DO AÇO AO GADO: análise do trabalho escravo na região de fronteira da Amazônia maranhense

Abstract

The Amazon border region, the last great border in Latin America (MARTINS, 2019), underwent intense transformations from the 1980s onwards with the implementation of the Great Carajás Program (GCP). With the aim of controlling the Amazon territory and boosting the region’s economy, the military government financed public and private projects in the Eastern Amazon, expropriating lands from traditional populations and mobilizing thousands of workers from the Northeast to the region, enabling the boarding of foreign investors and from other regions of the country on the border. Incapable of reproducing itself in traditional ways, the capital uses primitive forms of accumulation and appropriates slavery as a way of exploiting the labor available on the border. By rejecting the accusations from the Pastoral Land Commissions (PLC), the Brazilian State after the Military Dictatorship opens credit lines for the implantation of steel industries in Marabá/PA, and Açailândia/MA, without monitoring the socio-environmental impacts of the millionaire investments. As a result, there is an increase in the cases of slavery in two economic activities on the border of Maranhão: steel and cattle. Therefore, the research intends to understand how the advance of capital on the Amazonian frontier of Maranhão took place from these two economic cycles in the region, which is the largest livestock producer in the state and is among the main exporters of crude iron, a component material of steel, in the country. In view of this scenario, we seek to understand how slavery practices are carried out in the two activities. For this, the border region is bibliographically contextualized, which brings together particularities described by Martins (1994; 2019) & Velho (2009) that enable the confluence of large capital with ancient practices, such as slavery. Slavery is analyzed from international and national legislation, with the purpose of pointing out which legal documents influenced the definition of the crime, as well as the data collected by PLC regarding complaints, operations, number of freed victims and economic activities linked to the crime flagrant. At the last moment is interviewed a member of the Carmen Bascarán Center for the Defense of Life and Human Rights (CDLHR/CB), a non-governmental organization (NGO) from Açailândia/MA created in 1995, linked to the fight against slave labor, and a labor inspector, specialized in combating slave labor and assigned to the Regional Labor Management in Imperatriz/MA. Confronting the primary and secondary data obtained, it was possible to understand the new dynamics of the crime of slavery, as well as the consequences of the pandemic and the current political situation in facing the practice.