WITNESS and Commissão Pastoral da Terra produced Bound by Promises: Contemporary Slavery in Rural Brazil to raise visibility and push Brazil to fully enact the National Plan to Eradicate Slave Labor.
Throughout the North of Brazil, 25,000 men each year are offered jobs and the promise of a better future for their families. They are taken to isolated ranches mostly in the Amazon only to find that they have been lured into debt bondage. Forced to do backbreaking work and live in overcrowded shacks with no running water, armed guards remind the workers that those who try to run away may be killed. With no way out, they toil in the hope of buying back their freedom.
An international media campaign and petition to President Lulu will put the necessary pressure to finally help win passage of a Constitutional Amendment that would allow land to be confiscated - without compensation - from those practicing slavery.
Forced labor is a severe violation of human rights and restriction of human freedom. Tightened laws, increased penalties and expropriated land belonging to slave holders redistributed to poor landless farmers will help end the cycle of slavery.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
