Part Two: That Time Volkswagen Operated a Slave Plantation in Brazil

We conclude the heinous tale of Volkswagen's slave plantation in Brazil.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a
podcast that.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
You're listening to right now. And this is part two
of our episodes on Volkswagen's slave plantation in Brazil, So
you probably know what's going on here. You're not dropping
into part two of this specific episode just on your own.
That would be weird.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
I hope not.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Uh huh.

Speaker 4 (00:28):
They'll both be depressing. But yeah, to just pick this
second part of it.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
That's maniac shit. That's like fifty one fifty shit right,
Like that's a seventy two hour hold for you see
count Yeah, what do you? What are you doing? And
we're coming in, of course on the day that Diddy
just got sentenced, So that's fun. Have you have you
caught this yet? This happened in between us a recording

(00:53):
part one. In part two, the court art is something
else very special. He does not look happy. Oh I
had hoped for more than that, but yeah, he's more
than four years so it's not it's I don't know
what do you want?

Speaker 1 (01:07):
This is?

Speaker 2 (01:07):
This is twenty twenty five, Like.

Speaker 3 (01:10):
I am like, wow, he meant trial.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Yeah, yeah, he's going he's staying in prison. He's not
gonna get time served what he already did. That's not nothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's sad that like I'm looking at that and being like, well,
I I was worried it would be worse. But look
at this picture of him. I'm also I'm really vibing
on this, uh this drawing. I love good court art. Yeah, yes, yeah,

(01:33):
it's beautiful. He does not look happy. His hair is
totally white. Also, this has to be a choice that
clearly it looks like a bailiff behind him. You can
see they've like drawn his badge, and it looks like
an anarchy circle a symbol on the bailiff's badge. I
don't know why it made that choice.

Speaker 3 (01:48):
You are not you're not reading into it. To my
untrained eye, Absolutely, that.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
Is a circle a right, Like that's just a circle
a hell. Yeah, Let's let's talk about something that makes sense,
you know, something, something that makes us feel good, that
makes us feel optimistic. Oh wait, no, we're talking about
slavery in Brazil. We're not talking about any of that
at all, Maggie. You want to plug anything before we

(02:13):
get back into talking about Brazil slave plantations, Well, volkswagons
in Brazil.

Speaker 5 (02:18):
I need yeah, I am so excited to get back
into talking about that. But in case you need a
little bit of a headspace before, Yeah, you can check
out my YouTube channel. I do video essays on cultural
stuff and film. And then yeah, over on Nebula, there's
a nice little show Amy's at in dream House, kids

(02:41):
show for adults, adult topics under the guys of a
kid show.

Speaker 3 (02:46):
We don't, however, cover.

Speaker 5 (02:48):
Business practices, so I think we'll cover that here today
in the.

Speaker 3 (02:52):
Second part of this podcast.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
Excellent, maybe just give some advice. Yeah, we'll be talking
a lot about that, and weirdly, I mean, we just
started talking about the strange bedfellows that politics make. But
like one of the good guys in this is the
Catholic Church, or at least a Catholic priest, which doesn't
happen often on this show, but it does happen more
when we're talking about Latin America, you know. So we've

(03:15):
got some liberation theology guys, So our Catholic listeners, this
is what you get to feel good about. Congratulations, you
get one, you get one, You get one. Every now
and then we have a good priest who comes in
usually when we bring up the Catholic Church on the
podcast about bad People. It's a dark story, but not today,
Not today, folks. When the military hunters started putting out

(03:45):
feelers to multinational corporations seeing who might be interested in
investing in the Brazilian economy, VW executives weren't just going
along with the flow. They were eager supporters of the
military dictatorship. After the former left leaning president was forced out,
directors at Volkswagen were quoted as describing what had happened
as the restoration of a rational political order. Oh thank god,

(04:07):
we got rid of those democratically elected guys. You know,
some dudes with guns coming in as Germans. We feel
really confident that this is going to end.

Speaker 5 (04:15):
Well, yes, I feel safe now, yeah, amongst my people.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah. I mean again, these are guys. We're talking the
sixties and seventies here. So anybody who's over like forty
or fifty, you know what their background was, right, Like?

Speaker 3 (04:30):
Wow do that? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (04:32):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (04:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
A lot of the people who are running this company
not great backstories, you know. Now. The irrational thing when
they talk about the dictatorship restoring a rational political order,
what they're saying is irrational is the idea that the
government of a country that Volkswagen might have profit interest
in would have any other priorities beyond maximizing the amount

(04:55):
of money that in multinational corporations could take out of
the country right. A write up by the Organization for
World Peace summarizes the reaction of members of the VW
board to these changes. Volkswagen board member Friedrich Wilhelm Schultzwank
rejoiced when secret police arrested trade union leaders on factory premises.
In so doing, he endorsed a regime that perceived its

(05:17):
own citizens as mindless autonatons, that committed widespread torture, that
ran hidden concentration camps to repress uncooperative indigenous tribes, and
precipitated the environmental destruction of the Amazon. Oo. Guy, Friedrich
Philhelm schultzwank, huzzah, the secret police have arrested union organizers.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
Woo.

Speaker 2 (05:37):
Yeah, the Nazis didn't go away. They just moved around
a little bit. They shuffled, you know.

Speaker 1 (05:42):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (05:43):
There's a good chumbawmba song about that. Now. As I
noted earlier, Volkswagen was participating in a wider system embraced
by the military junta and a lot of foreign corporations
that's had a profit interest in Brazil, which is a
large country. There's always been a lot of money in
selling to and utilizing Brazil's natural resources. That OWP write

(06:05):
up lists other corporations like Mitsubishi, Nesley, Goodyear, Swift, Bomber, Indus,
and Anderson Clayton Is all investing in Brazil during this
period at the express request of the military dictatorship. The
whole reason these companies wanted to work in Brazil is
because the junta would let you tear apart the Amazon,

(06:25):
which climate science is generally considered to be the lungs
of the world for quick profit, and because labor unions
and the rights of workers were among the first things
cracked down on by the dictatorship. There was no oversight
for how your workers were treated, So you could really
turn a profit doing this, right, as long as you
didn't care about how certain people were treated, right Arido. Yeah,

(06:47):
I mean obviously nothing like this has ever happened before
or since. This is the only time this happened, just
in Brazil, just these companies.

Speaker 3 (06:54):
Yeah, uh huh.

Speaker 2 (06:56):
So from nineteen seventy four to nineteen eighty six, Vocal
Swagon operated their para state farm through a local subsidiary
and tried to generate a profit from ranching and logging.
It's unclear to me how many workers were victimized during
the span of time. Court filings have since indicated at
least three hundred people were hired through what were known
as irregular contracts some sources I found with the real

(07:18):
number it close to one thousand people. One of the
only ways to escape was through contracting malaria or some
other serious illness, and this was not always a way
to escape, but sometimes you could get out because they
just didn't want to deal with you. There was no
real medical care for workers beyond the most basic treatment
of wounds, and sometimes you couldn't even count on that.

(07:39):
Depending on when and where it happened, it was uncommon
in some cases for workers to have any kind of
medical treatment for even those basic injuries. People on the
edge of death might be allowed to leave, but it
was at least as common for them to be worked
to death and disposed of. A twenty twenty four article
for The Intercept describes what was found at one graveyard
for enslaved laborers. Some of the bones were full of strings,

(08:00):
as if the person had been tied up before they died,
says Juselda Pereira, national director of the MST Landless Workers
Movements Production Sector. The crimes, however, were never properly investigated.
It was a very common logic to put the person
to work and then when she made some charge, they
sent her away and eliminated her on the way, explain
The sister of one such worker Isabelle Rodriguez, a pedagogue

(08:21):
and farmer who has been working at the MST for
thirty five years. And this is something you'll hear a lot,
specifically with Volkswagens workers. That a lot of these people,
they're not just worked to death and buried. Some of
them were strung up. This is a punishment when like
workers would refuse to work, when they would try to escape,
if they would get caught, if they would resist in

(08:42):
any way the gattos, they would be strung up and
sometimes hung until dead, you know, as a way to
make sure everyone else kept working.

Speaker 5 (08:50):
Right right, right, right, Yeah, there's a many parallels to
you know, a lot of the fishing industry. They also,
you know, trap people out on a boat contenuous contract
they can't.

Speaker 2 (09:02):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, these are the kind of things there's
no oversight, any sort of like unionizing, any sort of
like workers' rights has been utterly cracked down on by
the regime, Which is part of what's appealing to volkswag
Right is that they can just have these contractors do
whatever as far as they're concerned. There's no one policing
how they treat these people. As that previous quote said,

(09:25):
they're not looking at these workers as human beings. These
are automatons. They're robots. You plug them in, you work
them until they break, and then you throw them away,
and if one of them isn't working right, you string
them up as an example to the others, you.

Speaker 3 (09:36):
Know, and there's still no cars.

Speaker 2 (09:40):
They're not making cars. They're clearing they're clear cutting forests
for cows, right right right, even in your wheelhouse, v W,
what the fuck?

Speaker 3 (09:52):
I just need that to sink it.

Speaker 2 (09:53):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This would be like if cool
Zone Media started a cattle farming. It's like, this is
so far outside of our wheelhouse, Like why are you
even for the first like even outside of the ethical stuff,
why are you in this business? Yeah? The answer is
they thought they'd make a buck. They didn't because labor
rights and organizing had been so comprehensively shattered by the

(10:17):
military junta. The first outside entity to look into the
horrifying situation at Volkswagen's farm was a Catholic priest named
Riccardo Rizinde. As a new priest and a young man,
he was stationed at a diocese in the Para state,
relatively close to the Volkswagen ranch. He was made the
regional coordinator for the Bishop's Conference Land Pastoral Commission, or CPT,

(10:40):
which was formed in nineteen seventy five to support peasants
and rural workers. Now, it would be fair to say that,
like the CPT, it's good attempt, but it's kind of
like a band aid on an arterial wound, right, But
this is also the only kind of oversight for poor
workers that exists during the military Today, tatorship unionizing has

(11:01):
effectively been like, I mean, people are being put in
secret concentration camps for like being labor organizers, right, But
you can't do that to the Catholic Church. I mean
you can't. Obviously, some priests and nuns throughout Latin America
who are part of the same liberation theology which we'll
talk about things rezinde are killed, are assassinated, But you

(11:22):
can't whole scale, if you're the military, Huntu, you can't
just go after the Catholic Church whole hog, right, Like
that is a bridge too far because everyone's Catholic basically, right, Like,
if you do that, you are going to get in.
It's the same problem the Nazis had right where they
didn't like the Catholic Church. Himmler especially saw it as
an enemy, but they had to co opt and work

(11:43):
with it, because you can't just ban Catholicism in Germany
like that is going to get you in trouble like that,
even the Nazis didn't feel like they had enough of
a handle on things to do that.

Speaker 3 (11:53):
Yeah, it's the six you know, right, you're right.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
Right, you have to care somewhat about how much you're
pissing these people off because these are kind of these
are the people who are real people in your state, right,
And so we can argue that like this land Pastoral Commission,
it's not like enough, there should have been much more here.
But Resenda and his diet is he's get a lot
of credit because they are They are the only people

(12:17):
who can really do something right because they have some
ability to operate under the junta without getting just completely annihilated.
And would be fair to say, again, while this is
not on its own a sufficient thing in order to
replace what's been lost in the crackdown on workers' rights,
Father Azende is a pretty admirable person in all of this,

(12:39):
I think, and he is unusually dedicated to the spirit
of his work. As I noted earlier, Resende was a
follower of what's known as liberation theology. This was at
the time a new creed that was particularly common in
the Latin American segments of the Catholic Church, and was
dedicated to a broad support for emancipation from every kind

(12:59):
of depression. Right, and Resinde personally considered the fight against
forced labor a sacred calling. Right, this was a religious
duty to him, which is good. Yeah, And he made
it known publicly that his office would investigate all serious
allegations that people were being forced to work. Resinda gets
moved into this program in nineteen seventy five, and he

(13:21):
first starts hearing allegations that Volkswagen has a plantation in
the Amazon and people are being enslaved there in nineteen
seventy seven. Two years later, very first claims come from
a union organizer named in tall Ribero, who said that
he had been hired by He was a former union organizer.
But he goes to Resinde and says that, you know,
I was hired by these Gatto's and they forced to

(13:44):
pay me for my work. And he tells Resinde that like, yeah,
there's a farm out there, it's guarded by people he
described as professional pistoliros. These are just you know, gunmen, right,
and that they were abusing workers, that there were hundreds
of people who weren't being allowed to leave, were being
held at gunpoint. So here's about this in seventy seven.
But all he's got is this one guy's claim. He
doesn't have hard evidence, he doesn't have like anything he

(14:07):
can really go to the state with. And this is
something where if you kind of go off half cocked
on this when you've just got this one and this
is a union organizer, so it's not someone that like
the government's going to take super seriously if you just
go off immediately right exactly, yeah.

Speaker 3 (14:20):
Exactly, yeah, they'll kill him, they'll all.

Speaker 2 (14:22):
Yeah, right, or they'll they'll clean up their act enough
that nothing else will get out right, So he resin Dae.
He does the hard thing, which is he keeps digging, right,
he keeps trying to collect accounts. He doesn't give up
on this, but he doesn't immediately pull the trigger on
it too, because he's trying to see, like, can I
get enough that I can make an unimpeachable case. He

(14:42):
gets a major shot in the arm to his efforts
in nineteen eighty one when he meets his first escapee
from the ranch, Edevon Allen Carr, who told him quote,
a man tried to flee and was caught by Chico,
who's one of these gattos. Chico beat him with a beam.
So this is his first he's talked to this one
guy who had formerly worked there. Then he talks to
another guy who was like outright enslaved and had some

(15:05):
direct stories about like being tortured by these guards. So
he's kind of slowly starting to build this, like this
basis of accounts on what had happened. Albon Carr would
go on to provide extensive testimony both to the state
and to journalists with several publications including The Washington Post.
He accused Chico and his men of beating and disappearing laborers.

(15:26):
In one instance, he claims to have seen Chico another
Gattos burned down a parcel of forest filled with workers
who he believes were burnt to death. These men were
still working at the time, and they may have just
been murdered to save the Gattos the risk of freeing
them right that they were going to be like moving on,
And it kind of sounds like it was a situation
where they were like, we don't have anything to do

(15:48):
with these folks, but if we let them go, they'll
spread more stories. What if we just light them on
fire and burn down a chunk of the Amazon.

Speaker 3 (15:55):
That one, that one, let's do that.

Speaker 2 (15:56):
One, right, right, a perfect ad for Volkswagen right here. Yeah,
Volkswagen the hottest cars. And that's that's bleak. You know what,
forget I said that, here's some ads. Wow, we're back.

(16:19):
So Resinde is increasingly building up his kind of account
of what's been happening in this slave plantation, and as
he talks to more and more people, his investigation reveals
these kind of patchy and incomplete stories that nonetheless paint
a pretty bitter picture. Workers were being kept dozens of
miles away from the main Volkswagen compound. They bedded under

(16:41):
clear plastic sheets, and they drank unfiltered water. He wrote
in nineteen eighty one of one woman who managed to flee, quote,
they fled through the forest because if they'd taken the road,
the gattos would have killed them. They walked one hundred
and fifty five kilometers. Now by eighty one, he's got
been doing this for three or four years. He wants
to take action to stop this, but the political situation

(17:02):
at the time makes that impossible, and Resinda's only able
to get away with anything at all because he's a
representative of the church. And even so he starts being
surveilled by the dictatorship. He's labeled a communist sympathizer and
a subversive, and the first witnesses he meets this isn't
enough for him to really go on yet, even four
years in so it's not until early nineteen eighty three

(17:24):
that this really gets blown open for him. He gets
approached by a group of young men who'd been hired
to work clearing land owned by Volkswagen. These kids had
all been part of a local soccer league in their hometown.
And one day a friend of theirs comes in. He's like, hey, guys, hey, buddies,
this guy's been out for a while. He's like, I'm
looking for men to do some contract work down south.

(17:46):
It pays great, it's a good job. Rezinde would write, quote,
among the five workers who fled the farm, three were
only seventeen. They were lured to work there not only
because of a promised payment, but also because they were
told that they would be to play soccer there. Oh yeah, soccer.
Who basically just be playing soccer the whole time? You know,

(18:08):
Oh my god, who wouldn't want to get paid to
play soccer?

Speaker 3 (18:12):
This is so theistic.

Speaker 2 (18:15):
I will say, on the main Volkswagen ranch, there was
a soccer field. But laborers like this, the people who
are being enslaved to clear land, they're not allowed on
that compound facility, right.

Speaker 3 (18:27):
Hey, they're not even near it, necessarily.

Speaker 2 (18:30):
No miles away, it says. We'll talk about there are
some really nice facilities for regular employees who are like
managing this cattle farm. It's a pretty good job for
those people. It's the folks doing this backbreaking labor in
the jungle that are being treated this way, and so
they don't have access to the soccer field. Now, within
the main body of the camp, which is a mix

(18:52):
of there's some skilled local workers and there's a lot
of foreign employees. Right, there's Germans, there's Swiss. You know,
there's a lot of people who have been brought in
their skills. And these men and their families enjoyed a
high quality of life. There were gardens, there were paved roads,
there were proper brick houses. There was a school for
children of workers. There was a club, a restaurant, and
a bar as well as a pool. Now, the kids

(19:13):
who had escaped, these seventeen year olds who flee home
to fucking make some money and play soccer. Yeah, they
tell father Azende that they didn't have access to any
of that stuff. They had been sold to a gatto
named Chico. This is our second time hearing about Chico. Right,
this is the guy who burnt down a forest with
people in it. He gets around, right, Yeah, Chico's a

(19:34):
busy man, and Chico made them work in a forest
labor camp under a coterie of armed men. One of
the kids died of malnutrition and malaria. Another was shot
in the leg trying to escape. A woman who worked
with them was raped when her husband escaped without her.

Speaker 4 (19:50):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (19:51):
On one occasion, one of the boys found a dead
man in the forest who had been strung up and
beaten to death. Yeah, and these are seventeen year olds. Now,
these kids do escape eventually, right, they weren't allowed to.
This is something that they they kind of managed to
make it out on their own because they they're in debt, right,
the Gatto says that they owe money, and the way

(20:13):
they're able to finally get out is they convince him
that they've been conscripted by the military. So, in other words,
they only got out of forced labor by convincing their
bosses that the state wanted to force them to work
for the military. Guy would get right, right, right, and
you'll get in trouble if you keep us right, we're expected,
you know. Like, that's how fucked up the situation is

(20:33):
for these kids.

Speaker 4 (20:34):
That is so grave of them to do. They they go,
but they trying to go above him and it works.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
Wow. Yeah, they're smart kids. So these kids get out
and there they are. This is kind of what blows
the case open for father Rezende. Right, he's got these
five kids who have like this just really hideously grave accounts,
and they're willing to like talk under their own names
about what's happened. They they're naming specific people, like this
is kind of what he'd been waiting for the whole time. Yeah,

(21:04):
and the boys told Father Zende that they expected at
least six hundred laborers were still stuck clearing land and
working as slaves. The priest, horrified, tried to schedule a
meeting with Yatar Barbelow, who was the state governor of
the Para state, and Rezende is refused initially, but this
does not dissuade him from pursuing the truth. So the

(21:25):
father flies to Brasilia with one of the escaped kids,
and he goes to the media and he gives a
press conference in a place that the hunter couldn't ignore,
the National Bishop's Conference of Brazil. The next day, newspapers
featured the headline Priests says, there are slaves on Volkswagen farm. Right,
So he takes this kid out in front and is like,

(21:47):
they can't crack down on a bishop's conference and they'll
have to pay attention to fight and said this is
a brave move. He's putting himself in danger, and this
kid is putting himself in danger to do this. But
it works. Part of why it works is that the
German media picks up the story. You know, the resilient
media is very much under control of the regime. But
Volkswagen's a German company, and Germany has a free press,

(22:09):
and the German free press are like, hey, VW, this
sounds pretty bad.

Speaker 3 (22:13):
This sounds familiar and bad.

Speaker 2 (22:17):
As Germans, we're kind of we're kind of sensitive about
slave labor allegations. What's going on down there? Now. VW
denies everything, of course, but they couldn't entirely ignore what
had come out, so they decided to authorize a fact
finding mission to quote shed light on the truth. This

(22:39):
is like the standard playbook of like, oh well, this
is definitely not true, but just to make sure you
know everybody knows how not true it is, we're gonna
we'll send a fact finding mission.

Speaker 3 (22:49):
Get the We'll send them.

Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yeah, right, we got it. Yeah, come over here, father,
we'll take care of this. You know, we'll get you
up with some local politicians. We'll take you to the
our rant and you can see how nice it really
is right. So Volkswagen invites a bunch of their critics
to visit the ranch and see what they claimed was
the reality. One of the men selected for this delegation

(23:11):
was sal Paulo state lawmaker Expedito Batista. Now, he had
actually worked in a Volkswagen factory previously and was likely
invited by the company executives because they were like, well,
this guy's a former employee, he'll be sympathetic to us, right.
This proved to be a miscalculation, Batista told OSV News,
a local publication quote. They just wanted to show me

(23:32):
the modern buildings they had recently built there. But I
asked for a truck that could take me to a
nearby city where I'd meet with father Razinde and the
local labor union leader. The vehicle had to take a
road that was not part of the visit planned by Volkswagen.
That's when Batista saw a farm truck carrying some people
and asked for it to be stopped. And this is Batista.
A worker had his arms tied and was being taken

(23:53):
by a labor contractor known as Abelau. I ordered them
to immediately release the man. Abilau argued that the worker
was trying to escape the farm, but that he was
in debt with it, so they had to get him back.
So they say, it what we got. We can't let
him just have luck for us for free, you know,
like he's got to pay to work for us, obviously,

(24:16):
But this guy's obviously been beaten and is clearly being
taken against his will to work. Like they've just stumbled
this delegation. Volkswagen brings them in to impress them with
how nice the main facility is, and this guy drives
and grabs the priest, and on their way back they
just stumble upon proof of forced labor.

Speaker 3 (24:37):
Wild I said take the other road, I said, go.

Speaker 2 (24:40):
The other We should have had him take the bus.
God damn it. Yeah, yeah, this is like, this is
like a Jurassic Park problem. Instead of the raptors getting loose,
it's this, This gotta is out of pocket and you know,
forcibly hauling a man back in chains. It's a lot
like your Asciic Park, it is.

Speaker 3 (25:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:01):
Yeah, yeah, So now you've got not just these eyewitness accounts,
but now credible members of like this fact finding mission.

Speaker 3 (25:11):
Yeah, that they've brought that they've brought here.

Speaker 2 (25:14):
To a member of the clergy and elected leaders have
seen this going on, right, this is like the worst
case scenario for VW because you have pretty hard evidence now.

Speaker 3 (25:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:26):
So the investigatory team, which now has the father with them,
heads back to the ranch and they do the original
meeting that they've been scheduled to have. They meet with
Volkswagen's corporate pr manager for Brazil, a guy named Paulo
de Castro, and they meet with the ranch's director, Friedrich Bruger,
who was a Swiss national. From an article in the
Washington Post quote, he touted its commitment to social service,

(25:48):
according to an account by a reporter who accompanied the delegation,
saying the farms three hundred and twenty eight direct employees
and their families had it great discounted food, free medical care,
quality schooling. The delegation said was not permitted to visit
the deforestation camps one day, though one of its laborers
managed to find them. He went straight to the priest
and touched his arm. The man's hand was hot with fever.

(26:10):
You have to save me, the priest recorded him, saying,
save you from what I've worked here for nine months
and I can't leave the man said, I have malaria
and I am sick, Padre, I want to leave. So
that's again pretty bad. This is how like they can't
even keep a little on this thing, the least bit.
As soon as these guys show up, they just start
stumbling into evidence of crimes against humanity.

Speaker 3 (26:32):
Honestly, pretty incredible, like very Yeah. They made their own
pot and kettle and invited everyone to tea time two
parts ache.

Speaker 2 (26:41):
Yeah, wow, No, they won't notice any They will show
him how nice our basketball court is. Yeah, play at
this club. Look at how good the food is here.
They're not going to notice the sick people begging them
to die. So the father goes to Bruger, who's this
Swiss dude running the ranch, and he says, he tells
him there's a problem. Your hiding something, And Bruger says,

(27:02):
this isn't my problem, and he tells them it's the
Gatto's problem.

Speaker 1 (27:05):
Right.

Speaker 2 (27:05):
I got nothing to do with this, Uh huh. I'm
only responsible for these workers who are being treated well.
Because these guys are actual employees of the Volkswagen subsidiary.
I can't how could I possibly expect to know what's
happening ten miles away? With the guys that I'm paying
to make other guys work for them.

Speaker 3 (27:21):
I want to hit into the detail, you know, when
you get cor in your room like that. Obviously, but yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:26):
Right, obviously yeah, yeah, how much can you expect me
to do? You know, I'm sitting here, I'm in the
jungle and pretending not to hear the screams. Nothing else
is my job, obviously, right.

Speaker 5 (27:36):
I also love the Catholic priests being uh I.

Speaker 3 (27:40):
Know a liar. Uh, I know, I know many liars,
and I can see that in you.

Speaker 2 (27:45):
Yeah, Like I'm a Catholic priest, like I have met
I have met better liars than you. Like It's kind
of my job.

Speaker 5 (27:54):
Yes, yes, yeah, you're hiding something and I want to know.

Speaker 3 (27:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:59):
So, on their way out of the area, the delegation
actually runs into one of the gattos, this guy we
talked about him a little bit earlier to Abilau, who
was driving back into camp and his Chevy truck quote
wearing a cross necklace and a cowboy hat, which really
must have pissed off the father, Like you're wearing a
fucking cross, Well you're do Come on, man in a

(28:20):
Chevy did take it off to do the slavery stuff,
at least.

Speaker 3 (28:25):
It feels like it's on purpose.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
At this point, he's the right, right, like, yeah, I
feel kind of like you're just insulting the faith here.
So they run into this guy Abilao, who's driving back
to camp. He's got his cross as cowboy hat on
and Rezende questions him about the mistreatment of the workers,
and the Gatto's like, I don't use violence. I just
use energy to keep my workers in line, right, Just energy,

(28:48):
you know, kinetic.

Speaker 3 (28:50):
Energy, energy like jazz hem.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
It's not hitting, it's kinetic energy. Yeah, oh yeah, he insisted,
quote they're nasty goats and vagaball that take my money
then disappear into the forest. And he bragged that just
sixteen out of four hundred and eight workers on the
ranch had fled and gotten away that year. One unsuccessful
fugitive was in the back of his truck when the
investigators found it. Abilau insisted the man had been eating

(29:15):
more than he could afford and thus couldn't be freed again.
Now he's eating too much. We can't just let this
guy go, right, We can't.

Speaker 3 (29:23):
Let this man be eating and sending him no.

Speaker 2 (29:26):
Right, this is a lot that they found and the
delegation they put together enough info on this trip that
it forces the state police to open an investigation. So
police officers come in and they talk with laborers, they
talk with the Gattos, with Volkswagen contractors, and they make
a report which they send to the State Security Chief.

(29:47):
And the state Security chief writes a letter to the
governor in late nineteen eighty three which concluded that the
Gattos quote treat their contracted workers like slaves.

Speaker 3 (29:56):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (29:57):
Yeah, so that's good, that's pretty directly. Security chief is
a guy named Arnaldo Filo who concluded that VW wasn't
directly guilty of any criminal action, but that it had
responsibility for what had happened by omission. And he says, quote,
it's impossible that everything investigated inside the limits of its

(30:18):
property occurred without any knowledge or action on its part.
And I might say, so, why is any responsible? Why
doesn't he have any responsibility here? Right? Like that kind
of seems like you're responsible if you like knew what
was happening and you had the resources to have stopped
it and you chose not to. Yes, but yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:40):
It's a little more active than yeah, just not you know,
not disclosing. Uh huh.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
It seems like pretty damning to me, But you know,
I'm not an expert on Brazilian law, so I suspect
this is just partly one of those things where it's
like it's probably a mix of corruption and also well
if I, if I go too far, they might sue me.
And he's kind of a little bit of a coward.
I don't know. That's kind of my interpretation of it,
as he doesn't want to like go too far, you know,

(31:08):
and maybe get out of pocket here. But yeah, that's
partly me kind of drawing that out. Yeah, yeah, I
think that's like a fair conclusion here. So several weeks
after this all happens, the father gathers with a group
of bishops in the state capitol along with the governor

(31:28):
who we talked about earlier, barbelow and Barbelo makes a
public statement during this gathering that his office is now
looking into the case, which would be referred once he
makes a conclusion, to the federal prosecutor's office. So he's like, hey,
I'm taking this seriously. Once my people come to a conclusion,
we will send this up the ladder so it can
be prosecuted. You know, at the highest possible level. And

(31:50):
this was a lie. I think it was just a
delaying tactic.

Speaker 3 (31:53):
Okay, you said so, huh, like you really meant it?

Speaker 2 (31:58):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, they don't get shit. A full
year later, the ranch is still operating and no action
has been taken against BW or her subsidiaries. There's no
evidence that he had his office refer anything to the
federal prosecutor's office. I think he just did this to
buy time.

Speaker 3 (32:15):
Yeah, already forgot about.

Speaker 2 (32:17):
It, or we forgot about it. He's a busy man,
you know, right, right, right, Look, you can't keep track
of all of the slavery happening in your state, right
like that just obviously an unreasonable ask.

Speaker 3 (32:30):
There's so many trees to cut down. That's just one,
right part of it, all that I gotta cut.

Speaker 2 (32:36):
Yeah, people can hide in forests, people can hide burning
people to death in the forest. You know, it's just
too much work for one man and all of his employees.
So in August of nineteen eighty four, there's another delegation
sent to the ranch. A group of state labor officials
visit and they conclude that nothing meaningful has changed, that
there's been no improvement in conditions, that workers are still

(32:57):
basically being treated as slaves by the Gattos, and they
further conclude that Volkswagen's ranch was quote a snapshot of
all the other farms in the region where humble and
illiterate laborers were easy prey for unscrupulous recruiters eyeing profits,
often with the complacency of the farm's owners. Still, nothing
gets done, no further steps are taken. By this point,

(33:19):
the governor has moved on from being the governor to
the Senate, which is probably why he never referred the
case to the state at all. He was delaying because
he was like, I'm not going to have this job.
I don't need this heat. I'm just going to like
wait until I can go do something else.

Speaker 3 (33:33):
The shuffle, the Nazi shuffle. He's doing that into a
new yeah, the Nazi shuffle. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:38):
Years later he's asked like, hey, why didn't you do
anything about this, And he's like, I don't remember this
at all. You're saying I said something I promised to
refer people to prosecute something. That doesn't sound like maybe
he did forget he forgot oh my job. No, yeah,
Now there must have been some other governor. So two
months after this, nineteen eighty four, this is the second

(34:00):
allegation to visit the ranch. State police finally arrest one
of the Gatto's Abalau, after investigations on two separate farms
unrelated to the Volkswagen farm turned up another one hundred
and seven enslaved workers working for this guy. The report
named that other Gatto, Chico, who'd provided workers for Volkswagen's
farm too, but they couldn't find him to prosecute, right,

(34:20):
So these guys, one of them is now being prosecuted,
the other they just can't find interest in. The case
dies down after this. Chico is investigated again two years later,
in July of nineteen eighty six, under suspicion of trafficking
workers in a nearby region, but again nothing comes of
the investigation. By nineteen eighty six, Volkswagen is kind of
looking at their balance sheet and they're like, this isn't

(34:42):
making us any money, right, and it never really does.
This is not a profitable enterprise. I kind of think
the point was never heard to be super profitable. They
would have liked that. I think the point is Volkswagen's
in business in Brazil and the military junta once companies
doing stuff like this. So I think there's a large

(35:03):
portion of where their interest in this is less the
money it makes directly and more the relationship it helps
them build with the dictatorship. That's kind of my interpretation here.

Speaker 5 (35:12):
Right, right, Yeah, it's it's you know, being paid in
exposure many people's lives and the livelihoods.

Speaker 2 (35:19):
Right, that's exactly it. Yeah, speaking of paid and exposure,
we're not paid an exposure. We're paid by our advertisers.
And let's let's hear from them now and we're back.
So in nineteen eighty six, Volkswagen closes down their operation,

(35:42):
they sell off their assets. They are cutting bait in
eighty six. Yeah, eighty six, Oh, because it's not mean
the workers who'd been enslaved there get freed, right, because
these guys are property of the gattos who still considered
these men indebted to them. So the ranch workforce is sold, right,
and this is very much a chattel slavery moment where
to try to get as much money as they can
out of this, these ghetto's are are splitting up their

(36:04):
labor force, in some cases splitting up family members in
order to auction workers off to the highest ba orienting.
They're splitting up families in the slave auction to get
rid of these Volkswagen fucking laborers.

Speaker 3 (36:22):
For no profit.

Speaker 2 (36:23):
Yeah yeah, I mean Volkswagen doesn't make the gattos are
making bank. Don't get me wrong here.

Speaker 3 (36:28):
Well, at least somebody, yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:29):
Fine, yeah, yeah, at least one worker. Raoul is separated
from his brothers. He later told The Washington Post, I
can still see my brothers being put on the back
of a truck and taken away from me. For the
Posts reporting quote. Raoul said he spent the next four
months captive until a farmer helped him escape. He found
his way back home to his brothers, who had also
managed to flee, but Raoul discovered that his younger brother

(36:51):
was not the same. Over the years, his brother receded
further into his trauma. Today he no longer speaks. He
only nods and sways. Oh my god, that's great, good,
good stuff, all worth it for beef killing the rainforest.

Speaker 3 (37:07):
Did they even get the cows part of all this
or did they.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
Just they've got cows. It's just not very profitable compared
to how much it costs. The real reason they're doing
this is because it makes a government more inclined to
give VW other things they want. I don't think Volkswagen's
primary interest is directly profiting from this right. Right. So,
for decades after the ranch closed his doors, the father
continued to collect accounts of former enslaved laborers. He eventually

(37:35):
documents sixty nine alleged victims, whose stories range from nineteen
seventy seven to nineteen eighty seven. Here are some relevant
examples from the document he puts together. Quote, we worked
Monday to Monday, often without eating. One man said they
promised to kill us. Another laborer, Jose to Sylvia twenty
nine of Annapolis, says they stopped on a laborer, broke

(37:58):
his teeth, brought him to the hospital, and put him
back to work in the jungle.

Speaker 3 (38:01):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (38:02):
Yeah. Three men made an account in nineteen eighty nine
after escaping and told Rezende, quote, they tied up a
man and beat him in the forest, leaving him naked there.
Another survivor, ed Evon Dias Alan Carr, told the priest,
they have a cave where they kill people and throw
the bodies in.

Speaker 3 (38:21):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
Cool stuff. Yeah, Volkswagen cave. Wow, driving wiles Volkswagen. We
got a cave for corpses. Yeah, we got a game.
Who look here at Volkswagen. We know that people are
concerned about our history and the slave laborers that were
mass murdered in concentration camps in Europe, and we promise

(38:45):
that'll never happen again. We have a cave for the corpses. Now,
you know, a wine cave.

Speaker 3 (38:51):
It's the same thing.

Speaker 2 (38:52):
But for boy, we're learning, we're growing. Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly,
so much better than a death camp. I mean, my god,
a death cave. Come on, it's a roof.

Speaker 3 (39:03):
It's got a roof.

Speaker 2 (39:04):
It's got a roof. It is a roof. So the
father documented everything he could. But again, even after this
branch closes, he has very little hope that any punitive
action would ever be taken, and it almost doesn't. It's
not until late twenty nineteen that a state prosecutor in
Brazil reopened an investigation on the Federal Slave Labor Division

(39:26):
into what had happened at Volkswagen's ranch, and he engages Resende,
who had to spend weeks traveling around rural communities finding
witnesses who would be able to come back on the
record and talk again about what they'd endure it right,
because they need to have people who are willing to
like show up in court and talk about a lot
of these people died. At this point. This is like
a this is a difficult effort for a man who's

(39:47):
not young. You know, this priest is not a young
man anymore, and he's got to really go around and
find these people, pull them out of you know, obscurity,
so that they can attempt to force some sort of accountability.
And they are somewhat successful here. The case does not
move rapidly. Again, I said, it starts in twenty nineteen,
and in twenty twenty two they finally wind up in

(40:09):
court and a lot of these survivors have a chance
to testify. Now Volkswagen had been in the process. They
had just been negotiating and admitted wrongdoing and like working
with the military junta, like this is a thing that
had happened not long before that, but they're not willing
to admit that they had anything to do with the

(40:29):
slave labor plantation or anything to do with like the
work of these gattos. They gave up after months of
negotiation with the Labor Ministry and refused to pay thirty
million dollars in reparations demanded by the government for their
past collaborations. In twenty twenty, the company had signed a
conduct adjustment agreement with the Public Prosecutor's Office, acknowledging that

(40:50):
it had supported the regime in several human rights violations,
but admitting to the enslavement of laborers on their isolated
ranch was a bridge too far. The case finally comes
to trial in twenty twenty five. Right, like they're starting,
there's some testimony and whatnot, but like it doesn't shake
out until this year. This is all reaching its conclusion
very recently. This is yeah.

Speaker 5 (41:12):
The evils are usually described and they are evils, but
and often you know, there are echoes.

Speaker 3 (41:18):
We're feeling now this is this is now.

Speaker 2 (41:21):
Yeah, this is right now, that this is coming to
some kind of conclusion.

Speaker 3 (41:25):
This is right now.

Speaker 2 (41:27):
Quote from the post Wow. The first person to testify
was Volkswagen's representative, Jose Tiro. He said that the company
didn't monitor human rights it's rigidly in those days, but
that it had investigated the allegations at the time and
didn't identify any irregularity. Then one by one, the laborers
came to the stand. We were sold, said Raoul Battista Desuza.

(41:47):
We slept under a black plastic sheet, said Pedro Vasconcelos.
They were all armed. We had to work, said Jose
Vianna Nunez. Finally, Rizende, who'd come from across the country,
rose to testify. If the priest hadn't slept my u
the night before and had woken angry, how could they
have permitted this crime he'd vented that morning and continued
to have permitted it. The court ultimately ruled against Volkswagen,

(42:10):
ordering them to pay one hundred and sixty five million
brol for collective moral damages. Volkswagen still denies any wrongdoing
and last I said, are appealing the case. And for
an example of how hideously company officials have refused to
acknowledge any wrongdoing, there's a very good article by DW

(42:30):
Deutsche Well, which is like a German publication by Estrid
di olivera Brazilian prosecutor summoned VW over slavery allegations. This
is from twenty twenty two. Quote the Swiss agronomist and
former manager of the cattle farm in Santana di Arraguya.
Friedrich Bruger, this is the guy we talked about earlier.
This is like the dude that met with Resindae when
the delegation show up. Describes the allegations that VW engaged

(42:53):
in modern slavery as complete nonsense, as if there were
nothing more important today than improving the past. He'd hold
a reporter. Oh yeah, like it's it's it's pretty hideous,
he says. The responsibility of a company in somewhere when
they are over a thousand men in one room. Things
aren't always gentle. That's obvious, especially in the middle of

(43:16):
a jungle h issuees and stuff that's happening in a room.
For one thing, you were clear.

Speaker 3 (43:21):
In the true Yeah, it wasn't in the middle of
the jump.

Speaker 2 (43:23):
It was a yeah. It was the jungle man like yeah,
like it's it's so fucked up, Like this fucking guy
Brugger needs to I mean he needs to be locked
up in a fucking cage somewhere. These are the kind
of things that people really need to pay for more often,
like the the fact that that that two thousand and

(43:45):
one law in Brazil where they're like we can take
all of your assets. If we find you holding slaves
like that's a good start. But they need to go
like especially Germany needs to go further for guys like this.
There's another infuriating quote from this motherfucker from a Washington
Post article, uh that I just have to read to you.

(44:09):
The brutality that happened, of course, doesn't surprise me at all.
The Brazilian is a bad person, he said. In the
twenty seventeen interview with a German reporter. He blamed the
laborers for their own debts and defended the Gatto's alleged
use of violence. To keep a crowd under control, they
have to show a certain amount of strength.

Speaker 1 (44:24):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (44:24):
I mean he's Swiss, but still not beating the Nazi allegations.
My man, Holy shit, dude. Wow. So that's cool, you know.
And that's more or less where we are. The court
ruled against Volkswagen. They are appealing. They have not admitted
wrongdoing as of yet. Right in twenty sixteen, as part
of their long reconciliation effort, Volkswagen engaged at the urging

(44:47):
of the Brazilian state. The car company hired a historian
named Christopher Kolper to write a report on the company's
activities during the dictatorship. And this is as I said,
they're not copping to the slavery. They did admit in
twenty twenty to having worked to like punish and put
in concentration camps and whatnot, like labor organized like they
helped the Brazilian state prosecute labor organizers, often viciously, and

(45:10):
they admitted to that. They haven't admitted to this, but
as a part of that other reconciliation effort they bring
in this historian and copper. He writes a good report.
He's not quite willing to say, Yeah, they definitely enslaved people.
He says that in like a more academic kind of
less legally actionable term. Quote, Volkswagens strictly monitor at operations

(45:36):
pasture cleaning, fencing, deforestation, all done under slave conditions. Contractors
were only paid once the work was in order. The
company couldn't not know how laborers were treated. Ignorance is
not credible. It's absolutely impossible, as the ranch was orderly
and efficiently run. Workers were surveilled at all times by
armed security who weren't directly employed by the automaker, but

(45:57):
were following a set of directives established by VW. Managers
later talked their way out of trouble by emphasizing they
were not responsible for the treatment of labors employed by
the subcontractors, even as they bragged the media that full
time workers employed directly by VW lived very well by
local standards. Copper concluded Volkswagen farm managers were certainly aware

(46:17):
of the realities of the rural labor market, the exploitative
practices of the gottos, and the treatment of the itinerant
labor force as second class. These men got no reliable shelter,
no sanitation, no proper medical care. Instead of fixing this,
management kept supporting the Gottos. His ultimate conclusion is that
while Volkswagen never gave the orders to enslaver abuse workers,

(46:37):
it quote took no action to mitigate inhumane conditions and
was absolutely aware of how its contractors were performing their duty.
And yeah, that's the story.

Speaker 3 (46:48):
Wow, So hey, don't buy Volkswagen.

Speaker 2 (46:52):
Maybe don't buy a Volkswagen. I don't know. Man again,
good luck finding it, Like by a used car, I guess,
although like used car, dealers are also sketchy in different ways.

Speaker 5 (47:02):
But right, I mean, there are several ways. You can,
you know, stick out a window here or there.

Speaker 2 (47:07):
I'm not going to tell you the right way to
live ethically under capitalism, but bad, wow, bad Volkswagen bad. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (47:16):
Wow, this is so like, so more recent than Yeah.
I think my a, my spine was prepared.

Speaker 2 (47:23):
For it's shocking, right, yeah, same, uh huh, Yeah, I
had this. This is a friend of mine and I'm
not going to name because they're a friend. And I
don't name friends on the podcast because that's a bad idea.
And you have none, yeah and I have none.

Speaker 3 (47:38):
No.

Speaker 2 (47:38):
They just brought this up to be in personally. Did
you know that Volkswagen had a slave plantation in Brazil
in the fucking eighties? I was like, no, I didn't
know that. Wow, that's pretty fucked up. Wow, And now
you know about it, and now I.

Speaker 3 (47:49):
Know about it? So great, and now you all know
about it.

Speaker 2 (47:52):
Now you all know about it.

Speaker 3 (47:53):
What do we do with it that you know? Now
that we know?

Speaker 2 (47:57):
I don't know. Somebody should probably like that. You know
that guy we kept talking about, that Swiss dude, he
should probably get charged with something. Bruger.

Speaker 3 (48:06):
Yeah, that's right, because he's still around.

Speaker 2 (48:08):
Right, he's still around last I checked. I know, maybe
he died recently, but he's run like twenty twenty two,
I think, yeah, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, someone go
yell at him or something at least. Fuck, I don't know.
I don't know how to fix this.

Speaker 3 (48:23):
Yeah, I guess that's not a problem.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
Yeah, Maggie, you want to plug an.

Speaker 3 (48:29):
Oh? Man, Well, yes, this this was lovely.

Speaker 5 (48:33):
Uh, I learned, unfortunately so much about our current state
of the world. And uh yeah, my other show, He's
don a dream House, it's on Nebula because he had
it also deals with topics.

Speaker 3 (48:46):
I would say, probably nothing as as.

Speaker 5 (48:49):
Grandiose as a current uh you know, labor infractions, but
it does do it with misogyny, depression, getting misdiagnosed friend,
break up, you know, less your evils in the grand
scale of things. But yeah, I can hop over there,
check it out, have a beautiful, wonderful time. I have

(49:09):
some wonderful guests, some wonderful guests that I've been on
this podcast. James loftis front of the pod and yeah,
YouTube essays at my name, what about copaganda coming out soon?

Speaker 3 (49:22):
And that's it?

Speaker 2 (49:23):
Man.

Speaker 3 (49:23):
Yeah, I think I would just really eat chocolate.

Speaker 5 (49:26):
Maybe I will eat ethnical chocolate the rest of the
entire day, I think, is what I'm going to be doing.

Speaker 2 (49:32):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I will say, folks, maybe a
void Haribo if you don't know, they've got a pretty
rough human rights. The Gummy Bear company not a great history,
and I could not.

Speaker 3 (49:46):
Tell from your tone earlier. Yeah that was a joke.

Speaker 2 (49:49):
No, that's that's not a joke. They allegedly still rely
on slave labor to harvest carnal ba wax to this day. Yeah.
There's a documentary released in twenty seventeen which showed that
Brazilian and carnalba pickers live in like horrific conditions without
access to like clean food or water and receive I
think it's like maybe twelve dollars a day, and it's

(50:10):
I think it's like a similar sort of like debt
image system in a lot of cases. It's maybe not
quite as bad as it used to be, but it's
it's pretty ugly, so bad.

Speaker 3 (50:20):
Put stummy bears the fuck down if they're in your hands.

Speaker 2 (50:24):
Currently, maybe it's gotten better, but it just don't get
it from Herribo. I don't know. I don't know where
you should get your gummy bears, folks.

Speaker 3 (50:31):
Again, that's not your job.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
Just look into it, read about herribo you know. Yeah,
I don't know. Just lick sugar from a bag from
the bag, that's probably ethical. Yeah, all right, well, thanks Matty,
by everybody.

Speaker 1 (50:51):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
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Speaker 2 (51:09):
Subscribe to our

Speaker 1 (51:10):
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