Human trafficking in Brazil is an ongoing problem. Brazil is a source country for men, women, girls, and boys subjected to human trafficking, specifically forced prostitution within the country and abroad, as well as a source country for men and boys in forced labor within the country. The United States Department of Homeland Security, describes human trafficking as "the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act."
Human trafficking is a condemned violation of human rights by international law. U.S. State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons placed the country in "Tier 2" in 2017. A country being rated a Tier 2 country means that the specific country does not fully meet minimum expectations set for countries by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, but are making clear effort to meet the standards of compliance.
Sex trafficking
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, sex trafficking of Brazilian women occurs in every Brazilian state and the federal district. Sex trafficking is the "recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, obtaining, patronizing, or soliciting of a person for the purposes of a commercial sex act, in which the commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion..." A large number of Brazilian women and children, many from the state of Goiás, are found in forced prostitution abroad, often in Spain, Italy, Portugal, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Germany, and the United States, but also as far away as Japan. Brazilian authorities have uncovered evidence that foreign organized criminal networks, particularly from Russia and Spain, are involved in sex trafficking of Brazilian women. Transgender women are a population especially vulnerable to human trafficking in Brazil, due in part to the high number of trans people already in the commercial sex industry. There is evidence that some Brazilian transsexuals have been subjected to forced prostitution abroad. Brazilian women and children are also subjected to forced prostitution in neighboring countries such as Argentina, Suriname, French Guiana, Venezuela, and Paraguay. To a lesser extent, women from neighboring countries have been identified in sexual servitude in Brazil. In cases of sex trafficking to and within Brazil, it is common for traffickers to move victimized people from poorer, more rural states, to richer, more metropolitan areas. This move is in part motivated by child sex tourists, people coming to Brazil in order to take advantage of the more lax regulations and easier access to victims. Child sex tourists that come to Brazil are for the most part, from Europe.
Slave labor
Under Brazilian law, the term "trabalho escravo", or slave labor, can signify forced labor or labor performed during exhausting work days or in degrading working conditions. More than 25,000 Brazilian men are subjected to slave labor within the country, typically on cattle ranches, logging and mining camps, sugar-cane plantations, and large farms producing corn, cotton, soy, and charcoal. Some boys have been identified as slave laborers in cattle ranching, mining, and the production of charcoal. Forced labor victims are commonly lured with promises of good pay by local recruiters – known as "gatos" – in rural northeastern states to interior locations where many victims are subjected to debt bondage.
Most internally trafficked forced laborers originated from the states of Maranhão and Piauí, while Pará and Mato Grosso states received the higher number of internally trafficked slave laborers. Labor trafficking victims are also found in the Cerrado, the Atlantic Forest, and the Pantanal. Children in involuntary domestic servitude, particularly involving teenage girls, also constitute a problem in the country.
A recent U.S. Department of Labor study showed that Brazil still employs children mostly in the agricultural sector, as well as the mining and textile industries with a total of 16 products. It was estimated by the International Labor Organization that in 2014, forced labor generated $150 billion in annual world wide profit.Special Action Programme to Combat Forced Labour (20 May 2014). "Profits and poverty: The economics of forced labour" (PDF). International Labour Organization. p. 4. Archived from the original (PDF) on 13 October 2017.
Brazil as a destination
To a lesser extent, Brazil is a destination for the trafficking of men, women, and children from Bolivia, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Paraguay, China and African countries for forced labor in garment factories and textile sweatshops in metropolitan centers such as São Paulo. African, Arab and Bangladeshi migrants forced to work in the halal chicken factories in the Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul. Child sex tourism remains a serious problem, particularly in resort and coastal areas in Brazil's northeast. Child sex tourists typically arrive from Europe and, to a lesser extent, the United States.
Prosecution
The Brazilian government maintained law enforcement efforts to confront human trafficking crimes during the past year. Brazilian laws prohibit most forms of trafficking in persons. Law 12.015, which entered into effect in August 2009, amended Sections 231 and 231-A of the Brazilian penal code to strengthen penalties against potential sex trafficking offenders. Sections 231 and 231-A prohibit promoting or facilitating movement to, from, or within the country for the purposes of prostitution or other forms of sexual exploitation, prescribing penalties of three to eight years’ imprisonment. Sentences may be increased up to 12 years when violence, threats, or fraud are used, or if the victim is a child. The above penalties are sufficiently stringent and commensurate with those prescribed for other serious crimes, such as rape. These statutes encompass activity that does not constitute trafficking, however, such as consensual smuggling or movement for the purpose of prostitution.
Slave labor
Labor trafficking is criminalized pursuant to Section 149 of the penal code, which prohibits "trabalho escravo", or reducing a person to a condition analogous to slavery, including by forcing a person to work or by subjecting a person to exhausting work days or degrading working conditions. This statute, therefore, prohibits treatment that is considered human trafficking, such as forced labor, as well as other treatment, such as poor labor conditions, which is beyond the definition of human trafficking. The penalty of two to eight years’ imprisonment is sufficiently stringent.
However, Brazilian law may not adequately criminalize other means of non-physical coercion or fraud used to subject workers to forced labor, such as threatening foreign migrants with deportation unless they continued to work. A 2006 presidential decree included a stated goal to amend Brazilian anti-trafficking laws to achieve parity between penalties applied to sex trafficking and slave labor crimes; , such amendments remained unrealized. A bill first proposed in 2001 which would allow the government to confiscate and redistribute property on which forced labor has been employed is still pending.
The government maintained efforts to investigate forced labor crimes. During the reporting period, the government prosecuted and convicted 15 persons under the "trabalho escravo" law. The 15 convicted offenders were given sentences ranging from 30 months to 10 years and six months plus fines, compared with 23 convictions for trabalho escravo during the previous year. Convicted trafficking offenders had subjected workers to slave labor on a rice and soy plantation, a palm-oil plantation, and cattle ranches. The Ministry of Labor’s anti-slave labor mobile unit, created in 1995, increased the number of rescue operations conducted last year; the unit’s labor inspectors continued to free victims, and require those responsible to pay approximately $3.3 million in fines. In the past, mobile unit inspectors did not typically seize physical evidence or attempt to interview witnesses with the goal of developing a criminal investigation or prosecution; labor inspectors and labor prosecutors can only apply civil penalties, and their anti-trafficking efforts were not always coordinated with public ministry prosecutors, who initiate criminal cases in federal court. In addition to weak coordination among the police, judiciary, and prosecutors, local political pressure and the remoteness of areas in which slave labor was practiced were cited as impediments in criminal prosecution of slave labor offenders.
Sex trafficking
In 2010, five sex trafficking offenders were convicted in one case involving Brazilian women trafficked to Switzerland, with sentences ranging from one to six years’ imprisonment. Such results represent a decrease in convictions when compared with 22 sex trafficking convictions achieved during the previous reporting period. There were no reports of convictions for internal sex trafficking, although several individuals were arrested for this crime. Authorities collaborated with foreign governments in a number of transnational trafficking cases involving victims trafficked to Italy, Spain, Portugal, Canada, Switzerland, Mexico, Argentina, and the United States. An integrated sex trafficking database which will collect information from law enforcement, the judiciary branch, and anti-trafficking centers around the country remained in the testing stage.
Transgender Victims The transgender population of Brazil is at especially high risk for sex trafficking. According to the United States Department of State, Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons "2021 Trafficking in Persons Report: Brazil", as of 2019 "90 percent of transgender women in Brazil are in commercial sex, and of those in Rio de Janeiro, more than half are in a situation at high risk for human trafficking." Transgender people are also at high risk for often violent murders. "In Brazil, data from Antra (National Association of Trans and Queer People) show that every 48 hours, one trans person dies. 82% of trans victims are black people. There were cruel practices, such as carbonization, stoning, and decapitation in 80% of the cases." In 2017, the Trans Murder Monitoring Project reported that at least 167 trans people were murdered in Brazil. A combination of both homophobia and racism contribute to such a high rate of trans victims, and some poor communities in Brazil are especially prejudiced against trans women of color. Gilmara Cunha, a trans-black woman who was raised in one such community and is now a psychologist and activist for LGBTQIA+ rights, and spoke about the experience of the trans-black woman in poorer Brazilian communities. Cunha describes these communities as "places where sexism, transphobia, and prejudice are repeated...in Brazil, to be trans means you fight to have something to eat. It means to be a disposable body in a heteronormative society, a society that kills our lives daily."
Official complicity