Slaves of the Amazon

I pray that this story made the lives of those young men better in some way..I can hardly bear to think that they have to work like they do just to eat, just to survive one more day, just to be a slave for another horrible day..
God help us humans..

Somehow, with our "Cash for Clunkers" program, I feel we are adding to this. We destroy engines which are often perfectly good. We care causing more natural resources to be used for our consumption. We have not yet learned to use less within the context of global living; we create suffering and global devastation.

This is so sad really- the US has some thing to do with this!!! they buy their cattle, polute the earth with all the animal slaughter more than cars! and leave people with no land! Same thing is done in parts of Africa.

slavery and destroying of the amazon the un needs to send officials to halt that immediately

As a Brazilian living overseas, it's difficult to see scenes like these. The same ones who made us leave the country; sick and tired of those who could not value its own natural treasure years ago . It's a fact: the country has changed a lot for the past years and invested in wonderful things such as: clean energy (hydro/bio). Besides that, it might sunddenly become one of the biggest oil producer in the world market. Improving Education and Public Health but struggling with the corruption of its goverment. A country that have achieved a lot to become an even greater country, but that still needs lots more to become a respectfull and respected NATION.

I agree.

excellent work.

As journalists, we're trained to try to restrain our feelings, but I admit that I like trees. Here in California where I live, I like to take my family to see the Redwoods and the Sequoias. They remind me of whales, but milder... So perhaps that's why this particular story caused conflicting emotions in me. Laura and I flew to Imperatriz in Marinhao state on the north eastern edge of Brazil's Amazon on Thanksgiving Day, 2004, to meet up with a Federal Police anti-slavery task force. The previous week, we'd been in Mato Grosso state on the southern edge of Brazil's Amazon. The edges of the Amazon are known as The Arc of Destruction in North America and Europe, and as The Arc of Development in Brazil.
And whether your orientation is destructed or developed, you'd agree that Marinhao, its neigbhoring state of Para, and Mato Grosso show plenty of either, in that lots and lots trees are gone... The Federal Police task force told us that their ratio of finding actual slaves--or indentured servants--per raid was about one in four, and we found that to be true in the days that we followed them. On our last day, we hit a truly gruesome example of actual indentured servitude in a charcoal factory near a town. Then we hit two false alarms at charcoal factories out where the Arc of Destruction/Development meets the edge of the forest. They were false alarms in that the workers cutting down the forest at a prodigious rate weren't slaves... They were free men who'd set up their own business--far into the forest, where they didn't have competition from the slave-run charcoal factories closer to town... So is that a triumph of downtrodden individuals, or a massacre of nature? Which side do you root for?