Photo by: Katie Mastroianni

British journalist Binka Le Breton discussed the causes and future of the slave labor industry in modern-day Brazil at the Graduate School of International Studies’ Cyber Café last Tuesday. The talk was given as part of the Center on Rights Development’s lecture series, whose theme this academic year is human trafficking and forced labor. Just over 30 students attended the event. Le Breton, an activist who now lives in Brazil’s Amazon region and runs the Iracambi Rainforest Research Center, has written five books on human rights. Her latest work, The Greatest Gift: The Courageous Life and Martyrdom of Sister Dorothy Stang, was released on Tuesday and discusses the life and death of an activist who aimed to protect the rights of family farmers threatened by illegal loggers in Brazil. “What I do as a writer is try to find a story and tell it well to focus attention on the issue,” Le Breton said. During the lecture, Le Breton concentrated on exploring the causes of Brazil’s slave labor industry while integrating the data with personal anecdotes and her understanding of local culture. “In Brazil, I was looking at environmental rights and human rights, and guess what? You can’t separate them,” she said. Some of the major factors Le Breton gave for the continuation of slave labor in Brazil include economic inequality and environmental sustainability, which are both significant problems in the Amazon. “There are immense inequalities between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots,” Le Breton said. “Three million two hundred thousand Brazilians are extremely poor.” This social disparity often causes issues when it comes to land use and ownership. “Brazil is perhaps the last place in the world that has a functional frontier,” she said. Attempts to develop this frontier, however, have led wealthy landowners and developers to practice deforestation and illegal logging, Le Breton said. The government often sells land to the wealthy in an attempt to appropriate land without men for men without land. “The problem is: this wasn’t a land without men. There were men in the land, and women and children who were indigenous peoples, and they didn’t know you needed a piece of paper to prove the land was yours,” she said. Since developers often do not visit the site, they frequently uproot the indigenous groups who inhabit the space. The resulting confusion and conflict has caused many of the poor Brazilians to leave their homes and become a part of the slave labor workforce. There are 25,000 cases annually, Le Breton reported. “If you are poor, all you have to remind yourself that you are a man is your honor,” Le Breton said. Many of these men work in order to pay off the debt they believe they owe their managers, who often provide sleeping quarters and food for their workers. The Landless Movement is currently working to counteract the slave labor phenomenon.”It is a very successful movement and it consists of the landless, the poor, and the hungry, and the people who have absolutely no alternative,” she said. “It’s a way of getting people together and giving them an identity.” The movement works to unify the community and define a code of ethics for workers. In turn, some workers are beginning to recognize informal labor as unjust unpaid work. Le Breton ended the lecture on a positive note, predicting that the Amazon is not doomed to environmental degradation and human exploitation. Groups like the Landless Movement have the opportunity to spark change, she said. “It was nice to see people who are in the field and actually doing what we are studying to do,” said attendee Lauren Olinsky, a second year graduate student in international studies. “It’s good to see that it can be done. Sitting in Denver learning about it, it seems really far off, but it’s not.”