, but sentences are minimal and range from 1 to 3 years’ imprisonment. Labor trafficking is prohibited under Article 149 of the Penal Code. Under the code slave labor (
trabalho escravo
) is the act of reducing a person to conditions analogous to slavery. This includes forced labor and forcing a person to work or subjecting a worker to degrading work conditions or exhausting workdays. Imprisonment ranges from 2 to 8 years. It is unclear how many individuals identified in slave labor are forced-labor victims, though a 2011 study stated that 60 percent of workers interviewed in rural slave labor experienced primary characteristics of forced labor (U.S. Department of State, 2010, 2012).
The government has significantly increased the number of people assigned to investigations of forced labor. There has also been an increase in the number of civil actions brought against ranch owners and direct traffickers of forced laborers. Moreover, in December 2006 Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled that crimes of slave/forced labor fell under federal, not state, jurisdiction. This judgment helped resolve a long-disputed issue of jurisdiction that had previously delayed and hindered prosecution (U.S. Department of State, 2006, 2007a). Another measure taken in 2006 by the government is the Dirty List. The list is public, and state financial institutions may not provide financial services to those on it. The Dirty List includes the names of companies and property owners who employ workers under slave-labor conditions. Violators stay on the list for two years and are removed only if they have stopped the use of slave labor and paid all due wages to workers (U.S. Department of State, 2007b; U.S. Department of Labor, 2009). The list is updated every six months. In January 2010 there were 164 employers on the Dirty List. The number of employers on the list increased to 392 in 2012. According to Alexandre da Cunha Lyra, head of the Labor Ministry’s inspection service, the surge is due to increased surveillance by ministry inspectors, not to an increase in the number of workers subjected to slave-labor conditions (U.S. Department of State, 2010; Lehman, 2012; Repórter Brasil, 2012).
Business dealings between companies on the Dirty List and those that have signed Brazil’s nonslavery commitment are automatically suspended, so there is a strong incentive for companies to get off the list. Of concern is that some companies are able to do so. For instance, Cosan, Brazil’s most powerful ethanol producer, was able to get a temporary injunction to remove it from the Dirty List. A June 2007 inspection resulted in the rescue of 42 people from a Cosan refinery. The company promised good jobs and wages, but instead the workers were not paid or even provided with clean drinking water (Anti-Slavery International, 2010). As a result, Cosan was added to the Dirty List on December 31, 2009 (Gomes, 2010b). The judge who removed Cosan from the list stated that the subcontractor, not Cosan, was responsible and that the situation did not amount to slavery. The statement that subcontractors alone—not the companies that hire them—are solely responsible for slave labor seriously undermines the nation’s anti-trafficking agenda. “The fact that workers in this case were not directly employed by Cosan does not absolve the company of the responsibility to ensure that workers producing their goods are employed in decent conditions,” said Joanna Ewart-James, Anti-Slavery International’s supply chain program coordinator (Anti-Slavery International, 2010).
Despite the various legislative changes, the number of sex and forced-labor convictions remains quite low. There were 14 convictions in 2006, 7 in 2007, 45 in 2008, and 20 in 2009. There were 23 slave-labor traffickers convicted in 2008 and 15 in 2009. In those 2 years sentencing ranged from 14 months to more than 13 years’ imprisonment for sex traffickers and 30 months to 10½ years’ imprisonment as well as fines for slave-labor traffickers. In 2010, 4 persons were convicted of sex trafficking under Article 231, while 4 other trafficking offenders were convicted under charges of forming a gang. Sentences of those convicted under Article 231 ranged from community service to nearly 9 years’ imprisonment, while the sentences of those convicted of forming a gang ranged from fines and community service to 11 years’ imprisonment. Eight slave-labor offenders were convicted under Article 149 in 2010, but 7 of the 8 were given fines, and 1 offender was fined and sentenced to 3½ years’ imprisonment, which was converted to community service. In 2011, 2 transnational sex traffickers were convicted under Article 231; they were each sentenced to 5 years’ imprisonment. It is unclear how many slave-labor traffickers were convicted in 2011, but media reports indicate that 7 labor trafficking offenders were convicted, including a former congressman. Sentences ranged from 4 years to 5 years and 10 months’ imprisonment. Three of these sentences were converted to community service. In one case the trafficker’s service was fulfilled by the payment of one month’s minimum wage salary to a health center. Convicted traffickers—both sex and slave-labor traffickers—are able to appeal their convictions while out on bail, and slave-labor traffickers are able to serve sentences in a halfway home (U.S. Department of State, 2006, 2007b, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012).
INTERNAL EFFORTS TO DECREASE TRAFFICKING
The international human rights community has brought attention to the multiple abuses and exploitations of sugarcane plantation workers. In response, the Brazilian government launched the National Commitment to Improve Labor Conditions in the Sugarcane Industry in June 2009. The commitment was signed by 331 Brazilian companies (Sugar-caneblog, 2009; Gomes, 2010b). In signing the commitment, signatories agree to carry out exemplary business practices regarding workers. The commitment also forbids labor intermediation for sugarcane and ethanol production. This step would eliminate the middleman (
gato
) position that recruits workers from rural areas of Brazil and offers workers an advance in order to lure them to the plantation jobs. The agreement also includes a requirement to provide adequate housing facilities, strengthen collective bargaining, and provide workers with proper protective equipment as well as safe transportation (Gomes, 2010b).
Contrary to the intent of the agreement, companies that commonly violate workers’ rights were accepted as signatories, and those that violated workers’ rights after they signed onto the commitment were allowed to remain as signatories (Gomes, 2010b). One such signatory was Usina Santa Cruz, purchased by the José Pessoa Group in 2002 (EMII, 2002). Hundreds upon hundreds of slave laborers have been discovered at the Usina Santa Cruz plant—150 on May 15, 324 on June 6, and 5 on November 11, 2009. Additionally, 122 slave laborers were found at a property (Lagoa de Cima farm) that was leased by the José Pessoa Group. The José Pessoa Group was also found to have slave laborers at its facilities in November 2007 and June 2008 (Gomes, 2010b). Despite vast human rights offenses and although the José Pessoa Group was excluded in 2008 from the National Pact for the Eradication of Slave Labor, Usina Santa Cruz could still advertise itself as a signatory of the National Commitment to Improve Labor Conditions in the Sugarcane Industry (Gomes, 2010b).