Buenos Aires Times

German carmaker Volkswagen faces an viewers with Brazilian prosecutors Tuesday over allegations of human-rights violations at a farm it ran throughout Brazil’s navy dictatorship, together with slave labor, rapes and beatings.

Prosecutors have assembled a 90-page file they are saying paperwork years of atrocities dedicated by Volkswagen managers and employed weapons at a cattle ranch the corporate owned within the Amazon rainforest basin within the Nineteen Seventies and 80s.

In the newest try and deliver justice for abuses dedicated beneath Brazil’s 1964-1985 navy regime, the federal prosecutor’s workplace for labour affairs summoned VW representatives to a hearing in Brasilia to reply for proof of abuses together with torture and killings on the property within the northern state of Pará, referred to as Fazenda Vale do Rio Cristalino.

“There were grave and systematic violations of human rights, and Volkswagen is directly responsible,” lead prosecutor Rafael García informed AFP.

The viewers will likely be an preliminary contact “to see if it’s possible to reach a settlement” with out opening legal proceedings, he mentioned.

Volkswagen has declined to touch upon specifics of the case, saying it first wants “clarity on all the allegations.”

But the corporate is “committed to contributing very seriously to the investigations,” a spokeswoman for Volkswagen Brasil informed AFP by e mail.

In 2020, Volkswagen agreed to pay 36 million reais (US$6.4 million on the time) in compensation for collaborating with Brazil’s secret police in the course of the dictatorship to determine suspected leftist opponents and union leaders at its native operation, who had been then detained and tortured.

 

Crusading priest

That settlement caught the attention of Ricardo Rezende, a Catholic priest who spent years compiling proof of abuses at Volkswagen’s farm after shifting to Pará in 1977 and hearing what he says had been horrifying tales from victims.

Rezende puzzled if the corporate is also held to account for that case, and determined to share his information with prosecutors, he informed AFP.

“You can’t fix someone suffering torture by paying reparations. The suffering of the women whose sons and husbands went to the farm and never came back – there’s no reparation for that pain,” mentioned the priest, now 70. “But there could be a symbolic reparation. I think it’s necessary.”

Rezende’s lots of of pages of testimony and different paperwork satisfied prosecutors to launch a activity pressure, which spent three years assembling proof – boiled all the way down to the file they are going to now current to VW.

In it, victims inform investigators of being lured to the 70,000-hectare (173,000-acre) farm with false guarantees of profitable jobs, then compelled to chop down the jungle beneath grueling circumstances for Volkswagen’s cattle ranch, which turned the most important in Pará for a time.

Workers had been stored in “debt-slavery” by being compelled to purchase meals and provides from the farm at exorbitant costs, prosecutors mentioned.

Those who tried to flee had been crushed, tied to bushes and left for days by armed guards who stored violent watch over the workforce, they mentioned.

In one case, three witnesses mentioned gunmen kidnapped a employee’s spouse and raped her as punishment after he tried to flee.

“There were extremely grave abuses,” mentioned Rezende, who estimates lots of and doubtless hundreds of employees had been basically enslaved from 1974 to 1986.

 

VW within the jungle?

What was a German automaker doing elevating cattle within the Brazilian Amazon within the first place?

The story is a window on how the navy regime noticed the Amazon, and helps clarify why the world’s largest rainforest is threatened at the moment.

It was a time when Brazil was urgently pushing to develop the rainforest, which the regime noticed as backwards, luring settlers with promised riches and the slogan: “Land without men for men without land.”

The authorities additionally lured corporations. Volkswagen benefited from tax exemptions and negative-interest loans for reducing down the forest to develop a farm, to not point out shut ties with the regime, Rezende mentioned.

“On the one hand, Volkswagen loved the dictatorship. On the other, it was a highly profitable business,” he mentioned. “It could have 6,000 people working almost for free.”

Authorities say such practices had been widespread within the Amazon area, even after the dictatorship.

Holding different corporations to account would rely upon gathering ample proof, García mentioned.

associated information

by Joshua Howat Berger, AFP

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Brazil, Germany, vehicle, slavery, human rights, dictatorship, Volkswagen, VW, rape, beatings

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