Volkswagen told the Public Labor Ministry, in writing, that it understands that it is not responsible for the occurrence of slave labor and other human rights violations on a farm it owned in southern Pará during the 1970s and 1980s, when Brazil still lived under the military dictatorship (1964-1985).
The MPT investigates the company for the occurrence of slave labor on the Vale do Rio Cristalino farm, which was known as Volkswagen Farm, located in the municipality of Santana do Araguaia.
The meeting with Volkswagen took place this Thursday (29), in São Paulo, and lasted just over two hours.
According to prosecutor Rafael Garcia, coordinator of the special group investigating the case, representatives of the German automaker argued that the occurrence is old and that other people were involved in what happened on the property.
Volkswagen’s legal director for Latin America, Marcelo Quio Ribeiro Nascimento, and the company’s three lawyers who attended the meeting declined to comment.
“The Public Labor Ministry once again reinforced the seriousness of the facts that occurred inside the farm. The serious violations of human rights to which the workers were subjected, from debt bondage to the blunt violence of armed surveillance, the absolutely precarious conditions to which they were submitted”, says Garcia.
For the MPT, there is no doubt that the company knew what was happening on its property.
“The evidence that exists in the records, and this was dealt with today in a very forceful way, that Volkswagen has always had, that the farm’s management has always been in control of what happened in the physical space of the farm”, says the Labor prosecutor.
One of the indications, according to the MPT, is that controlling the activities of workers in opening pastures and cutting down forests would not be possible without the company coming into contact with the living and working conditions of these employees.
There was also armed surveillance. “It would be impossible without the connivance or authorization of the farm’s management.”
A new hearing was scheduled for November 29. The MPT’s expectation is to reach an individual reparation agreement for 14 workers identified as victims, in addition to collective compensation.
In agreements and convictions of this type, prosecutors often include collective moral damage and the anticipated financial compensation may go to a fund or civil society entity.
The judicialization of the case is not ruled out, but, according to Garcia, it is not under discussion at the moment. Although there has been no progress towards an agreement, the investigation coordinator says that the automaker remains open to dialogue.
The next procedures related to the investigation of the case should take place in secrecy, at the request of Volkswagen’s defense.
This Thursday’s hearing was the second meeting of representatives of the automaker with the special action group created by the MPT to investigate the case. The first hearing was in June, in Brasília (DF).
When the case became public, Volkswagen said it took the matter “very seriously”.
In 2020, referring to another case, Volkswagen do Brasil committed to allocate BRL 36.3 million to former company employees who were arrested, persecuted or tortured during the military dictatorship.
The payment takes place with the conclusion of three civil inquiries at the Federal Public Ministry, the São Paulo Public Ministry and the Labor Public Ministry.
understand the case
In 2019, the Public Ministry of Labor received documentation reporting what prosecutors considered to be “situations of submission of workers to degrading working conditions”.
The material was organized by Father Ricardo Rezende Figueira, who was coordinator of the CPT (Pastoral Land Commission) for the region of Araguaia and Tocantins.
After three years of analyzing the dossier that Figueira had put together, the MPT understood that there were grounds for initiating an investigation. The priest is the author of a book on slave labor.
The Volkswagen Farm had, according to the MPT, more than 139 thousand hectares. The native vegetation was transformed into a pasture area. To do this work, the cats (as the recruiters of slave labor are called) recruited workers in small villages in Mato Grosso, Maranhão and Goiás, according to the MPT.
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