Peter was three years old when his mother gave him to a poor family in the Amazon. When I met him, in a raid to release enslaved workers, he was 14 and illiterate. He had to work to buy his own shoes, clothes and medicine – he’d already had dengue fever once and malaria five times. Like many boys in Brazil, he dreamed of being a soccer player. Instead he was a slave on a cattle ranch in the rainforest.
It is because of people like Peter that we, a group of investigative reporters, founded Repórter Brasil – an NGO with the mission to identify and publicize slave labour and other human rights violations. Through our work, we realized that contemporary slavery is a tool used by modern supply chains in the search for competitiveness: reducing costs and making people disposable.
