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

Cool Zoom Media.

Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that 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.

I hope not.

Uh-huh.

They'll both be depressing, but to just pick the second part of it.

That's maniac shit.

That's like 51.50 shit, right?

Like

that's a 72-hour hold for you.

Seek help.

Yeah.

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 caught this yet?

This happened in between.

us

recording part one and part two.

The court art is something else, very special.

He does not look happy.

I had hoped for more than that, but yeah, he's more than four years.

So at least it's not,

I don't know.

What do you want?

This is 2025.

I am like, wow.

He went to trial?

Yeah, yeah.

He's going.

He's staying in prison.

He's not going to 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 was worried it would be worse.

But look at this picture of him.

I'm also really vibing on this

drawing of him.

I love good court art.

Yeah, yes, yeah, it's beautiful.

He does not look happy.

His hair is totally white.

Also, this has to be a choice.

The 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 they made that choice.

You are not, you're not reading into it to my untrained eye.

Absolutely not.

That 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 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 get back into talking about Brazil slave plantations?

Well, Volkswagens in Brazil?

I mean,

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 a dreamhouse, kids' show for adults, adult topics, under the guise of a kids' show.

We don't, however, cover business practices.

So I think we'll cover that here today in the second part of this podcast.

Excellent.

Maybe just give some advice.

Yeah, we'll be talking a lot about that.

And weirdly, I mean, we just started 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 um which doesn't happen often on this show but it does happen more when we're talking about latin america you know that's true so we've 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 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.

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Hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso are going deeper than ever with bold new conversations, fresh guests, and unfiltered takes on queer sex and cruising.

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When the military junta started putting out 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 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 well.

I feel safe now amongst my people.

Yeah.

I mean, again, these are guys, we're talking the 60s and 70s here.

So anybody who's over like 40 or 50, you know what their background was, right?

Like, wow, doing that, man.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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 of money that 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 Schultz-Wenk rejoiced when secret police arrested trade union leaders on factory premises.

In so doing, he endorsed a regime that perceived its own citizens as mindless autonomes that committed widespread torture, that ran hidden concentration camps to repress uncooperative indigenous tribes and precipitated the environmental destruction of the Amazon.

Who guy?

Friedrich Wilhelm Schulz-Wenck.

Huzzah, the secret police have arrested union organizers.

Woohoo!

Yeah, the Nazis didn't go away.

They just moved around a little bit.

They shuffled, you know?

There's a good Chumbawumba song about that.

There is.

Now, as I noted earlier, Volkswagen was participating in a wider system embraced by the military junta and a lot of foreign corporations that 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-up lists other corporations like Mitsubishi, Nestle, Goodyear, Swift, Bamerindus, and Anderson Clayton as all 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, which climate scientists generally consider 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 about how certain people were treated right and we don't

yeah i mean and obviously nothing like this has ever happened before or since this is the only time this happened just in brazil uh just with these companies yeah um uh-huh

so from 1974 to 1986 volkswagen 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 300 people were hired through what were known as irregular contracts.

Some sources I found put the real number at close to a 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.

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 2024 article for The Intercept describes what was found at one graveyard for enslaved laborers.

Some of the bones were full of strings, as if the person had been tied up before they died, says Giselda Pereira, national director of the MST, Landless Workers Movement's production sector.

The crimes, however, were never properly investigated.

It was a very 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, explained the sister of one such worker, Isabel Rodriguez, a pedagogue and farmer who has been working at the MST for 35 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 any way, the gatos, they would be strung up and sometimes hung until dead, you know, as a way to make sure everyone else kept working.

Right, right, right, right.

Yeah.

There's many parallels to, you know, a lot of the fishing industry.

They also, you know, trap people out on a boat and tenuous contracts that they can't fulfill.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a lot of.

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 utterly cracked down on by the regime, which is part of what's appealing to Volkswagen, 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.

Right.

As that previous quote said, 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 know?

Right.

And there's still no cars being

cars.

They're clearing, they're clear-cutting forests for cows.

Right.

Right, right.

This isn't even in your wheelhouse, VW.

What the fuck?

Just need that to sink it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This would be like if CoolZone Media started a cattle farm in Brazil.

It's like, this is so far outside of our wheelhouse.

Like, why, why are you even for the first, like, even outside of the ethical stuff?

Why are you in this business?

Yeah.

And 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 military junta, the first outside entity to look into the horrifying situation at Volkswagen's farm was a Catholic priest named Ricardo Resinde.

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 Bishops' Conference Land Pastoral Commission, or CPT, which was formed in 1975 to support peasants and rural workers.

Now, it would be fair to say that, like, the CPT, it's a 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 dictatorship.

Unionizing has 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 this same liberation theology, which we'll talk about thing as Resinde, are killed, are assassinated.

But you can't whole scale, if you're the military juntu, 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 it.

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 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 yeah it's the civ 6 you know right we're all right 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 resende and his diocese get a lot of credit because they are they are the only people who can really do something

right because they have some ability to operate under the junta without getting just completely annihilated and it 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 on workers' rights father resende is a pretty admirable person in all of this, 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 of oppression.

Right.

And Resende personally considered the fight against forced labor a sacred calling, right?

This was a religious duty to him, which is good.

And he made it known publicly that his office would investigate all serious allegations that people were being forced to work.

Resende gets moved into this program in 1975, and he first starts hearing allegations that Volkswagen has a plantation in the Amazon and people are being enslaved there in 1977, two years later.

The very first claims come from a union organizer named Natal Ribeiro, who said that he had been hired by, he was a former union organizer, but he goes to Resende and says that, you know, I was hired by these Gatos and they forced to pay me for my work.

And he tells Resende that, like, yeah, there's a farm out there.

It's guarded by people he described as professional pistoleros.

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 Resende hears about this in 77, but all he's got is this one guy's claim.

He doesn't have hard evidence.

He doesn't have like anything he can really go to the state with.

And this is something where if you kind of go off half-cocked on this, 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, exactly.

Yeah, they'll kill him.

Right.

Or they'll clean up their act enough that nothing else will get out.

Right.

So he, Resinde, 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 gets a major shot in the arm to his efforts in 1981 when he meets his first escapee from the ranch uh edevon alencar who told him quote a man tried to flee and was caught by chico who's one of these gatos 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 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.

Alan 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.

In one instance, he claims to have seen Chico and other Gatos burn 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 Gatos 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 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?

That one, that one.

Let's do that one.

Right, right.

It's a perfect ad for Volkswagen, right here.

Yeah, Volkswagen, the hottest cars in the ass.

That's that's weak.

You know what?

Forget I said that.

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So Resende 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 clear plastic sheets and they drank unfiltered water.

He wrote in 1981 of one woman who managed to flee, quote, they fled through the forest because if they'd taken the road, the gatos would have killed them.

They walked 155 kilometers.

Now, by 81, he's got been doing this for three or four years.

He wants to take action.

He wants to stop this, but the political situation at the time makes that impossible.

And Resinde is 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 1983 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.

Oh, my God.

And one day, a friend of theirs comes in and 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.

It pays great.

It's a good job.

Resende would write, Among the five workers who fled the farm, three were only 17.

They were lured to work there not only because of a promised payment, but also because they were told that they would be able to play soccer there.

Roberts.

Oh, yeah.

Soccer.

You'll basically just be playing soccer the whole time, you know?

Oh, my God.

Who wouldn't want to get paid to play soccer?

This is so sadistic.

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?

They're not even near it necessarily.

No, they're 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, you know, 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 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 for their skills.

And these men and their families enjoyed a high quality of life.

There were gardens, there were 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 who had escaped, these 17-year-olds who flee home to fucking make some money and play soccer,

they tell Father Resende that they didn't have access to any of that stuff.

They had been sold to a gato 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 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.

Oh my God.

On one occasion, one of the boys found a dead man in the forest who had been strung up and beaten to death.

Again, these are 17-year-olds.

Now, these kids do escape eventually, right?

They weren't allowed to.

This is something that they kind of managed to make it out on their own because they're in debt, right?

The gato says that they owe money.

And the way they're able to finally get out is they convince them 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.

Oh, God.

Right, right, right.

Like, you'll get in trouble if you keep us, right?

We're expected, you know?

Like, that's how fucked up the situation is for these kids.

is so brave of them to do they yeah they go they try to go above him and it works wow yeah they're smart kids um yeah so these kids get out and they're 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're naming specific people.

Like this is kind of what he'd been waiting for the whole time.

Yeah.

And And the boys told Father Resende that they expected at least 600 laborers were still stuck clearing land and working as slaves.

The priest, horrified, tried to schedule a meeting with Yadar Barbalo, who was the state governor of the para state.

And Resende is refused initially, but this does not dissuade him from pursuing the truth.

So the 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 junta couldn't ignore, the National Bishops' Conference of Brazil.

The next day, newspapers featured the headline, priest says there are slaves on Volkswagen Farm, right?

So he takes this kid out in front and is like, they can't crack down on a bishops' conference.

And like, they'll have to pay attention.

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 Brazilian media is very much under control of the regime, but Volkswagen's a German company, and Germany has a free press, and the German free press are like, hey, VW, this sounds pretty bad.

It sounds familiar and bad.

As Germans,

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 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 going to, we'll send a fact-finding mission.

We'll get these.

We'll send them.

Yeah.

Right.

We got it.

Don't worry.

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 our ranch and you can see how nice it really is, right?

Uh-huh.

So Volkswagen 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 was Sao 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 the modern buildings they had recently built there.

But I asked for a truck that could take me to a nearby city where I would meet with Father Resinde 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 by a labor contractor known as Abelau.

I ordered them to immediately release the man.

Abelau 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 just say it.

Well, we got we can't let him just have work for us for free, you know.

Like, he's got to pay to work for us, obviously.

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.

That is wild.

I said take the other road.

I said go the other way around.

Fuck.

Jesus.

Fuck.

We should have had him take the bus.

God damn it.

Yeah,

this is like a Jurassic Park problem.

Instead of the raptors getting loose, it's this gatos

out of pocket and, you know, forcibly hauling a man back in chains.

It's a lot like Jurassic Park.

It is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So now you've got not just these eyewitness accounts, but now credible members of like this fact-finding mission.

Yeah, that they brought.

That they brought here.

So 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.

Yeah.

So the investigatory team, which now has the father with them, heads back to the ranch and they do the original meeting that they'd been scheduled to have.

They meet with Volkswagen's corporate PR manager for Brazil, a guy named Paolo De Castro, and they meet with the ranch's director, Friedrich Bruger, who is a Swiss national.

From an article in the Washington Post, quote: He touted its commitment to social service, according to an account by a reporter who accompanied the delegation, saying the farm's 328 direct employees and their families had it great.

Discounted food, free medical care, quality schooling.

The delegation, Resende 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.

You have to save me, the priest recorded him saying.

Save you from what?

I have 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 lid on this thing the least bit as soon as these guys show up.

They just start stumbling into evidence of crimes against humanity.

Honestly, pretty incredible.

Like, very uh yeah they made their own pot and kettle and invited everyone to tea time to partake yeah wow no they won't notice any they will show them how nice our basketball court is yeah look 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 you're hiding something and bruger says this isn't my problem and he tells them it's the gatos problem, right?

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 10 miles away with the guys that I'm paying to make other guys work for them?

I wouldn't get into the detail.

You know, when you get granular like that, obviously, but yeah.

Right, obviously.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How much can you expect me to do?

You know, I'm sitting here.

I'm in the jungle.

I'm pretending not to hear the screams.

Nothing else is my job, obviously.

Right.

I also love the Catholic priest being,

I know a liar.

I know many liars, and I can see that in you.

Yeah, like I'm a Catholic priest.

Like,

I have met better liars than you.

Like, it's kind of my job.

Yes, yes.

Yeah.

You're hiding something and I'm one to know.

Yeah.

So on their way out of the area, the delegation actually runs into one of the Gatos, this guy, we talked about him a little bit earlier, too, Abelau, who was driving back into camp in 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 while you're,

come on, man.

In a Chevy.

Take it off to do the slavery stuff, at least.

It feels like it's on purpose at this point.

He's mocking them.

Right, right.

Like, yeah, I feel like you're just insulting the faith here.

So they run into this guy, Abilau, who's driving back to camp.

He's got his cross's cowboy hat on.

And Resende questions him about the mistreatment of the workers.

And the Gato's like, I don't use violence.

I just use energy to keep my workers in line.

Right.

Just energy, you know?

Kinetic energy.

Energy.

Like jazz ham.

It's not hitting.

It's kinetic energy.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

He insisted, quote, they're nasty goats and vagabonds that take my money, then disappear into the forest.

And he bragged that just 16 out of 408 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.

Abilao insisted the man had been eating 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 let this man be eating and sinning him.

No.

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 Gatos, with Volkswagen contractors, and they make a report which they send to the state security chief.

And the state security chief writes a letter to the governor in late 1983, which concluded that the Gatos, quote, treat their contracted workers like slaves.

Wow.

Yeah, so that's that's good.

That's pretty, pretty direct.

The security chief is a guy named Arnaldo Filho, 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 property occurred without any knowledge or action on its part.

And I might say, so why isn't he 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.

It seems a little more active than just, yeah, just not, you know, not disclosing.

Uh-huh.

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 is he doesn't want to like go too far, you know,

and maybe get out of pocket here.

But yeah, that's partly me kind of

guessing, parsing, drawing that out.

Right.

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, who we talked about earlier, Barbolo.

And Barbolo 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 this was a lie.

I think it was just a delaying tactic.

Okay, you said so.

Uh-huh.

Like you really meant it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

They don't give a 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.

Yeah.

Or he forgot about it.

Maybe he forgot about it.

Or he forgot about it.

He's a busy man, you know?

Right, right, right.

Right.

Look, you can't keep track of all of the slavery happening in your state, right?

Like that just

an unreasonable ask.

There's so many trees to cut down.

That's just one

part of it all that I got to cut.

Yeah.

People can hide in forests.

People can hide burning people to death in a forest.

You know, it's just too much work for one man and all of his employees.

So in August of 1984, 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 basically being treated as slaves by the Gatos.

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, 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.

The shuffle, the Nazi shuffle he's doing that into a new yeah the nazi shuffle yeah years later he's asked like hey did 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 me he did forget he forgot

my job no

yeah

now it must have been some other governor so Two months after this 1984, this is the second delegation to visit the ranch, state police finally arrest one of the Gatos, Abelau, after investigations on two separate farms unrelated to the Volkswagen farm turned up another 107 enslaved workers working for this guy.

The report named that other gato, Chico, who'd provided workers for Volkswagen's farm too, but they couldn't find him to prosecute.

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 1986 under suspicion of trafficking workers in a nearby region.

But again, nothing comes of the investigation.

By 1986, Volkswagen is kind of looking at their balance sheet and they're like, this isn't making us any money, right?

And it never really does.

This is not a profitable enterprise.

I kind of think the point was never for it to be super profitable.

They would have liked that.

I think the point is Volkswagen's in business in Brazil and the military junta wants companies doing stuff like this.

So I think there's a large 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.

Right, right.

Yeah, it's like it's you know, being paid in exposure via many people's lives and livelihoods.

Right.

That's exactly it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Speaking of paid and exposure, we're not paid in exposure.

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So in 1986, Volkswagen closes down their operation.

They sell off their assets.

They are cutting bait.

In 86.

Yeah, 86.

This does not mean the workers who'd been enslaved there get freed, right?

Because these guys are property of the Gatos, who still consider these men indebted to them.

So the ranch workforce is sold.

And this is very much a chattel slavery moment where to try to get as much money as they can out of this, these gatos are splitting up their labor force, in some cases, splitting up family members in order to auction workers off to the highest level.

In 86,

I just think this is like orienting money.

In 86, they're splitting up families in a slave auction to get rid of these Volkswagen fucking laborers.

For no profit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, Volkswagen isn't making.

The Gatos are making bank.

Don't get me wrong here.

Well, at least somebody.

Yeah, fine.

Yeah, yeah, at least.

One worker, Raul, 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.

Per the Post's reporting, quote, Raul 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 Raul discovered that his younger brother 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.

Wow.

All worth it for beef, killing the rainforest.

Did they even get to the cows part of all this?

Or did they 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 the 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 documents 69 alleged victims whose stories range from 1977 to 1987.

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 de Silvia, 29 of Annapolis, says, they stomped on a laborer, broke his teeth, brought him to the hospital, and put him back to work in the jungle.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

Three men made an account in 1989 after escaping and told Rosende, quote, they tied up a man and beat him in the forest, leaving him naked there.

Another survivor, Edevon Diaz Alankar, told the priest, they have a cave where they kill people and throw the bodies in.

Oh my God.

Cool stuff.

Yeah.

Volkswagen.

Wow.

New Beatle driving you wild.

Volkswagen, we got a cave for corpses.

Yeah.

We got a cave.

Woo.

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 that'll never happen again.

We have a cave for the corpses now, you know?

A wine cave.

It's the same thing, but for bodies.

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.

It's got a roof.

It's got a roof.

It is a roof.

So the father documented everything he could.

But again, even after this ranch closes, he has very little hope that any punitive action would ever be taken.

And it almost doesn't.

It's not until late 2019 that a state prosecutor in Brazil reopened an investigation on the federal slave labor division into what had happened at Volkswagen's ranch.

And he engages Resende.

He 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 endured, right?

Because they need to have people who are willing to show up in court and talk about it.

A lot of these people have died at this point.

This is a difficult.

effort for a man who's 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

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 2019.

And in 2022, they finally wind up in 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 slave labor plantation or anything to do with like the work of these Gatos.

They gave up after months of negotiations with the labor ministry and refused to pay $30 million in reparations demanded by the government for their past collaborations.

In 2020, the company had signed a conduct adjustment agreement with the public prosecutor's office, acknowledging that 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 2025, 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,

the evils you usually describe, and they are evils, but, and often, you know, there are echoes we're feeling now, but this is, this is now.

Yeah, this is right now.

This is coming to some kind of conclusion.

This is right now.

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 as 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 Raul Batista de Souza.

We slept under a black plastic sheet, said Pedro Vasconcelos.

They were all armed.

We had to work, said Jose Viana Nunes.

Finally, Resende, who'd come from across the country, rose to testify.

The priest hadn't slept much the night before and had woken angry.

How could they have permitted this crime, he'd vinted that morning, and continued to have permitted it?

The court ultimately ruled against Volkswagen, ordering them to pay 165 million BRL for collective moral damages.

Volkswagen still denies any wrongdoing, and last I said, are appealing the case.

And for an example of like how hideously company officials have refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing.

There's a very good article by D.W.

Deutsche Welle, which is like a German publication by Astrid de Oliveira.

Brazilian prosecutors summoned VW over slavery allegations.

This is from 2022.

Quote, the Swiss agronomist and former manager of the cattle farm in Santana di Aragueya, Friedrich Brueger, this is the guy we talked about earlier.

This is like the dude that met with Resinde when the...

delegation showed up, describes the allegations that VW engaged in modern slavery as complete nonsense, as if there were nothing more important today than improving the past, he told a reporter.

Oh,

yeah, like it's it's it's it's pretty hideous.

He says the responsibility of a company in somewhere when there are over a thousand men in one room, things aren't always gentle.

That's obvious, especially in the middle of a jungle.

The issue is it's stuff that's happening in a room for one thing.

No, no, no, you were clearing the trees,

it wasn't in the middle of a jungle, it was a it was a field, yeah,

it was the jungle, jungle, man.

Like, yeah.

It's so fucked up.

Like,

this fucking guy, Bruger, needs to, I mean, he needs to be locked up in a fucking cage somewhere.

Yeah.

These are the kind of things that people really need to pay for more often.

Like the fact that that 2001 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 really infuriating quote from this motherfucker from a Washington Post article

that I just have to read to you.

Please.

The brutality that happened, of course, doesn't surprise me at all.

The Brazilian is a bad person, he said in the 2017 interview with a German reporter.

He blamed the laborers for their own debts and defended the Gato's alleged use of violence.

To keep a crowd under control, they have to show a certain amount of strength.

Man, 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 2016, as part of their long reconciliation effort, Volkswagen engaged at the urging of the Brazilian state.

The car company hired a historian named Christopher Culper to write a report on the company's activities during the dictatorship.

And this is, as I said, they're not copying to the slavery.

They did admit in 2020 to having worked to like punish and put in concentration camps and whatnot, like labor organizers.

Like they helped the Brazilian state prosecute labor organizers, often viciously, and they admitted to that, right?

They haven't admitted to this, but as a part of that, 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 monitored operations, 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 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 laborers employed by the subcontractors, even as they bragged to the media that full-time workers employed directly by VW lived very well by local standards.

Copper concluded, Volkswagen farm managers were certainly aware of the realities of the rural labor market, the exploitative practices of the gatos, 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 gatos.

His ultimate conclusion is that while Volkswagen never gave the orders to enslave or abuse workers, 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.

Wow.

So just maybe don't buy a Volkswagen.

Maybe don't buy a Volkswagen.

I don't know, man.

Again, good luck finding it, like like buy a used car, I guess.

Although, like, used car dealers are also sketchy in different ways.

Right.

I mean, there are several ways you can, you know, tick out a window here or there.

I'm not going to tell you the right way to live ethically under capitalism, but

bad.

Wow.

Bad Volkswagen.

Bad.

Yeah.

Wow.

This is so like so more recent than

I think my spine was prepared for.

It's shocking, right?

Yeah, same.

Yeah, I had this.

This is a friend of mine who 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.

No, they just brought this up to me in person.

Like, did you know that Volkswagen had a slave plantation in Brazil in the fucking 80s?

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 know about it.

So great.

And now you all know about it.

Now you all know about it.

What do we do with it, you know, now that we know?

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.

Brueger.

Yeah, that's right.

Because he's still around, right?

He's still around.

Last I checked, I don't know, maybe he died recently, but he's around like 2022, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Somebody go yell at him or something at least.

Fuck, I don't know.

I don't know how to fix this.

Yeah, I guess that's not our problem.

Yeah.

Maggie, you want to plug anything?

Oh, man.

Well, yes, this was lovely.

I learned, unfortunately, so much about our current state of the world.

And

yeah,

my other show, Amy's Dead in Dreamhouse, it's on Nebula.

Because, yeah, it also deals with topics.

I would say probably nothing as

grandiose as current.

you know, labor infractions, but it does deal with misogyny, depression, getting misdiagnosed, friend breakups, you know, lesser evils in the grand scale of things.

But yeah, you can hop over there, check it out.

Have a beautiful, wonderful time.

I have some wonderful guests, some wonderful guests that have been on this podcast, Jamie Loftus, friend of the pod.

And yeah, YouTube essays at my name, one about propaganda.

coming out soon.

And that's it, man.

Yeah, I think I would just really eat chocolate.

Maybe I will eat ethical chocolate the rest of the entire day, I think is what I'm going to be doing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I will say, folks, maybe avoid Haribo.

If you don't know, they've got a pretty rough human rights, the gummy bear company.

Not a great history.

James, I could not tell from your tone earlier.

Yeah, if that was a joke.

No, that's not a joke.

They allegedly still rely on slave labor to harvest carnaba wax.

To this day?

Yeah, there's a documentary released in 2017, which showed that Brazilian carnaba pickers live in like horrific conditions without access to like clean food or water and receive,

I think it's like maybe $12 a day.

And I think it's like a similar sort of like debt peonage system in a lot of cases.

It's maybe not quite as bad as it used to be, but it's

pretty ugly.

Sounds bad.

Put those gummy bears the fuck down if they're in your hands currently.

Maybe it's gotten better, but just don't get it from Haribo.

I don't know.

I don't know where you should get your gummy bears, folks.

Again, that's not your job.

Just look into it.

Read about Haribo, 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, Meggie.

Bye, everybody.

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Hey guys, it's Aaron Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

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These are the cutest dresses ever.

They're high quality and they're affordable.

I do this thing where when I see something cute, I'll buy it.

And that way I'll have it when I need it.

Because you know, when you go shopping for something specific, you can't ever find it.

So, I

came across Bohm's website and I saw all these cute dresses and I was like, okay, I will get this, this, and this.

And then, next time I have an event, it's going to be perfect for it.

They have trendy products that fit everyone's taste and personal style.

I showed my friend the website, and she was also like, I need this, this, and this.

Tons of options for dresses,

also like cute little summer two-pieces, and all that stuff.

You can visit Bohm.com and start your style journey today at Bohm.

Start now at boam.com.

That is B-O-H-M-E.com.

This is an iHeart podcast.