In Brazil, Volkswagen AG is being investigated for slave labor.
Freiburg’s online petition wants the company to acknowledge its guilt of human rights violations against Brazilian farm workers.
The Brazil Initiative Freiburg e.V. has started an online petition to be handed over to Manfred Döss, VW Board Member for Integrity and Legal Affairs, in early March 2023.
The demand: VW should set up a victims’ fund and compensate former farm workers on the company-owned cattle farm Fazenda Vale do Rio Cristalino.
The allegations relate to 1974 to 1986, when VW do Brasil acquired and operated the Rio Cristalino cattle farm – fiscally favored by Sudam depreciation opportunities in Amazônia – and sought to become one of the largest cattle producers there.
During this period, “serious crimes and human rights violations have occurred in Brazil,” the petition text states.
According to the text, 600 to 1,200 migrant workers, 90% illiterate, worked in a system of bonded labor guarded by a private security service.
Workers had been beaten, humiliated, and imprisoned.
They had to pay for their own tent, food, and transportation and were thus in debt from the start.
People were without the right to leave the farm without permission.
The farm workers would have been in complete economic and labor dependence on the so-called “gatos” (cats), a Brazilian Portuguese term for the subcontractors who had hired Brazilian workers for VW and organized operations on the cattle farm.
Brazilian priest Ricardo Rezende protected three farm workers who escaped from the farm.
The 70-year-old is now a university human rights and anthropology lecturer at UFRJ Rio de Janeiro.
He heads the working group “Contemporary Slave Labor.”
In the 1980s, he initiated a police investigation, had witness statements notarized, and collected further evidence of inhumane treatment at the VW plant.
Many cases were documented, but there were no consequences for VW. Friedrich-Georg Brügger, a Swiss citizen and manager of the cattle farm at the time, sees no injustice.
In 2022, the Brazilian public prosecutor’s office started investigations against VW again.
It is about human trafficking, systematic human rights violations, slavery-like working conditions, and slave labor in hundreds of cases.
Several meetings between prosecutors and VW representatives last year failed to produce results. The next meeting is scheduled for March 29.
The Brazil Initiative Freiburg plans to hand over the online petition with a list of supporters to VW manager Döss at the beginning of March 2023.
The online petition is intended to make it clear to those responsible at VW that the group’s filibustering tactics are met with incomprehension.
According to investigation files of the Brazilian public prosecutor’s office, the board of the VW group knew about the human rights violations on its cattle farm in the state of Pará – but did not act.
VW is accused of human rights violations against temporary workers employed for clearing work.
With information from amerika21