Re: [Marxism] Charcoal

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

> I think that one does not need to probe too deep in the class issues
> involved to understand where should a serious radical stand on this
> issue.
>
> With Morales, with the Bolivian poor, with Latin American union, and
> with the Amazon forest.
>
> Against the charcoal-based plant, believe it our friend, or not.
>
> Este correo lo ha enviado
> Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky

The Guardian (London), April 19, 1991
Environment: A land bound in misery and iron - A devastated region of the 
Amazon that the Prince of Wales is unlikely to be shown on his visit to 
Brazil next week

BYLINE: By JAN ROCHA

PRINCE Charles, on his royal visit to Brazil next week, will be shown a 
small and heavily guarded ecological oasis created by the state mining 
company, CVRD. What he will not see is the vast surrounding area of 
devastation caused by the giant Carajas iron ore extraction project the 
worst environmental disaster zone in the Amazon rainforest.

The environmental destruction is so great that the European Court of 
Auditors has decided to investigate EC responsibility for the disaster. The 
EC helped finance the mine and a 550-mile railway to the coast with a 
USDollars 250 million loan. Brazilian organisations are suing the 
government for its part in the damage.

As part of his trip, Prince Charles intends to co-host, with Brazilian 
President Fernando Collor, a closed seminar aboard the royal yacht 
Britannia to discuss the environment.

ACAILANDIA in the eastern Amazon: smoke rises from dozens of sawmill 
chimneys. There used to be over 120 but many have closed because of the 
recession. Beyond huge piles of tree trunks waiting to be sawn into planks, 
a row of 20 beehive-shaped brick ovens, half-hidden behind smoke, are 
packed with sawmill waste to be turned into charcoal for Acailandia's two 
pig iron smelters that service the mighty Carajas iron ore mine.

Beyond the ovens, manned by blackened men, two 6 ft-deep pits have been 
dug. In one, a small boy is piling timber higher than his head to fill the 
pit. Jose Vens de Souza looks younger than 13, his age, but he works 10 
hours a day to earn 1,200 cruzeiros ( pounds 2.80) for each pit load. On 
top of the pile is Raimundo, 12; when the boys get thirsty they drink water 
from a hose in an old oil tanker. At the company offices, the accountant, 
when asked about the children, splutters and denies. 'Children? There 
aren't any children working here.' Eventually he says: 'I'll have to tell 
the man who hired them to get rid of them.'

The trees which feed the sawmill have to be brought from up to 60 miles 
away because there are no more large trees left nearby. The sawmill employs 
nearly 600 men and women; it enjoys 10 years of tax exemption, and half of 
its capital comes from two federal development agencies, Sudam and Sudene, 
because it is helping to provide economic development.

Ten miles outside Acailandia at Pequie, the CRVD railway unloads iron ore 
from the Carajas mine for the two pig iron smelters. Local union leaders 
complain about the conditions at the smelters. They denounce what they call 
'the local business dictatorship' - safety rules are ignored, men are 
forced to work 16-hour days without full overtime, the price of their 
uniforms is deducted from their wages and those who join the union are 
sacked. Last year, 15 union officials were fired and banned from entering 
the workplace.

Acailandia is an important industrial centre for the Greater Carajas 
programme, which was set up by the Brazilian government after the world's 
largest high grade iron ore deposit was discovered in 1967. Hundreds of 
thousands came looking for jobs; it was said that export earnings from the 
sale of the iron ore would pay off Brazil's foreign debt. The European Coal 
and Steel Community arranged a USDollars 600 million loan, later reduced to 
USDollars 257 million, and the World Bank lent another USDollars 350 
million. Aailandia's population exploded to 200,000 but there is little 
sign of progress in its muddy streets. Over 6,000 people cram the largest 
shanty town, Capelosa, where naked children compete with chickens and dogs 
for scraps in the streets between the open sewers; people toil with tins 
and buckets on their heads carrying water from the one pump.

On the road back from Acailandia is a Forestry Research Station set up by 
the CVRD. The 550-mile-long railway corridor which cuts through the 
rainforest to carry the iron ore to the port at Sao Luis for export to Asia 
and Europe left 250,000 square kilometres of degraded land, to add to the 
area already cleared by earlier roads. The company says it plans to plant 
new forests of up of 70 per cent eucalyptus trees, and 30 per cent native 
species. Previous attempts to introduce artificial forests have failed, but 
the company says it has studied 150 species of eucalyptus to find the right 
variety.

Maraba, a former river port, is now another sprawling town of 200,000 
people. As we arrive, one of the six daily iron ore trains rolls by, 
pulling behind it 40 flat wagons of loaded lorries - with drivers. To avoid 
the pot-holed road, especially during the rainy season, the lorries travel 
by train. Giant pot-holes keep our driver, Nelson, swerving during the 
120-mile drive from Maraba to the Carajas mine. 'When I came here 16 years 
ago this was all dense forest,' says Nelson. Now treeless ields of cattle 
grass stretch to the horizon, with only the odd tall blackened stump to 
remind travellers this was once thick rainforest.

The road runs to the town of Parauapebas at the foot of the iron ore 
mountain. A checkpoint bars the way up the mountain, to the CRVD enclave. 
Only company employees or those authorised by head office in Rio may enter. 
Inside the forest begins again. A thousand feet up, the air in the company 
town is cooler. Neat bungalows, clean streets, green litter bins every mile 
or so. The company environment officer has a green garbage scheme - garden 
waste is collected and sprinkled on degraded mining land. The Visitors' 
Lodge is hidden behind two pairs of automatic gates; the mansion where 
Prince Charles and Princess Diana will be taken is furnished with 
exquisitely carved Amazon hardwoods. The view is breathtaking, miles of 
deep intact rain forest.

Down through the checkpoint we visit the Parauapebas hospital, built by the 
company when they made the town to house 5,000 workers. Now there are 
30,000, and the Municipal Health Secretary, Dr Welney Carvalho Lopez, 
accuses the company of reducing its monthly contribution to the hospital 
from over Dollars 30,000 to under Dollars 10,000. Each day there are five 
to seven new malaria cases and the town has the highest rate of leprosy in 
the state with over 200 new cases a year, plus 300 already in treatment. 
The company hospital on top of the mountain, though, is well-staffed, 
equipped and under-used. 'Up there it's Sweden, down here it's Biafra' said 
the doctor.

We stop at a row of beehive charcoal ovens at the side of the road. Elias 
Oliveira, 32, tends seven ovens single- handed, working from 4am to 7pm to 
produce at most one ton of charcoal a day for the region's pig iron 
smelters. He gets 1,000 crujeiros ( pounds 2.20) a ton from the landowner, 
who then sells it on for 8,200 crujeiros. Elias is aware of his miserable 
state, but says 'Work, whatever it is, is no dishonour.' Beyond the ovens 
in a rickety hut live his young wife Eunice and two children - the baby has 
open red sores round his neck, the 18-month-old girl's eyes are infested 
with insects. Eunice shows me her legs covered in sores. A doctor 
recommended she wore tights to stop scratching - a bad joke in the humidity 
of the Amazon.

The CVRD mining company, one of Brazil's most efficient, recorded an 
USDollars 800 million profit last year. When will it begin to recover the 
human degradation it has indirectly helped to cause? Maybe the charcoal 
burner's sick children cannot be treated inside the enclave, but why can't 
the company set up a mobile health service? Or lay on a proper water supply 
for the shanty town dwellers of Acailandia? Perhaps these are questions to 
be asked during the Royal visit.

===

The New York Times, August 10, 1995
Of Modern Bondage -- A special report.; Brazilians Chained to Job, and 
Desperate
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

DATELINE: SANTA RITA DO RIO PARDO, Brazil

Desperate as they were, Rosangela and Clemente Pereira rue the day they 
heard a radio commercial promising steady wages driving for a company 
called Carmig, in the distant brushlands of Mato Grosso do Sul.

Without money for food, they rode 18 hours on the back of a truck. Bellies 
empty, they encountered their new life at Agua Clara, a one-street town 
that has neither doctor nor hospital to tend laborers, but does have a 
funeral home to bury them, run by the local police chief.

"I got here, and I got thrown right into the oven," said Mr. Pereira, who 
is 36. Cheeks sunken, cloaked in soot, he works alongside Mrs. Pereira from 
sunup to sundown packing beehive-shaped ovens of brick and mud with 
eucalyptus logs, making charcoal to fuel the steel plants of Brazil. The 
couple have been trying to get home for more than two years but have become 
trapped, they said, by ever-increasing debts charged by Geraldo Mateus, the 
owner of Carmig.

The Pereiras and the half-dozen other workers at this settlement, some 45 
miles down a dirt road fromthe highway to Campo Grande, say they cannot 
leave without permission from their boss, and they cannot gain permission 
to return home to Minas Gerais without paying off debts to the company that 
only increase the longer they work.

And they are not alone. All along the River Pardo, clusters of two to three 
dozen ovens are worked by men, women and children who rarely receive any 
pay at all, but are charged inflated prices for food against the record of 
wages kept by their employer. All of them know stories of workers who have 
tried to leave and have been pursued, beaten and robbed of their meager 
belongings.

Laborers who try to flee are not killed by their bosses' henchmen, said 
Eliana da Silva, another worker -- not exactly. "They knock the wits out of 
them, and if they can't stand it, they die," she said. "That's happened to 
many people."

According to the Pastoral Land Commission, a nonprofit group sponsored by 
the Roman Catholic Church, reports of forced labor in Brazil reached 25,193 
last year, up from 4,883 in 1991. The church group's figures are based only 
on reports of forced labor that it has confirmed, but Jose de Souza 
Martins, a sociology professor who is an expert on the issue, puts the true 
figure closer to 85,000, and says those using forced labor now include 
modern multinational companies.

The numbers have grown so large that President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 
who is eager to portray his country as a modern economic power, appointed a 
presidential commission in June to investigate companies that use slave 
labor and earmarked $290 million for the effort.

Though Brazil in 1888 became the last country in the Americas to abolish 
slavery officially, Mr. Cardoso said in an emotional radio address that 
bondage continued today, with the only difference being that "the slave of 
modern Brazil changes owners and never knows what to expect the next day."

What the President called the modern Brazilian slave is, typically, an 
uneducated and poor laborer who is transported huge distances by recruiters 
promising steady work and wages, but then saddled with inflated debts for 
transportation, food and lodging, which often is just a plastic sheet 
stretched over four poles.

On the books, Brazil has a law against "reducing a person to a condition 
analogous to slavery." But nobody has ever been prosecuted under it.

Geraldo Mateus would not directly address the conditions among his workers, 
but his lawyer, Joao Alfredo Danieze, denied that workers were not free to 
leave, and said they earned higher salaries working in the coal ovens of 
Carmig than they could back home in Minas Gerais. Women and children did 
not work in the coal plants, he insisted, because Mr. Mateus prohibits it.

"Maybe some husbands want to increase their incomes, so they make their 
wives work," he said.

According to government statistics, the highest concentrations of forced 
labor are found in the states of Para and Mato Grosso do Sul. Workers stoke 
the ovens to make coal. They also work in the sugar distilleries that 
produce alcohol for Brazil's cars and in gold mines and picking the black 
seeds that are used for a special kind of grass that is particularly 
suitable for cattle grazing.

"This isn't the result of a system from the Middle Ages, of progress not 
reaching here yet," said the Rev. Alfeo Prandel, a Redemptorist priest who 
has been spearheading a local commission examining conditions in the coal 
ovens and distilleries of Mato Grosso do Sul. "It is a result of a 
modernism, to produce charcoal, to produce steel, to produce sugar cane, 
alcohol for cars, sugar for export. We should have some more modern system, 
not using slavery to produce these things."

The Inspections: Frustrated Efforts To Catch Abuses

Every few weeks, a group of labor, human rights and church workers, 
gathered under the weighty title of the Permanent Commission to Investigate 
and Regulate Working Conditions in the Coal Plants and Distilleries of the 
State of Mato Grosso do Sul, sets out to uncover the pockets of slave labor 
hidden in the vast countryside.

Theoretically, the commission's members should include representatives of 
local government agencies charged with monitoring working conditions, the 
most powerful of which is the Regional Labor Ministry, which can examine 
the books of landowners and fine them for abuses. The commission's 
difficulty in working with the regional ministry, however, suggests the 
strength of the bonds between landowners and the local authorities.

The commission keeps the targets of investigations a secret, even to its 
members. Earlier, it said it had found that landowners were being warned in 
advance of impending inspections, and would hide workers and clean up 
conditions by the time the commission arrived.

On its last inspection two weeks ago, the commission met in front of the 
Regional Labor Ministry at 7 A.M. It was the only way, said Maucir 
Pauletti, a lawyer, to insure that labor inspectors would actually 
accompany them to the coal furnaces. But the strategy did not work.

The first inspector arrived half an hour late. Father Prandel noticed that 
she was wearing high heels, hardly suitable for the rough work ahead, and 
took it as a bad sign. The two inspectors said their van could not drive 
over dirt roads -- an assertion their driver unwittingly contradicted. And 
they said they had authorization from the chief of the Regional Labor 
Ministry, Silvio Escobar, only to look at records in the city of Ribas do 
Rio Pardo. "How can they inspect coal plants if they don't go to them," Mr. 
Pauletti complained.

"What kind of a joke is this?" said Dener Cruz, who represents a rural 
labor union. He looked away, his lips tightening into a wire of smoldering 
fury.

The labor inspectors balked again en route to the coal plants, and when 
finally, under unrelenting pressure from commission members, they drove 
into the coal plants, they did not demand to check worker records there.

"It's a strategy to sap the commission of its motivation," Mr. Pauletti 
said at the end of the day, as he sat trying to figure out the commission's 
next step. It was the fourth consecutive time, he said, that the Regional 
Labor Ministry had sabotaged the commission's attempt to document the 
abuses the President had vowed to eradicate. "A lot of people are getting 
discouraged," Mr. Pauletti conceded.

The System: Creating a Need For Forced Labor

The use of forced labor is so widespread in the region, and so tied to the 
local power structure, that it surprised even Luis Camargo de Melo, an 
experienced federal prosecutor who came here after tackling slavery in the 
sugar cane fields outside Rio de Janeiro. "It's too vast," the prosecutor 
said. "It's the whole state, and that makes it very hard." Here at Santa 
Rita, even the Mayor runs coal plants.

Had the local labor inspectors gone along that day, they would have met 
Arleus Lopes Lima, a 7-year-old, and his 9-year-old friend, Marco Muniz da 
Silva, who eagerly demonstrated how they brick up the packed furnaces as 
high as their hands will reach and then pack them over with mud for $1.10 
cents per oven, paid to their parents.

Or they might have met Mareio Jose Muniz, a 12-year-old boy from Sao Paulo 
with the body and the serious face of a man, who does the same work to help 
his family. The children work in furnaces on the Fazenda Financial, which 
the commission said was owned by Ludio Martins Coelho, a Brazilian Senator 
who belongs to the same party as President Cardoso.

Mr. Coelho's office in Brasilia confirmed that he owned the Fazenda 
Financial but said the Senator was unavailable for comment.

Silvio Escobar, the head of the Labor Ministry, said the commission's 
frustration was the result of a misunderstanding. "They didn't tell us 
beforehand where they were going," Mr. Escobar said. He dismissed the 
commission's worry about leaks to the owners.

In a long and at times contradictory interview, Mr. Escobar alternately 
called the commission a "help" for his understaffed ministry, which has 
only 30 inspectors for territory nearly the size of Montana, and a 
"political" spectacle doomed to failure because it did not work with the 
landowners or coal producers, who clear the eucalyptus forests and run the 
coal plants.

He said that his ministry was negotiating with the owners to remedy 
problems and that conditions were slowly improving. The abuses, he said, 
came from the "gatos," or cats, labor contractors who lure workers with 
false promises and then refuse to pay them.

But the gatos are only part of the problem, said James Cavallaro, of Human 
Rights Watch/Americas Watch. The contract that landowners and producers 
sign with the gatos often pay only a pittance for clearing large tracts of 
land.

"The system is designed to require the use of forced labor," Mr. Cavallaro 
said. His organization has been pressing for Brazil to enforce a law 
allowing the expropriation of land on which slave labor is used -- a step 
few Brazilians expect the courts to take.

The People Work for Nothing Except Debts

The people who work the coal ovens here no longer have any illusions. They 
are marooned in another era, where electricity and treated water do not 
exist, where logs are carried to them by ox cart. They do not read 
newspapers. They do not bother with politicians' promises.

Eliana da Silva, who has been working for Carmig with her husband Valdo for 
28 months, instead studies each truck that passes, laden with coal bound 
for her home state. Ten of them pass the road by her ovens each day; in her 
imagination, any one could carry the family to freedom.

The couple has been told that they owe Carmig 870 meters of coal -- an 
amount equal to an astonishing $4,700, at the $5.50 a meter they are 
supposed to be paid for the coal; that would represent about five weeks of 
labor for the entire crew of eight people working the battery of 34 ovens. 
They have been told that most of the debt is for food, which they buy at 
the supermarket at Agua Clara, and for maintenance of a tractor Mr. da 
Silva uses for the work, which belongs to Carmig. Like other workers, they 
are never told the prices of items they buy, but the bill is passed on 
directly to Mr. Mateus, who charges it against wages.

"Since I've come here, I haven't earned anything, only the food we eat," 
Mr. da Silva said. He leaned against his tractor, the smoke baked into 
every wrinkle in his 39-year-old face, and wondered if the acrid fumes were 
killing him. "My chest is on fire," he said.

The family has never been paid, and is instead reduced to asking Mr. Mateus 
for whatever needs arise. Recently, Mrs. da Silva wanted to buy fresh 
clothes. She appealed to Mr. Mateus. "Why buy clothes?" she remembered him 
telling her. "I don't even buy clothes. Look at me."

Her boss was, however, buying up vast properties -- a fact confirmed by Mr. 
Mateus's lawyer. "He's getting filthy rich on our blood," Eliana da Silva 
said, her eyes following a passing truck.

The family is also paying off the cost of burying their daughter, a 
3-year-old who was struck by lightning. Rather than bury her here, they 
took her body back home to Minas Gerais, a 27-hour ride.

So deep is the culture of submission among the poor, though, and so 
profound the fear of retribution, that the family never thought of simply 
staying back in Minas.

"My hope is that when all the wood finishes here, Mateus will forgive my 
debt," Mr. da Silva said. "If he doesn't forgive, he'll take everything I 
have: the chain saw, the chickens, everything."

Mr. and Mrs. Pereira have also watched the family they hoped to build 
wither here.

Earlier this year, Mrs. Pereira, 28, gave birth to the couple's only son, 
called Cleito, born with six fingers on each hand. The baby seemed to have 
been struggling from birth. Then, one night, he became ill. It was 7 P.M., 
and the child had trouble breathing. His parents grew frantic, trying to 
find a way to reach a doctor. It was not until 9 the next morning that a 
passing truck gave Mrs. Pereira a ride to Ribas do Rio Pardo, some 60 miles 
away, where the doctor pronounced the boy dead of anemia.

Before Mrs. Pereira gave birth, the couple was earning $55 a month, or half 
the minimum legal salary in Brazil. But since she gave birth, Mr. Mateus 
has been charging them $775 for the medical care she required. They still 
owe $250 on the debt, though if their employer had registered them legally, 
their medical care would have been covered by the government.

These days, Mr. Pereira said, he can save nothing. "We can't even buy 
panties for our daughter," he said, looking at the couple's two-year-old 
child, Casia, asleep in her mother Rosangela's arms. "We arrived without a 
penny, but we didn't owe anything, either."

Three weeks ago, Mr. Pereira had a dream. He was riding with Rosangela and 
their daughter in the cab of a truck, going back home to the city of 
Pompeu. He was leaving as he came, with empty pockets. But this time he was 
headed for freedom and people who loved him. And he was happy.



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