More than 300 people have been rescued from slave-labor conditions at illegal mines across Brazil since 2008, an exclusive report by the Mining Observatory shows, with most of these outfits operating in the Amazon and mining for gold, Report informs referring to Mongabay.
The 333 workers were rescued in a series of 31 law-enforcement raids over the past 13 years. The extent of these rescues has never been revealed before.
The Amazonian state of Pará accounted for the most raids, at 12.
In all the raids, workers are found in precarious conditions, without adequate accommodation facilities or bathrooms; consuming contaminated water and improvised food; working without protective equipment, on exhausting journeys, and without formal employment; and, often, subjected to accumulated debts with the owners of the mines, or garimpos, most of them illegal. Under Brazilian law, such conditions constitute slave labor.