The debt economy was introduced to Rio Negro communities during the rubber boom of the 19th century. According to the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), 1.5 million people in Brazil are unable to leave their employment due to some kind of debt.
Augusto Miranda Brasão, now in his 60s, has been cutting piassava since the age of 12 to pay off debts to his bosses. This palm tree, with coarse fibers that are used to make brooms, has marked the life of Augusto as well as that of his brother, father, and grandfather. For 100 years, various generations of the Brasão family have lived under a criminal enterprise that binds thousands of indigenous workers on the upper and middle Rio Negro, in the state of Amazonas. The brothers live in the community of Malalahá. They are trapped in a world of exploitation, where work is confused with debt payment.
The working relationship is based on a system of loans provided by the bosses who control piassava production. For enough food to last a month, the bosses charge nearly 1,500 real (about US$475). Some items cost 300 percent more than similar products sold in the towns. A kilogram of piassava, meanwhile, is worth around R$2 (US$0.60). The workers receive whatever’s leftover, if anything, after deducting the rancho loans for food, transport, and basic working equipment. From the amount paid at the end of the month, employers also withhold 20 percent for potential impurities in the piassava. And, in some cases, another 10 percent is deducted for the “rent” of their place of work.
“The goal is to keep the piassava worker indebted and subordinate their whole life,” explains researcher Márcio Meira, former president of the National Indian Foundation (Funai), who has studied the cycle of bondage in the Amazon, a system known as aviamento.
Many piassava workers are the first to deny that their working conditions constitute slave labor. “What would happen if they reported it? How would they get back home with nothing? It’s a trap,” says Alexandre Arbex Valadares, a researcher at the Applied Economics Research Institute, a think tank on public policy headquartered in Brasilia. He explains that once they start working under the aviamento system, workers have no choice but to survive and pay their debts.
These conditions, however, are viewed as normal by the piassava workers themselves. Augusto, who has been trapped in the system for 48 years, says he is free and that he only works when he wants. “Nobody here forces me to do anything,” he explains. When interviewed, Augusto and his brother had spent the entire day working to pay off a “little debt” of R$800 (US$253) with nearly a ton of piassava. Cutting palm leaves in temperatures that can exceed 30˚C (86˚F) in the autumn and carrying 60 kilograms at a time on their backs is only half the day’s work. They are also required to cut, comb, trim, and tie the fibers up into bales. “But we’re not slaves, like people say we are,” he insists.
The person giving the orders in Malalahá is a man called Edson Mara Mendonça, but there are many others like him. A 59-year-old man from Bahia state who asked to remain anonymous owes R$400 (US$127) to another boss in Malalahá. “I’ve got product to pay for, but first I have to buy some oil and gasoline from him to collect the fibers.” In other words, to pay the debt, the worker must first take on a new loan. For another piassava worker, Alberto Neres da Silva, aged 41, bondage appears to have robbed him of his capacity for emotion. “I lost my children,” he explains calmly. Three of his six children died before their first year due to the precarious living conditions on the piassava plantations. Many, like Neres da Silva, take their whole family upstream with them. This allows them to reduce food costs and avoid living apart for three weeks each month. But it also leaves women and children vulnerable to poisonous snake bites, malaria and Chagas disease. For the workers themselves, umbilical hernias, lower back pain, and early rheumatism are also common occupational diseases.
All across Amazonas, the pejorative expression “those who aren’t Indians” used by Olânio and Olavo is a common way to refer to the Baré indigenous people, who are the main victims of this type of bonded labor in this area.
Like so many other indigenous groups, the Baré were persecuted in the early decades of the 20th century, facing illegal occupations, massacres, cultural violence embodied by the forced introduction of Catholicism, imprisonment, and slavery. To survive, they concealed their own identity, losing their rituals and their native tongue. The strategy to disappear worked so well that Funai declared the group extinct. In 1990, the recovery of their identity began.
“The alliance of so many peoples around an indigenous issue is, above all, an alliance for survival. They undertook this process so they wouldn’t be decimated,” explains the anthropologist Camila Sobral Barra, who studies at the Rio Negro for Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), an indigenous peoples research body based in São Paulo.
The search for identity is associated with the search for land. Some indigenous associations, like Foirn (Federation of Indigenous Organizations of Rio Negro), argue that, with demarcated lands, indigenous autonomy increases. Many lands in the region are in this process. “With demarcation, the land returns to the indigenous peoples and stops generating profit for the piassava bosses, business people [from the agribusiness and mining sectors] and for politicians,” says Barra.
Fear is the greatest tormentor of those who stay under the aviamento system, according to José Melgueiro de Jesus, aka Zezão, president of the Association of Communities of Rio Preto. “When I was a piassava worker, life was bad but I didn’t leave because I didn’t think I could survive any other way.”
On the upper and middle Rio Negro, for years whole families have been subjected to exploitation through debt bondage in the extraction of piassava. Although many still cannot understand – or admit – the violations they suffer, there is a growing movement that is eager to create, for the first time, a new beginning.
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