Rio de Janeiro Ricardo Rezende Figueira first heard about the brutality of the German carmaker Volkswagen when three workers came to see him in the mid-1970s. They had fled from a farm and told him, who was then working as a priest in the region, of their horrible experiences. Rezende was shocked. Farm Cristalino was one of several cattle farms that Volkswagen do Brasil operated in the Amazon region at the time. “I was surprised that it wasn’t one of the traditional Coroneis, i.e. large landowners, who acted so brutally, but a global corporation from Germany.”
The studied philosopher, who belongs to the left-progressive wing of the Catholic Church, conducted his own investigations – and in doing so started a case that Volkswagen is still dealing with today. The company is said to have used temporary workers on the farm, who were kept like slaves.
An estimated 600 to 1,200 workers would have had to pay for their accommodation in makeshift tents, food and transport themselves, says the priest. They were deeply in debt from the start and should never have left the farm. Private security services are said to have prevented them from doing so and otherwise kept a brutal regiment. It was punished, imprisoned and shot, says Rezende. The sick were not treated, although malaria was rampant. The priest kept a record of the misdeeds.
In it, the priest had testimonies notarized and collected further evidence. He later visited the farm with parliamentarians from São Paulo and was able to partially confirm the inhumane conditions. Investigations by the Brazilian public prosecutor’s office are based on his logs. On June 14, she ordered the VW lawyers to come to Brasília.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
Specifically, it is about labor law violations, which are classified as modern slavery in Brazil, and human trafficking. The “Süddeutsche Zeitung” reported on this for the first time at the end of May together with NDR and SWR. In an out-of-court hearing, the investigators want to check whether an agreement between victims in the Amazon region and the group is possible.
Gauchos on horseback with a herd of cattle at a gate with the VW logo (photo taken around 1978). After slaughtering, the Nelore cattle were turned into corned beef, frozen meat and meat extract.
(Photo: picture alliance / Wolfgang Weihs)
The Volkswagen Group has been aware of the investigations by the public prosecutors in Brazil since the end of May. “We take the investigation very seriously,” said a company spokesman on request. Human rights violations are not tolerable for the Wolfsburg car manufacturer. VW has not yet had access to the investigation files and is therefore unable to comment specifically on the current status.
Doubtful role of VW in the military dictatorship
The Labor Prosecutor’s Office has been gathering evidence and testimonies over the past three years, including Rezende Figueira’s dossier. In a total of four files with over 600 pages of material, he documented the allegations against the group. A glance at the folder shows how Volkswagen increasingly became an accomplice in human rights violations under the military dictatorship in Brazil at the time.
In the mid-1970s, Volkswagen do Brasil, with the support of the military government, would bring progress to the rainforest – and not only make a profit with the Beetle, but also as a meat producer and exporter. Since Volkswagen, like all foreign groups at the time, was only allowed to transfer its profits to Wolfsburg to a very limited extent, the group looked for investment opportunities in Brazil.
The then ruling military in turn wanted to settle the untouched Amazon in order to be able to control it better. They feared that guerrilla groups supported by Moscow and Cuba could gather there. Several foreign corporations took advantage of this opportunity: the computer manufacturer at the time, Nixdorf, also invested in an Amazon farm. The US billionaire Daniel Keith Ludwig developed a cellulose production. However, Volkswagen was the only carmaker to embark on the adventure.
>> Read about this: VW in Brazil – torture on the factory premises
This was also due to the fact that Rudolf Leiding, the then Volkswagen boss in Wolfsburg, had previously managed the Brazilian subsidiary of Volkswagen for three years. As was usual at the time, he had excellent connections in the highest circles of the dictatorship. At that time, Brazil was by far the most important foreign market for Volkswagen. VW sold 380,000 vehicles a year there. Almost 60 percent of the market was in the hands of Wolfsburg.
The beef business should protect profits. VW boss Leiding personally instructed to buy 140,000 hectares of rainforest – before he informed the supervisory board and board of directors. He appointed the Swiss agricultural expert Friedrich Georg Brügger as head of the farm, who boasted that he had already set up cattle breeding projects in the tropics for the dictators Fidel Castro in Cuba and Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay. VW boss Leiding justified the decision before the board: “The world not only needs cars, but also beef.”
Cloud of smoke over the Amazon
In addition to the exploitation of workers on the farm, a lot of rainforest was cleared for this. A fire recorded by NASA satellites over Brazil in December 1975 was one of the largest fires ever recorded in the world. At the time, the US space agency even warned its colleagues in Brazil that a huge cloud of smoke was spreading in the atmosphere. The outrage over the torched Amazon united scientists all over the world at the time. The heart of the source of the fire, which spread further in the coming months, was what was then the VW farm.
For the permanent employees, the farm was a perfect “mini-Brasilia” with a swimming pool, first-aid station, soccer field – as Rezende recalls. The primitive dwellings of the workers, on the other hand, were far removed from the Amazon idyll. Even when the professor visited Cristalino with journalists and they reported about it, nothing happened.
Volkswagen factory in Sao Paolo 1973.
(Photo: bruno barbey / Magnum Photos / Agency Focus)
The judiciary, the police, the governments, the bar association, even the trade unions in São Paulo were not interested in what was happening in the Amazon region. “We in the church were the only ones who denounced it.” In 1986 – a year after the end of the military dictatorship – the VW group finally separated from the beef business.
The economic damage was limited: the soil had been cheap. VW do Brasil was able to deduct the investments from taxes. It all looked as if Volkswagen would be able to forget its Amazon project at some point. But Rezende, now a professor of public human rights at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, did not give up.
Evidence on 2000 pages
For a long time, no one wanted to hear about it in Wolfsburg. While the group had its role in the Nazi era reviewed by historians and compensated 1.7 million forced laborers with a total of 4.4 billion euros, a cloak of silence was initially spread over the violations in Brazil. “They didn’t have to hire a historian here in Brazil – we had documented all the evidence,” says Rezende.
It wasn’t until Volkswagen in Brazil began investigating human rights violations during the military dictatorship five years ago that the professor sensed an opportunity to prosecute the company after all. Ultimately, the VW factory security had demonstrably handed over unionized workers to the security forces of the military dictatorship, even though everyone knew that they would be tortured.
In 2020, Volkswagen paid compensation to former employees, human rights groups and trade unions. 36 million reais (about six million dollars). VW was thus the first company in Brazil to assume historical responsibility for collaborating with the dictatorship. The events on the Fazenda Cristalino are also mentioned in a separate chapter in the final report. But there was never any compensation for the workers in the Amazon region.
This could change now. And that is also up to prosecutor Christiane Vieira Nogueira. She is co-leader of the six-person working group “Rio Cristalino” within the Labor Justice. Investigators have visited around 20 former workers across Brazil over the past three years and collected evidence of VW’s human rights violations. They have compiled 2000 pages.
Like the public prosecutor’s office as a whole, Nogueira has already proven slavery-like working conditions in the supply chain to numerous corporations in Brazil. This also includes international fashion groups such as Zara from Spain or the food group Danone from France. But at Volkswagen, the conditions at the time were particularly shocking. “The workers were treated like animals,” she says. In an interview, she says that such processes could be proven for the first time at a car company, which is quite unique.
The way many people in charge in the VW Group deal with the allegations annoys Rezende to this day. People like farm boss Brügger were mainly looking for excuses: at that time all companies acted like this, the company management didn’t know anything about it, and the responsibility lay with the people who had placed the workforce. But that, says Rezende, is no justification for injustice committed. The 70-year-old continues to hope that the workers will be compensated later.
More: Allegations of “slave labor” on cattle farms – investigations against VW in Brazil