There are multiple public agencies in Brazil that operate for the purpose of inspection, investigation, and the levying of penalties for the crime of exploitation of labor in conditions analogous to slavery: These include the civil police, Federal Police, the Ministry of Labor, the Regional Labor Tribunals, the Public Ministry of Labor, the Federal Public Ministry, and the state-level public ministries, with branches that encompass the entire nation and others that focus on specific regions. The activities of each one of these entities is recorded in different types of documents that are processed at various levels and can cover considerable amounts of time, depending on the deadlines and procedures involved. While the volume of this documentation is quite substantial, these records are not especially well known or widely used.

The principal Brazilian legislation regarding what has been termed contemporary slave labor dates back to 1940. Article 149 of the Penal Code, promulgated on December 7, 1940, defines the crime of “reducing someone to conditions analogous to slavery” and stipulates penalties of fines and imprisonment.Footnote ¹ Even though the terms of article 149 (and its revision in 2003)Footnote ² have been discussed almost to the point of exhaustion by politicians, researchers, and activists, little is known about the administrative, laborist, and penalization processes that the article has generated. In the labor tribunals, the situation is similar, with the additional complication that the majority of the records have been destroyed as a direct result of institutional practice.Footnote ³ In the Ministry of Labor, the Special Group for Mobile Inspection to Combat Work in Conditions Analogous to Slavery, since its creation in 2014, has been tasked with issuing information on the activities of the Federal System of Work Inspection,Footnote ⁴ but this is only accessible for those who are duly registered.Footnote ⁵ The Federal Public Ministry makes some of the Reports of the Mobile Inspection Group available on its internet site, but only for the year 2013, and there is no indication of whether these correspond or not to the totality of inspections for that year.Footnote ⁶ The Public Ministry of Labor, by means of the Digital Observatory of Slave Labor in Brazil, provides some statistical data with regard to the rescue of workers beginning in 2003, which allow for the identification of patterns of locales of recruitment and exploitation of labor and migratory flows, among other indicators.Footnote ⁷ The documentation for specific cases, however, is not available through that site.

In addition to this, there are a large number of projects and initiatives to combat contemporary slavery throughout Brazil. The website of the organization Réporter Brasil, for example, publicizes these practices and makes available dozens of publications, reports, texts of legislation, and statistical data regarding the violation of labor and socio-environmental rights in Brazil.Footnote ⁸ Since 2003, the Research Group on Contemporary Slave Labor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro has been linking up researchers and scholars who work on this theme, producing and publishing texts, organizing meetings and scientific symposia, and participating in acts to denounce and combat slave labor. In this case, the institution compiles and keeps the documents produced dating back to the 1970s, and these records include testimony from workers, reports from various governmental entities, files from criminal and workplace suits, analyses and denunciations by the Pastoral Land Commission, and other sources.Footnote ⁹ Even though this collection is quite rich and has served as the basis for many studies, it does not constitute a continuous institutional repository of documentation.

The public institutions directly concerned with the policies for combatting labor analogous to slavery do not provide organized and indexed collections that would be accessible to researchers. The Memorial of the Public Ministry of Labor, inaugurated in 2017, for example, functions more as a museum space than as a real center of documentation and research.Footnote ¹⁰ Certainly making contact with the Ministry of Labor could result in access to important documents, either directly or by digital means, such as the reports elaborated on by the fiscal auditors of labor conditions.Footnote ¹¹ Unfortunately, in the case of the tribunals, the police, and the ministries, there is no institutionalized archiving policy that would oversee the processing of documents issued by these institutions and would maintain stable channels of public access to them.

The situation used to be no different in the case of the Public Ministry of Labor in the 15th region (MPT15), headquartered in Campinas, the principal municipality in the interior of São Paulo. Since 2003, the administration of documentation in this institution has followed the guidelines of the Manual of Archive Administration of the Public Ministry of Labor, which applies the legislation in force with regard to the federal public service archives.Footnote ¹² However, instead of resulting in the preservation of documentation, this policy led to the destruction of important materials that recorded the activities of this public organ since its earliest operations. In 2010, due to the decrees issued by the Chief Attorney of the Public Ministry, a process began of regularly assessing the documentation and compiling lists of partial or complete elimination of procedural files generated between 1990 and 2005.Footnote ¹³ In spite of having legal authorization to destroy case files, the elimination of documentation was halted, though no initiative to organize the material was adopted.

In August 2013, following contacts with academic researchers interested in the history of slavery in the Americas and contemporary slavery, the situation began to change.Footnote ¹⁴ Thanks to the initiative of these researchers, a project was initiated for the digital preservation of all the investigative files produced by this public entity up to 2009. The project was approved by the Foundation for Support of Research in the State of São Paulo (FAPESP),Footnote ¹⁵ and in 2015, the process of digitalization of this documentation began, and was concluded in April of 2018. This has resulted in a digital collection of some 24,029 procedural documents drawn from cases examined by the attorneys of the Public Ministry of Labor of the 15th Region (Campinas), between 1991 and 2010, and that are now deposited in the Edgard Leuenroth Archive at the University of Campinas (IFCH/UNICAMP).Footnote ¹⁶ Covering 598 municipalities/counties of the state of São Paulo, these documents address multiple themes having to do with infractions of labor laws and violations of human rights. Aside from investigations of slave labor, there are corroborations of (illegal) labor by indigenous peoples, minors, prisoners, disabled people, and public functionaries; as well as materials regarding workers’ associations, discrimination, harassment, contributions to workers’ funds and pensions, contracts, wage rates, working hours, health, safety, workplace environment, outsourcing, and fraud.

In tandem with this, an effort was made to construct a research instrument that systematizes basic information regarding these administrative procedural files, one that allows searches by file number, document type, beginning and end dates of the case, name of the complainant and the object of the complaint, and place and cause of the denunciation/complaint. The Databank, supplemented by various details concerning the Public Ministry of Labor and its record collection, is available on the internet in order to facilitate research by interested parties.Footnote ¹⁷

This set of documents, thus, constitutes one of the first continuous record series of one of the most important public institutions responsible for the inspection of labor relations in contemporary Brazil. Prior to the Federal Constitution of 1988, the Public Ministry of Labor fulfilled the traditional function of issuing opinions on suits brought before the Labor Tribunals. However, starting in the 1990s, the institution began to exercise additional investigative functions, examining irregularities in labor relations linked to the public interest. The digitalized collection registers, therefore, the operations of this entity in its formative period, but when it was already performing some of the functions that characterize it today.

The Public Ministry of Labor in Campinas, the recipient of an increasing number of complaints with regard to possible violations of labor rights, shifted from carrying out a few hundred inquiries at the beginning of the 1990s, to pursuing more than a thousand in the early 2000s. At the end of this period, with the increase in the number of prosecutors, around two thousand cases were opened each year, and more than twenty-five hundred were archived annually. During the 2000s, Region 15 (MPT15) branched out, installing prosecutors in key municipalities (Bauru, São José dos Campos, Ribeirão Preto, Sorocaba, São José do Rio Preto, Presidente Prudente, Araçatuba, and Araraquara), thereby guaranteeing greater decentralization of the institution's operations.

The MPT15 document collection basically consists of two types of administrative procedural materials. The labor courts case files contain commentaries on judicial processes in which the MPT15 acted as author, defendant, or when it participated in its role as legal inspector and issued an opinion with respect to a determinate process. The other set of judicial documents consists of procedural records with various names, but which address investigations of labor irregularities that were conducted by the MPT15 itself. In this collection, the accompanying files are the minority, amounting to no more than 6 percent of the total (or 1,375 documents). Those relating to inquiries, divided into a series of very similar types, such as preparatory procedures, investigations, representations, aside from the public civil inquiries, amount to almost 90 percent of the procedural documents (about 21,400). There are, in addition, other, scarcer types of documents, such as letters of intent (31), hours of administrative service (128), and mediations (247), these last typically referring to cases of imminent strikes.

The investigative collections contain a variety of documents that serve as excellent sources for quantitative and qualitative research. They include documentation from employers, such as registries of employees, guides for pension payments, receipts for equipment deliveries, instruments for production control, cards for control of working hours, manuals of conduct, contracts, certificates of adherence to medical and safety norms, etc. Furthermore, there are workers’ documents, such as copies of work cards and other personal identification papers, check stubs, receipts, tests, health certificates, and, occasionally, handwritten letters. There are also documents from other public entities, including reports issued by inspection auditors from the Ministry of Labor with details about working conditions, housing, food, basic sanitation, transportation, occupational safety, and other health-related issues. In some cases photographs are available, as well as identification sketches for areas that are difficult to access and technical reports on environmental and ergonomic factors. There are, in addition, police incident reports regarding possible crimes, such as impeding labor organizing, illegal enticement, or slave labor, alongside depositions, notices for violations in transit (as in the case of transport trucks for rural workers), and even expert reports regarding cases involving death in the workplace. Sentencing documents and some evidence gathered for legal cases can be found in the files from the labor courts.

In addition to this constellation of documents, the prosecutors and advisors themselves collected newspaper materials involving denunciations and produced writings that penetrate the case files in the form of preliminary analyses and dispatches, minutes of judicial audiences, and reports of inspections in the field—sometimes accompanied by photographs and films. One can also find statements of commitment to reform conduct signed by violators, registries of official communication with other public organs and private entities, as well as reports on the filing away of documents, in which the prosecutors justify the closure of the ministerial inquiry into a particular irregularity either because it was not within the purview of the MPT15 or because the illegal activity had ceased.

The foregoing describes a collection of extremely rich material for studies on the theme of labor relations and the institutional operations of an important public organ directly engaged with this theme. In this set of documents, at first glance, contemporary slave labor does not occupy a salient position. An initial search utilizing the mechanism for consultation of the Databank allows us to establish that, of a total of 24,029 administrative cases initiated between 1991 and 2010, only 159 were identified by the prosecutors as being related to the terms “slave labor” or “slavery.”Footnote ¹⁸ Nevertheless, in a variety of situations, the classifications indicated by the prosecutors for the object of their investigation encompass themes that correlate with slave labor in the strict sense. This is to say, to the term “slavery” can be added to others, such as enticement of workers, trafficking, indebtedness, excessive work hours, private jails, forced labor, and degrading conditions. A search in the Databank that included all the terms related to the practice of contemporary slavery resulted in an increase to 264 cases requiring investigation that we can classify as “slave labor and analogous to slave labor.” Moreover, a search for the term slave in the body of the digitized files revealed that words related to slavery, pronounced by various individuals, appear in at least 568 investigations. Sometimes it is mentioned in a purely metaphorical sense: The workers lived “like slaves.” At other times, certain expressions question the boundaries between slave and free labor, such as the use of the term “semi-slavery” for situations in which the salaries paid are so inadequate as to make it impossible for the workers, above all migrant workers, to buy a return ticket to their place of origin.

Moving beyond the realm of statistics, through qualitative readings of the investigative files, or through a comparative analysis with other sources, it would definitely be possible to perceive the impact of legal changes on the treatment of this theme, the different meanings attached to labor relations for the various parties involved, and the importance that conditions related to contemporary slavery occupy among the infractions of the Consolidated Labor Laws (CLT), Brazil's federal labor code. One can note the irregularities in contracts, in the conditions of occupational health and safety, in remuneration, in the documentation regarding labor relations, etc.

This brief incursion into the documentation should be sufficient to demonstrate the potential resources that this collection offers for research regarding the exploitation of labor in conditions analogous to slavery and on the organs and agents charged with combating it. These are themes that have been the subject of public policies and of much debate on the part of magistrates, inspectors, attorneys, journalists, union officials, etc. Gradually, historians have begun to take part in this debate. For them, aside from comparisons with what we might term historic slavery, the historical treatment of this issue necessarily implies preservation and access to institutional records. The collection of MPT15, now placed at the disposition of researchers, begins to fill this gap in the documentation. But other initiatives are essential—and especially the adoption of a firm position vis à vis the organs that produce the records relative to labor relations in contemporary Brazil—insisting that collections such as this one be preserved, organized, and made available for consultation by the public.