The CPT gave him a car -- a VW Gol, the more angular Brazilian version of the Golf. Traveling on behalf of the CPT, Father Tiago spends his days on the 101 and in the ethanol villages lining the secondary roads. He knows many people in the region, and he spends much of his time bringing people together, as well as providing advice and comfort.
One of the poverty-stricken bedroom villages for cane cutters on Tiago's route is Araçoiaba, a flat collection of dirty huts and houses in the sweltering heat. The important parts of Araçoiaba are the large squares where buses line up at night.
Antonio da Silva moved to the town with his family five years ago. They threw plastic tarps over a handful of branches to build the hut where they still live today. The door consists of scraps of cloth nailed to a board, and boards placed around a hole in the tarp form the window. The furniture, arranged on the bare earth floor, consists of the plank beds and a cabinet.
The children usually play in the dirt, and the girls often have infections. Raw sewage runs through open ditches. When it rains the entire tent city turns into a muddy morass. It was once a garbage dump, until the ethanol boom began attracting more and more people to the region. Today it is called Araçoiaba Nova, an effort to evoke the promise of the future.
Da Silva could not have ended up anywhere else. He is illiterate and had no other opportunities. His father died when he was seven. When his mother fell ill, she gave Antonio a facão and sent him to the foreman on the plantation.
The machete, with a blade wider than a hand, is sharpened seven or eight times a day. It's sharp as a razor blade. The hook at the end of the blade can make serious wounds.
The act of cutting the cane consists of two strokes with the facão. The first stroke separates the cane from the root, and the second removes the remaining leaves from the stalk, allowing the worker to twist the stalk with his free hand. The motions are fast and fluid, but the double stroke requires strength, even the first, second or third time. After 3,000 or 4,000 strokes a day, by evening the men are often too exhausted to speak.
Da Silva learned the laws of sugarcane before he learned to cut. The first is that no law is above the words of the feitor, or foreman. The feitor determines what the workers earn, who is hired and who is fired.
Da Silva learned that men could collapse and die on the spot from working too hard in the searing sun and not having enough drinking water. It happens often. He learned that no one would help if he sliced into his foot with the facão, and that those who cannot work have nothing to eat. He learned that anyone who makes trouble quickly finds himself face-to-face with the capangas, who crisscross the plantations in Jeeps and on dirt bikes. They carry radios and weapons. Officially, they are considered security guards who watch over the plantations. In reality, the capangas circle the workers like aggressive dogs encircling a herd.
'These Men Live Like Slaves'
On the plantations, workers are not entitled to eat anything but corn meal with water, the daily subsistence food of cane cutters. Their wages are insufficient to buy anything else.
They work six days a week. Da Silva earns about 400 real (about €130, or $172) a month during the season, which last about five or six months. One of the curses of monoculture is that there is no work for sugarcane cutters in the northeast except during the harvest season. In other words, they and their families must survive on their earnings for an entire year. This is far too little, especially when a kilo of beans costs 5.80 real (about €2, or $2.65).
The economics of ethanol
She devotes herself to fighting for the girls' future. "Many become prostitutes when they are this tall," says Sister Conceição, holding her hand about 1.50 meters (five feet) off the ground. It is not about money, she says. "They give themselves away for a piece of salt meat," until they become pregnant and try to perform abortions with bicycle spokes. "Some die in the process," says the mother superior.
Two brothers, 17 and 18 years old, live in another hut in Araçoiaba. They began working in the sugar fields 10 years ago. They had no childhood, and now they have no future. They can see what the future holds when they look at men like Antonio da Silva. "The heat, the dirt and the wounds are bad enough," says the elder of the two, "but the worst of it is that we will have to stay here forever, because there is nothing else."
"These men are held like slaves. Slavery is illegal, but they are slaves," says José Lourenço da Silva. Many here share the surname da Silva. Most are descendants of slaves, who had only first names. When the plantation owners were forced to free their slaves in 1888, thousands were given the same surnames.
'We Learn Nothing at All'
José Lourenço da Silva is the president of the STR farm workers' union in Aliança, another of the ethanol villages. The wind carries the stench of squalor across the open inner courtyard of the building that houses his offices. Lourenço, peering over the edge of his reading glasses, is wearing an ironed shirt and carries a ballpoint pen in his shirt pocket. In the ethanol zone, these are the insignia of an intellectual, and yet Lourenço feels more like a fighter.
He has survived three murder attempts, committed by capangas, as he believes. The last time, he says, he barely escaped with his life. He had received a telephone call -- a pretense to lure him out to a plantation. As he was driving back home, three bullets struck his car.
The people who pin their hopes on Lourenço sit on white plastic chairs in the hallway outside his office. "The ethanol boom may be good for Brazil, but it is devastating for the people," he says, adding that Lula's dream has been a disaster. In the six years since Lula has been in office in Brasilia, says Lourenço, the number of people seeking his help, sitting outside his office in Aliança, has doubled. He has even had to bring out more plastic chairs.
Many of their cases relate to accidents, but most are about wages. The cane is not weighed to determine how many tons the men have cut on a given day. Instead, the feitor measures the sections of the field each worker has cleared with a long stick, which he twirls in his hand like a drum major twirling his baton. If he wishes, he can allow the stick to slide through his hand, thereby reducing the section of land a worker has cleared -- and his wages. In many cases, the plantations simply pay the workers nothing or only a portion of the wages they are owed.
When that happens, Lourenço drives to the offending plantation, where he examines records and re-measures the cleared fields. He argues with the feitor, and he can be very annoying. But he has little real power.
Fábio Farias, on the other hand, has power -- at least in theory. "When we look at the numbers, there appear to be no problems on the plantations," says Farias, an official at the labor ministry in Recife, the capital of the state of Pernambuco. "They indicate that when it comes to accidents, we have a better record than Switzerland. The problem is that our numbers are wrong. In other words, we learn nothing at all." The plantations, says Farias, are worlds unto themselves, places where no one reports accidents or abuse. He has far too few people to monitor them, he says -- nine inspectors for 140,000 workers.
Farias sits in a small office where the plaster is peeling from the ceilings and the computer is broken, suffocating in his files. He wears a suit and tie to work, and beads of sweat glisten on his forehead. This is no country for ties and yet, despite everything, Farias wants to preserve his dignity.
He knows that work on the plantations is far more dangerous than it ought to be. "The use of pesticides alone is outrageous," he says, adding that they are often spread onto the fields by hand -- by workers wearing neither masks nor gloves. "There is long-term damage, and there are cases of poisoning."
Because Farias has so few inspectors, they can only search a plantation or a factory -- and close it, if necessary -- once every few months. When that happens, they file lawsuits, sometimes for slavery, but always for violations of all kinds of rules and regulations.
José Nunes da Silva spent 12 years cutting cane, until he was so worn out that he could no longer work. Nowadays he buries the dead of Araçoiaba. Their paths through the cane end at his feet.
There are nice graves in his cemetery, graves with crosses on them, where capangas and feitores lie. But the bodies of cane cutters are usually buried for only two years. After that, he digs up the remains of the ethanol men and carts them to the back to a spot at the back of the cemetery, next to the garbage dump, where they are burned. Bones protrude from the ashes, and stray dogs roam around.
The gravedigger usually pours a petroleum mixture onto the remains of the cutters and sets them on fire. "No one smells it," he says, "because the plantations are burning anyway."
The bodies are burned to avoid payment of the 15 real (about €5, $7) annual fee for each gravesite -- too costly for the widow of a cane cutter.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
Post to other social networks:
Stay informed with our free news services:
| All news from SPIEGEL International | Twitter | RSS |
| All news from World section | RSS |
© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2009
All Rights Reserved
Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH
