Vol. 26: Unfree Labour Relations in Brazil’s Amazon Region

71 pages, paperback
14,8 x 21,0, 2024

Trabalho escravo, a form of unfree labour, has been considered a crime in Brazil since 1995. Historically, Pará, a state in the Brazilian Amazon region, has had the highest numbers of trabalho escravo, especially in the agricultural sector. This article examines the changes in the regime of trabalho escravo in Pará, from the time after the coup against Dilma Rousseff in 2016 until the end of the Bolsonaro government. Political and economic changes have had reciprocal effects on the organization of trabalho escravo as well as on the power dynamics in the Amazon region, on land conflicts and on the racialization of the labourers, which in turn influence trabalho escravo. 
To study all of these factors, two series of interviews with experts working in the field were conducted, one in 2014 and another in 2022. Apart from the secondary literature, this article also draws on statistics gathered by the state and those gathered by one of the most important NGOs fighting this labour regime. All these enable this work to shed light on a time frame that, to date, has barely been the subject of research, especially with regard to trabalho escravo.
     

The Author

Julia Harnoncourt completed her master’s degree in History at the University of Vienna in 2012. Her master’s thesis, the outcome of an extensive archival research, deals with population control in 19th century colonial Algeria and was published in 2014. Her PhD thesis was subsequently published. Unfreie Arbeit: Trabalho escravo in der brasilianischen Landwirtschaft (Unfree Labour: Trabalho escravo in Brazilian agriculture) is the outcome of an interview study conducted in Pará, a state in the Brazilian Amazon region. It is a project on labour history that connects the local with the global. Furthermore, Julia Harnoncourt has worked as a lecturer at the University of Vienna and the University of Luxembourg, where she currently works as a post-doctoral researcher. She has published articles on racism, resistance movements against colonialism, and more recent social problems, for example, the living situations of refugees in Austria, as well as a book compiling different feminist texts. She has also taken part in international conferences in places such as Brazil, Senegal, San Salvador, Germany, Greece and Austria. At the moment, she is working on a book on extra-European migration to Luxembourg in the first half of the 20th century.