The long twentieth century, the New Republic and the old problems. The Federal Constitution of 1988 and the recurrence of contemporary slave labour in Brazil

Abstract

Brazil was a slavery state for more than 350 years. This practice was legally extinguished in 1888, but left its legacy. After the whole of the 20th century and two serious dictatorships, we lived the hope of better moments with the political opening begun in the 1980s, the promulgation of a Constitution in 1988 and with it, the strengthening of individual civil rights, inaugurating a new stage in the struggle for human rights. Despite the advances made in this letter regarding labor rights, social rights, and individual freedoms, Brazil still lived with denunciations of slave labor, and such cases did not represent a survival of the past, but were and continue to be during this century, an expression of this modern society, reaching seemingly unsuspected areas such as agroindustry and even in the metropolitan regions of Southeastern Brazil. The trace of possible permanence to be observed between the past and the present is not in the attempt of confrontation or comparison between the model of exploitation of legal labor extinguished in the nineteenth century and the criminal and morally damnable practice verified today; but in the perpetuation of a brutal social distance between rich and poor that makes the country, in Hobsbawm’s words, a monument to social inequality.