When labour inspectors and heavily armed police officers finally raided Lúcio de Cassio Vieira’s cattle ranch in the Amazonian rainforest of northern Brazil, they found seven men huddled beneath a makeshift shelter. All were exhausted after labouring all day under the scorching sun.

A large wooden sign, staked in the red earth a few yards away, reminded the men of their most basic duty: “Don’t envy me, just work.” Most of Cassio Vieira’s farm workers were illiterate, but they got the idea. Their boss was a man to fear.

Cassio Vieira allegedly ruled his 560-acre ranch with an iron fist. The workers said he was easily angered, and that he cursed and beat his employees, often threatening to kill them with the gun he carried on his belt. Behind his back, the men called him Lúcio Brabo (Angry Lúcio), or, more simply, Lucifer.

“We worked from Sunday to Sunday, with no rest. If we complained, he said he owned the farm and that he would only calm down if he killed one of us,” one of the workers told the Guardian, which accompanied the police and prosecutors on the raid.

The seven workers were identified as victims of modern-day slavery under Brazilian law. Prosecutors hurried to draw up an arrest warrant for Cassio Vieira. On paper, it was an open and shut case.

But Brazil’s once famously tough anti-slavery laws are being grossly undermined by powerful politicians and business interests. Remote ranches, semi-feudal power structures, impunity and lack of resources have made slavery the grim trademark of Brazil’s $4bn (£3bn) beef export industry, which counts the US, UK and EU among its clients.

The men hired by Cassio Vieira claim they were made to live in shacks that had no running water, sanitation, beds or electricity. They say they had to survive on shreds of meat stored in plastic buckets mixed with brine, working 12-hour days clearing land in searing heat. The men say they were paid infrequently, at salaries far below Brazil’s minimum wage, and that “debts” supposedly owed to their boss were deducted from their income.



“The only thing he didn’t charge us for was the drinking water, because it comes from the rain,” said another worker, who claimed they had all been forced to share their few provisions with farm animals. “We had to drink the water the pigs shit in.”

Lúcio de Cassio Vieira with his wife. Photograph: Facebook

Following the March raid, the men, ranging in age from 22 to 58, told inspectors that they were all in debt to their boss. None knew by how much, but with salaries of just £35-50 paid to them every three or four months – in violation of Brazil’s monthly minimum wage of £220 – the workers knew they were unlikely ever to pay off Cassio Vieira.



Hidden deep in the state of Pará, where much of the Amazon is protected but rarely enforced by conservation laws, Cassio Vieira’s ranch was so remote that officials and police spent 48 hours driving along bumpy dirt roads trying to find it. Chief labour inspector Raimundo Barbosa, who coordinated the raid, said the farm’s geographical isolation did much to stop the workers from escaping and diminished the likelihood of prying eyes.

“Slave labour is extremely common on cattle ranches out here in southern Pará. But what is exceptional in this case is the savagery with which Lúcio treated his workers,” he added, alluding to the workers’ testimony that they were beaten and threatened with murder.



This wasn’t Cassio Vieira’s first brush with authorities. Five years ago, officials found 15 workers living in conditions of slavery during a raid on another of his cattle ranches. The men had been beaten, threatened, extorted and forbidden from leaving the ranch. One of them was found sleeping in a pigpen.



Brazil’s beef industry has been rocked by a series of scandals over the past six months. In March, 30 meat companies – including Brazil’s largest meatpacker – were revealed to have engaged in fraud, bribery and document falsification to circumvent industry regulations. That same month, 15 slaughterhouses were fined for purchasing cattle raised on illegally deforested land.

According to the NGO Walk Free, an estimated 160,000 people are trapped in some form of slavery in Brazil. More than 50,000 people have been released from conditions of slavery since 1995 – nearly one-third from cattle ranches.



Yet slavers go mostly unpunished by criminal justice. In December, the inter-American court of human rights ordered Brazil to pay £4.1m to 128 former farm workers rescued from conditions of slavery at a cattle ranch in southern Pará, not far from Lúcio’s ranch, between 1988 and 2000. No criminal charges were levelled against the slaver until 2013, when two NGOs brought the case to the international court.

Despite a pending trial over the 2012 case, Cassio Vieira was able to bypass Brazil’s anti-slavery laws, which “blacklist” ranches linked to labour exploitation or deforestation, by selling the problematic ranch and buying another under his daughter’s name. The biggest Brazilian meat companies have pledged not to source their cattle from farms and farmers on the blacklist, but ranchers openly flout the law, explained Andre Campos of Repórter Brasil, an NGO that investigates supply chains and transparency.

“Ranchers get around this by transferring ownership of their animals to a middleman – a partner, relative or neighbour, for example – who, in turn, sells to the main meatpacking companies,” said Campos. “This intermediary is created to ‘wash’ the oxen, thereby hiding their true origin.”

Cattle on Cassio Vieira’s ranch. Photograph: Fabiano Maisonnave

When contacted by the Guardian, Cassio Vieira’s lawyer, Leonardo Soares, denied the allegations against his client.

“He did not charge [the workers] for food or equipment and he didn’t walk around the ranch with a gun,” said Soares. “It was a temporary contract work deal. The employee agrees to work in these conditions and then everything else falls under his own responsibility.”

Barbosa has been collaborating closely with the police and federal attorney general, who is in charge of the prosecution against Cassio Vieira, in order to secure a conviction. But the rancher, who prosecutors want to charge under modern slavery laws, is now on the run; Brazil’s federal police have issued a warrant for his arrest and are treating him as a fugitive. “It’s hard to understand how slow justice works in cases like this,” said Barbosa.

Justice in Brazil may soon be even harder to deliver. Despite having some of the world’s toughest anti-slavery laws, Brazil now has half as many anti-slavery mobile units as 10 years ago. Several proposals backed by politicians and the beef industry are threatening to undermine the blacklist and current labour laws, as well as reduce the definition of slavery to captivity only. Recently, a lawmaker went so far as to propose that agricultural workers’ salaries could be paid in food and board, which some activists see as akin to 19th-century slavery.

“We’re living through a difficult time,” said Campos. “Active lobbying is going on to change the laws that define what slave labour is in Brazil, limiting the number of situations in which poor conditions can be characterised as slavery.



“These reforms pose a dramatic threat to workers in Brazil.”