Forced labour in the Amazon takes place in illegal logging activities. In recent years the increased global price of luxury hardwoods, such as mahogany and cedar, has led to an intensification of the exploitation of Amazon timber.The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that profits from illegal logging alone are $75 million.

Indigenous people and mestizos are forced labourers, with the majority of mestizos coming from cities far away whilst indigenous labourers come from the local communities living on that land or nearby. Given the extremely isolated locations and clandestine nature of this activity it is extremely difficult to estimate the number of people involved. However, the ILO estimate that 33 000 people are forced to work in the Peruvian Amazon, with the main areas being Ucayali, Madre de Dios, Loreta, Pucallpa, Atalaya and Puerto Maldonado.

There are two main forms of forced labour in logging activities in the Amazon: the first where the indigenous communities are contracted to provide timber from their own land and the second where the timber bosses hire indigenous and mestizo men to work on their camps. Both forms employ deception to entrap workers in a cycle of debt and servitude, that can be passed on from one generation to the next.

A common form of forced labour is when the timber company bosses are able to exploit the labour of an indigenous community to extract the valuable timber without actually controlling the land. Middlemen approach indigenous communities and offer them advances in the form of basic goods (such as rice, salt, boots and rifles), public goods (such as building a school or playing field) or money. These advances form part of a verbal or written contract whereby the community agrees to provide the middleman with an amount of timber of a specified quality, although usually the contract does not detail the price of the timber.

The middlemen exploit the communities’ ignorance of the value of money, value of timber and prices of basic goods to charge excessively high prices for the goods whilst under-valuing the timber. Hence, when the indigenous workers return with the agreed quantity of timber they are told that it is of inferior quality and therefore not worth as much as agreed. In order to work off their advances they must therefore keep working and provide more timber.

Concurrently, the workers are accumulating debts with the middlemen by purchasing food and basic goods from them. As they do not know the cost of these products they often pay between three to five times the price for them. Therefore the initial “advance” now becomes a debt that must be paid off by the provision of more timber.

The middlemen repeatedly postpone final payment on delivered timber whilst continuing to under-value it thereby increasing the debt incurred by the communities. Additionally, the communities’ sell their timber to, or work for, anyone else. Thus the communities gradually find themselves trapped: they are increasingly indebted to the middlemen, and underpaid for timber, and do not have the capacity to seek work or money from elsewhere to pay them back. Middlemen can exploit this situation by demanding that the debt be repaid by providing free labour at logging camps. Therefore it can be seen that the initial advance given is a mechanism to trap free labour and convert it into forced labour.

Workers are often not paid until the end of the season, when they are told that their debts are greater than their earnings and that they will have to return next season to pay off the outstanding debt. It is also common for women and children to accompany the men to the camps, carrying out tasks such as cooking, cleaning and logging. These tasks go unrecognised by the camp bosses, and they receive no form of payment for their work.

"Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim." - Thomas Macaulay

SOURCES:

-www.financialexpress.com/news/clandestine-world-of-modern-slavery;
- www.cifor.cgiar.org/Knowledge/Publications/.../mahogany.htm;
- www.bloomberg.com/apps/news;