Woman in Brazil enslaved for 55 years by 3 generations of the same family

https://english.elpais.com/international/2026-07-10/woman-rescued-in-brazil-after-being-enslaved-for-55-years-by-three-generations-of-the-same-family.html

by RetroTechie • 11 days ago

163 225 11 days ago

english.elpais.com

Razengan2• 11 days ago

Although the family has agreed to compensate her, Maria, who lived in near-total isolation and without contact with her relatives, will remain with her employers

What the fuck?

Why did the law need the family's "agreement"??

Why is nobody going to jail for imprisoning someone for 55 years??

MichaelZuo4• 10 days ago

In Brazil there are so many laws, I heard that nearly 100% of the population treats laws like strongly worded suggestions, at best.

Idk how the prosecution system even functions without credibility.

mcdonje• 10 days ago

If it operates like most corrupt systems, it binds the have-nots, but not the haves.

matheusmoreira4• 10 days ago

It's the usual "criminalize everyone then selectively enforce when politically convenient" corruption.

leoc2• 10 days ago

Just going on what it says in the article, it may be difficult to prove that anyone specifically forbade her to leave or made threats to prevent her from leaving.

flyingshelf2• 10 days ago

I have some insight into this as my ex ended up in a similar situation in Malaysia. Rich family, no free days, 5-22 work hours.

It took me a year to convince her that it was not ok. They took away her passport, phone, she wasn't allowed to go out without them. I was ready to help her but she did not want my help.

In the end I'm sure she had to pay her "employer" for breach of contract since she left early. I think she had less than $1000 saved from these 18 months of work.

The thing that made me angry the most is that the family was incredibly well off, yet thought they deserve a slave (or more than one) at home.

tchalla2• 10 days ago

The concern is that Maria’s dependence on the exploiting family is so extreme that removing her abruptly, without a structured support network, could do more harm than good

From the article.

leoc2• 10 days ago

See also the late Alex Tizon's "My Family's Slave" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-s... , with a 2017 HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14350059 .

ryukoposting• 10 days ago

Oh wow, I didn't realize this was already 9 years old. One of the essays of all time.

Certainly provides some perspective on why Brazil might let that woman stay with the family that enslaved her. Granted, Lola's case is unique because she was taken halfway around the world and was an undocumented immigrant for decades. It sounds like that's not the case for this woman in Brazil, but there's a lot we don't know.

I've seen what might be a similar social dynamic in very long, but abusive marriages in the US. A person can understand intellectually that they could have a better life elsewhere, but this has been their life for so long that conceiving of what that life might be like is impossible, or terrifying at best. I resent the abuser no less, but it's hard to know what to make of all of it.

metadat• 10 days ago

Thanks for unearthing this, it was immediately what came to mind when I saw this headline and read some of the discussion.

zaik• 10 days ago

$40k compensation for 55 years of service...

threethirtytwo5• 10 days ago

The crime done here is nearly death penalty levels. Nearly. Jail time for the entire family or stripped of all wealth.

Maybe public humiliation is better, release names and address.

rglullis7• 10 days ago

You are acting like the case is that the girl was kidnapped or taken from their family against their will. Barring extraordinary circumstances, this is far from the truth here. More likely than not, this is the case of some poor family that couldn't take care of the girl and gave her away.

It is a horrible arrangement, and she should be given a lot more than what she is getting (at the very least, she should be given backpay + pension equivalent to the market rate of her work for all these years), but to treat this case as some sadistic family keeping someone in captivity is overreacting.

vitorgrs• 9 days ago

Knowing today's Brazil, the family would probably get a considerable amount of followers on Instagram, for weird reasons.

tchalla2• 10 days ago

“The signing of this agreement does not rule out the possibility that the worker may pursue individual claims through the courts,” the statement added.

So not only but a start.

brabel2• 10 days ago

In cases like this, it’s likely the victim defended the family, and it made it impossible to classify the crime as slavery if she said she was free to leave but “was afraid of the violence outside”, which the article mentioned. It sounds ridiculous but in any court, if you can’t prove something beyond doubt, you cannot punish, which I think is why they ended up with that arrangement.

rglullis7• 10 days ago

If you ever been to or lived in Fortaleza, "being afraid of the violence outside" is not ridiculous at all.

forinti4• 10 days ago

Minimum wage is about US$300, which would make about US$220k total (you get about 13.3 salaries per year), plus fines and overtime. They'll have to pay social security too. It seems to me that the case doesn't include the labour part of the situation. That might be a separate case.

segmondy• 10 days ago

systemic racism is a thing, bet you there are judges, lawyers, etc that have the same thing going on. many in power do and thus are sympathetic to such causes. it's hard to viciously go after what you are guilt of.

forinti4• 10 days ago

Its a common occurrence for families to take in poor girls to do house work in exchange for food and lodging. And with the insidious nature of Brazilian racism, they will pretend that she is part of the family. They might even take her on vacations (to work, of course). If you grow up with this mentality it might even be hard for you to see the injustice. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so, decades after its neighbours. The slaves never got compensation but their owners did.

petcat• 10 days ago

I was shocked to read how late even several prominent European countries abolished it. Most northern US states abolished slavery even before Britain, France, Portugal, and (especially) Spain did.

wahern2• 10 days ago

Serfdom wasn't legally abolished in Russia until 1861. Slavery was technically abolished in the late 1700s, but in some areas serfs were still bought and sold like chattel until the end of serfdom.

The Ottoman Empire legally abolished slavery in the 1880s, but there was still illicit yet tolerated slavery in Turkey into the 1930s.

I think in some areas of the Sahel chattel slavery may still exist as a practical matter. Mauritania didn't legally abolish chattel slavery until 1981, for example, but as in other areas it can take decades for reality to match the law, given the laws were often changed under international pressure rather than reflecting any change to the domestic social order.

throw_m239339• 10 days ago

You'd be shocked how much of our "friends" in MENA still have legal slavery for non citizens. When an employer can legally confiscate someone's passport and one can only leave the country with their authorization, it is slavery.

I have no idea why we in the west consider that normal and look the other way... What am I saying, I know, oil & VC money...

Some of them also bring their Filipino, India, Nepali, or African slave maids in Europe and everybody looks the other way, they have too much money to be criticized...

They are so brazen about slavery they routinely sell their slaves on Instagram or Facebook ads, with copies such as "doesn't need much food","will sleep on the floor", "will work 20 hours a day"...

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50228549

"African worker, clean and smiley," said one listing. Another: "Nepalese who dares to ask for a day off."
When speaking to the sellers, the undercover team frequently heard racist language. "Indians are the dirtiest," said one, describing a woman being advertised.

They are dehumanized at first place, but the level of racism in these places, on top of all that is shocking...

hokkos• 10 days ago

Serfdom was abolished in the Kingdom of France in 1315.

crote2• 10 days ago

This isn't very surprising.

The vast majority of slaves went to the New World, so that's where most of its effects were felt. Of the 12.5M people kidnapped from Africa, only ~9000 went to the Old World. It just wasn't as obvious of a problem in Europe itself.

An interesting side-effect of this is that a lot of European countries have two relevant dates: the first being the banning of slave trade, the second being the banning of slavery. For example, the UK prohibited any involvement in the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, but slavery in the UK itself was only abolished in 1833.

insane_dreamer4• 10 days ago

Most northern US states abolished slavery even before Britain, France, Portugal, and (especially) Spain did

Sort of. France and England abolished slavery within their own territories before the US states did, but it did not extend to their colonies until later. France banned slavery within its home territory back in the 1300s (Free Soil Principle), but continued with slavery through its "Code Noir" (Black Code) in its colonies, where slavery was not permanently abolished until 1848 (it was abolished at the time of the French Revolution but then reinstated by Napoleon). England abolished slavery at home in the mid 1700s but not in its colonies until 1834.

(Like the US North, England and France had very small populations of Africans/others, so it was relatively painless and easy to ban slavery there, while continuing to accept slavery "elsewhere". For the US North "elsewhere" was the South, for England and France it was their colonies. Same principle though.)

Along the same lines, slavery of Catholics was forbidden in Europe all the way back in the Middle Ages. So it was acknowledged to be something bad, that Christians should not do to each other. But slavery of "infidels", heathen/pagan/Muslims/etc., was OK - and not only okay but sanctioned by Romanus Pontifex in the 1400s granting Portugal the authority to enslave "pagans" (basically all non-Europeans) along the coast of Africa. (Incidentally, as some Africans converted to Christianity, this posed a problem (they were no longer pagan and couldn't be enslaved), and so eventually it shifted to being about race and skin color rather than religion.)

cyphar• 10 days ago

The abolition of slavery in the US is unfortunately a more complicated story than most people are aware.

The 13th amendment removed the legal concept of slavery (except for convicts) but it was still not a crime to do slavery. Slavery changed shape many times over the years since the civil war (usually involving convicting black people under sham crimes and then selling them as debt slaves or forcing them to sign contracts that rendered them slaves under threat of being convicted for said sham crimes) and can only reasonably be said to have actually ended in the US after Pearl Harbour when concerns that it would be used as enemy propaganda caused the Justice Department to properly prosecute slave owners (see Circular 3591[1]).

The last chattel slave in the US was Alfred Irving[2] and he was released in late 1942. He was kept in chains and was permanently disfigured due to constant physical abuse from his owners. He died in 1960.

[3] is a very comprehensive video essay about the topic.

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Circular_No._3591 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Irving_(former_slave) [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA

iammrpayments• 10 days ago

I was repeatedly told in school that Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery, only to find out recently that places like UAE had not abolished slavery until 1967.

jdiff• 10 days ago

They likely had the qualifier, as does GP, that it was the last country "in the Americas."

inexcf• 10 days ago

"last country to abolish slavery" vs. "last country to practice slavery"

tedggh• 10 days ago

Most people I talk to don’t know that 80% of Russians were slaves until their emancipation in 1861, as well as a significant amount of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Latvians and Estonians. There were no reparations paid, in fact they had to continue working for free for generations to pay bankers for the same land they have been enslaved for. Then just after the former serfs finally paid their “debt” the Bolsheviks came and took it

ffsm82• 10 days ago

As if they stopped... The whole middle east is a shit show in that regard.

And North Korea continues to show that literally nobody cares, really. Because if they did, at least that would've been prevent- or at least stopable with some concessions to China. The North Korean people would've at least been treated as humans if they became part of China and the NK dictator along with the whole government be executed.

jauco• 10 days ago

https://www.nytimes.com/1967/03/28/archives/saudi-arabian-sl...

AwaAwa• 10 days ago

This is quite interesting, given the UAE was only formed in 1971, and their precursor states only agreed to form the UAE in 1968.

phyzome3• 10 days ago

Correction: The US still has not abolished slavery.

It is still legal in the case of prisoners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...

froh3• 10 days ago

yes! which is _the_ driving factor behind the US prison system with its private prison labor facilities.

there is zero financial motivation for the state for prevention or rehab or any other activities to reduce imprisonment rates

did I mention disenfranchisement of the imprisoned?

encom• 10 days ago

Prisoners are not slaves, because they are not the property of the prison or any other entity. It's called involuntary servitude. I'm sure the people affected do not care about the distinction, but words matter.

It's also trivially easy to not end up in involuntary servitude.

elmer2• 10 days ago

I suppose using this logic, murder is legal, because of self defense. Theft is legal because of tax laws.

Prisoners aren't 'slaves'. They are being punished for crimes they committed. Very dofferent than being born into it and bought/sold to the highest bidder.

matheusmoreira4• 10 days ago

"Common" occurrence? I've literally never seen literal slavery like this happen before.

motbus32• 10 days ago

"It is" is a bit misleading.

I will say it was common up to the end of 70s and somewhat into the 80s. Common here I don't mean that every single person would have a "slave child" at home but you'd know someone or someone that knew someone who did it.

I am not saying it justify this horrible behaviour, but mostly as to say how much worse it could get. Some would just be "Cinderella" style abuse, but other would be physically and sexually abused.

Some reform of policies around de 90s cleared much of the evil practice.

I think by today standards, 99% of people knowing this would have denounced this much earlier. The fact it did not happen in this case is because this family is related to a powerful politician of the region.

Compensation they offer is too little and too disrespectful. It is basically 3 USD a week for the past half decade of forced work relationship. First, it would need to be at least 100x more than that and it would need to put this rubbish in form of people into jail for the rest of their lives.

beAbU• 10 days ago

they will pretend that she is part of the family

Wasn't there some mild scandal a decade or so ago where wealthy white American families would adopt kids from Africa or Mexico, only to force them to do housework the whole time?

spwa42• 10 days ago

https://www.courts.wa.gov/opinions/pdf/774166.pdf

Well, it's classed as child abuse and the perpetrators ("parents") were punished harshly. So pretty bad, but not remotely the same thing as what happens in the middle east or north Africa.

bodash• 10 days ago

“The oppressors left, but their systems remain”

archagon2• 10 days ago

Not Brazil — Mexico — but the movie Roma does an amazing job at dissecting this sort of dynamic.

forinti4• 9 days ago

If you found that movie interesting, check out The Second Mother (Que Horas ela Volta?) which is a Brazilian movie about a maid and her relationship with the middle class family that employs her.

hobo_in_library• 10 days ago

Hot take: As bad as this is, I wonder if it would be kinder to leave her with the family for the rest of her life.

This lady is in her 60s, does she even know any other way to even live? Life with that family may be better than whatever Brazil's equivalent of welfare shelters are.

Seems like that may have been why the case workers left her with that family for now.

geraneum3• 10 days ago

If they pay her what she’s owed and the damages. She can get her place, hire people and pay them to care of her or help her.

singpolyma32• 10 days ago

If she hires people doesn't that just perpetuate the problem?

benjiro29• 10 days ago

The problem that often the victims also have not educated, have no worldly experience, often have no idea about money handeling beyond small items.

This can result in them being exploited again by even more unscrupulous people. The articles clearly mentioned how difficult these cases are to deal with. While they do not go into detail, the above is why.

Its very easy to gain peoples trust when they have no sense of normal anymore, and can you sign this paper, o, we need to go to a friendly notary to help with it. and before you know it, the people just handed over their apartment / or whatever.

There are a lot of good people with will want to help but it only takes one rotten apple to destroy peoples live again. Recently in Europe there was a case of a helper that took elderly their IDs and helped herself to their money. She made 100s of victims. Now imaging that type of person with somebody who probably did not have any proper education and normal independent life experiences that we all had the luxury of having.

In a ideal world, we have proper state funded solutions, with proper oversight to help people integrate into society. Reality is that if any services exist, they are underfunded, often lacking oversight and people fall into the often chasm of cracks.

These type of stories are never clean white and black, but a mix of gray sludge, where we all hope for the perfect ideal solution but often there are not many options. And naivety tend to often do more harm then good.

dev1ycan• 10 days ago

If I had a guess, the family got rid off her the easy way when she was old, they saved themselves a lot of money.

flyingshelf2• 10 days ago

No, if they wanted to get rid of her there were a lot of easier solutions. As you may be aware, slaves can be sold.

t1234s2• 10 days ago

I was talking to a doctor who went to medical school in Brazil and said it was normal for upper-middle class people to have a live-in domestic servant. Many of the floorplans for condos or houses include a servants quarters. They were telling me theirs cost around $12 USD a day which is not a bad deal.

Eddy_Viscosity2• 10 days ago

$12 USD a day which is not a bad deal

For the owner or the servant?

t1234s2• 10 days ago

probably for both.. don't forget it includes an air conditioned place to live, food and internet plus a salary. In exchange they take care of domestic needs (cooking, shopping, house keeping)

elygre• 10 days ago

Not a bad deal for who?

pelagicAustral• 10 days ago

This used to be quite common in Chile as well. I don't think it's that prevalent anymore, but it was very interesting to see the synergy some families built after decades of cohabiting with a "service person" (don't really know what word to use). I met a lot of people that widely regarded their service lady as a mother, they were pretty much raised with them around, so the bonds run deep. I have no doubt some times the compensation might not exactly be the best, but I have met quite a lot of people that are well happy with this arrangement.

forinti4• 10 days ago

If you pay minimum wage (about US$300) it would be about that per working day. Increasingly, cleaners are working per diem because they earn a lot more (about US$40 a day, but this varies a lot by region).

The downside is that they get no benefits.

wahern2• 10 days ago

This is true in Singapore and Malaysia, as well, where Filipino or Indonesian cooks and housekeepers are extremely common, as are separate entrances--typically into the kitchen. In Malaysia there's an odd situation, the reverse of the dynamic in the US, where Indonesian servant immigration is encouraged as a way to grow the Muslim population and help diminish the political power of Chinese-Malaysians and Indian-Malaysians.

noisy_boy• 10 days ago

This is true in Singapore and Malaysia, as well, where Filipino or Indonesian cooks and housekeepers are extremely common, as are separate entrances--typically into the kitchen.

Live in housekeepers are very common indeed in Singapore. However, majority of Singapore lives in Housing Development Board flats that do not have any separate entrance into kitchen.

ChrisMarshallNY• 10 days ago

I grew up with servants (in Subsaharan Africa and Morocco).

However, they were paid (I have no idea whether it was a good wage, or not), and had pretty decent quarters (in Morocco). My parents were pretty kind, fairly liberal, people. I would be quite surprised (and shocked) if they took advantage of the servants. I know that my mother made damn sure that I had respect for poor folks.

mc322• 10 days ago

Those things are a symptom of an undeveloped economy. It harkens back to a time of less development where there were more hands than jobs and much of the labor was manual. Not to excuse the practice in modern times but go back a few generations and that was the reality of the world -everywhere.

Laurel1234• 10 days ago

It's a symptom of inequality. It will start happening more and more even in the first world if inequality isn't tackled and wealth continues to concentrate.

argentinian17• 10 days ago

Why do you see inequality as the problem, instead of poverty?

55555• 10 days ago

The median income in brazil is 10X lower than USA. So $12 a day -> $120 a day. That's similar to what someone in the US at the bottom of the economic ladder might earn. We have the same thing, it's just that Americans want to have servants but don't want to see them, so there's an app barrier between you and the poor. Someone cooks your food, someone else delivers your food, someone cleans your hotel room, but Americans prefer not to have to ever learn their names or talk to them. Is that really better?

Unlike when you use an app, for the most part, because we're not psychopaths, living with someone every day for months or years causes us to feel a great affinity and care towards them.

I live in a developing country. Some people treat their live-in staff badly. But for many others, this is not the case.

Imagine you are a high-earner and hard worker and so you and your wife get a live-in nanny to assist with childrearing duties. Often, two or three decades later, the live-in nanny is ready to retire, but your children (whom you love) have come to see her as a member of the family, or even as a second mother. Surely you also do. How can you live with someone for 20-30 years and not care about them? You might thus often take care of her for the rest of her life, even though she has her own savings.

(No, I do not have live-in house staff. But I've had the same maid for 7 years and she knows she can come to me if she needs anything.)

How one treats someone else is probably mostly just a reflection of the individual. But it's harder to disregard someone's humanity when they live in your house and you've know them for years.

ricardobeat• 10 days ago

This is probably the same line of thought the families involved in the story have had.

Yet, the end result is still quite similar to slavery. Why do you suppose the servants stay, instead of living a life of their own? I think you’ll find the answer there.

ufmace• 10 days ago

Thanks for your perspective. I do wonder if this arrangement is usually not as bad as some people are implying. Though on the other hand, the line between this sort of thing and something that can reasonably be called slavery can be quite fuzzy.

mc322• 10 days ago

The practice of live-in maids has been somewhat common throughout the world up until WWI and into WWII. Well-to-do families would taken in boys and girls from poor families and use them for house and yard work. It wasn’t slavery, or even indentured servitudes, but it did take opportunity of their misfortune. Aristocrats and well to dos would take girls and boys mostly from the less educated countryside or from war-torn areas of the rest of Europe and use them as cheap labor. Some would stay on and some would go off to seek better future outside those families. It was somewhat symbiotic the poor kids (and their families) needed the money and the wealthy could show off they had money to spend on domestic help.

matheusmoreira4• 10 days ago

I am a brazilian doctor. Yeah, richer people are very likely to hire staff to manage their homes. It's not a rule, but it's not rare for them to live in the house they work at. This is common enough to show up as a trope in popular telenovelas.

I've yet to uncover a case of literal slavery like TFA though. One could argue the workers aren't getting paid enough and I'd agree, but the workers are getting paid.

brazukadev2• 10 days ago

It is very common for the worker to not get paid. A place to sleep and food is not payment, enslaved people also got it.

zkmon• 10 days ago

I hoped the article would mention whether the woman desires to be "rescued" or wants changes in the way she lives now.

mcphage2• 10 days ago

whether the woman desires to be "rescued" or wants changes in the way she lives now

Here’s the thing: you can’t keep someone isolated for 55 years, working them without pay—regardless of whether the victim thinks that they want it or not.

Loughla3• 10 days ago

Something, something, Plato's allegory of the cave.

comrade1234• 10 days ago

My wife's family were wealthy Chinese near Hong Kong. Her grandmother took in a poor girl as a servant. She was part of the family but also basically a slave. The grandmother arranged her marriage when the girl was older. We met the girls granddaughter when we visited china - she was a new college student. The two families still think of themselves as related.

BloondAndDoom• 10 days ago

Almost same story (except china), my grandmother lost her parents very young. A family took her in and she worked for them until 20 years old or something then she got married.

scottconover2• 10 days ago

I’m new to HN. How does this relate to the theme of Hacker News?

girvo• 10 days ago

Anything that is interesting. It’s not all just tech here.

tomrod• 10 days ago

Those of us that soldered wires, wrote custom drivers for esoteric hardware, and played with crazy things in the garage recognize that social systems are hackable too.

adolfoabegg• 10 days ago

Read this https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mcphage2• 10 days ago

Welcome to HN! You’ll find that a lot of the readers and commenters here don’t view technology as an isolated field, that it interconnects with all sorts of other systems—sociology, politics, entertainment, manufacturing, business, and so on.

mhb• 10 days ago

Despite the other comments attempting to expand the scope of "hacking" or general interest to pretty much anything, it doesn't.

xboxnolifes• 10 days ago

On-topic is described as anything that is interesting. And off-topic is described as typical news that doesnt have interesting implications.

froh3• 10 days ago

at the bottom of the page there is guidelines and FAQ

they also give good indication on how to handle topics that don't tickle your personal preferences (for "interesting" or "curious"): silently ignore them

especially if interest is the guidance on downvoting and flagging. the sorting is not according to your personal preferences, as in "social media", but according to the hn hive think. thus negative voting indicates "anti-curious", "anti-conversation", not dislike.

ThrowawayR2• 10 days ago

Welcome to Hacker News. Such submissions are mostly not on-topic according to the HN guidelines linked at the bottom of the page but there are persistent activist users who try to drag off-topic social issues onto Hacker News when the opportunity presents itself under the thin pretext that "everything is political". Most such submissions don't have the momentum to reach the HN front page but occasionally one does.

The joke's on them; it likely erodes support for their causes.

RetroTechie6• 10 days ago

Submitter here. As per HN guidelines: "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".

This playing out across generations of the family that kept her, the woman 'rescued' but staying with them for the time being, the social context, income levels, how to keep a slave from leaving in today's ultra-connected world, the low $ damages mentioned, relation with other modern forms of slavery...

Plenty to go on there. Btw welcome to HN!

scottconover2• 10 days ago

Interesting no doubt!

chwtutha• 10 days ago

You’re doing great so far; keep making more comments like this and you’ll fit right in

carlosjobim3• 10 days ago

"Statistics suggest that Maria was undoubtedly poor and, most likely, Black."

That is a new way of reporting news, that journalist Gortázar seems to have invented here. When you don't know anything about the victim, just make something up from "statistics".

Where else can we apply this technique?

"Maria entered their lives around 1971 — the year Henry Kissinger visited China, John Lennon wrote Imagine, and Mexico hosted the first Women’s World Cup."

Good to know.

"The traditional maid’s room is gradually disappearing in Brazil, but buildings with separate social and service elevators — for domestic workers, visiting technicians, neighbors with dogs, or residents carrying groceries — remain commonplace."

Those are for separating workers carrying broken dusty floor tiles or ladders or a bunch of fiber cables from the other people using the building.

Anyway, ignoring the lacking quality of the journalism, more countries should do like Brazil and call slavery for what it is in legislation, instead of using euphemisms like "human trafficking".

diego_moita3• 10 days ago

At first I found interesting how you nitpick in irrelevant details while ignoring the bigger picture.

The point of the whole article is to use a single case to illustrate a bigger picture that you seem to deliberately oversee: abuse and exploitation of manual and unqualified workers.

But, then, I saw your Brazilian name and understood. Brazilian jingoism freaks out when Brazil "looks bad" to the world. It is a very common reaction among 3rd world countries. Indians, Pakistanis, Nigerians, etc are just like that too.

carlosjobim3• 10 days ago

Dear Diego,

Senhor Jobim had to leave hastily for the horse race track, and has asked me to briefly tend to his hacker messages and Kubernetes before I prepare his afternoon coffee.

He regrets that you found his commentary as being picking of the nits, but says that the article itself didn't invite any much broader reflection on the subject matter. He also mentions that no amount of bad publicity could ever make Brazil look worse than their neighbours, meaning Argentina - as he has understood from your hacker name is your home country.

Further, the journalists exploits a crime in her agenda to ignite hatred between the races, instead of focusing on facts or trying to broaden the picture. A bigger picture could for example be that Brazilian law classifies as slavery such crimes as lawmakers and reporters in other countries are afraid to. Which has later been mentioned by other senhores hackers in this thread, for example regarding berry pickers in Sweden and Finland.

He sends you his latest composition, for your enjoyment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGO44D-hMmQ

diego_moita3• 10 days ago

A similar history, in the U.S.: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-s...

tom86150• 10 days ago

What disgusting subhumans. They should rot in jail until they close their eyes. Nobody can tell me that such a life is not exploiting and slavery. They dont need to play stupid and pay a laughable amount of money for a destroyed life. But thats how some people got rich...pretty disgusting.

atum472• 10 days ago

Yup, my mom and her sisters were all sent off to work on family houses when they were about 10 - 12. They were born in the country side, and my grandpa didn't care for them at all.

luipugs• 10 days ago

Did they also eventually win their freedom like in the article?

atum472• 10 days ago

Yes. She left that house to work on a nursery home with the nuns. Then on a supermarket, I think. Then my father knocked her up at the age of 20. Interesting woman.

OrvalWintermute• 10 days ago

I’m not quite how this relates to tech, hackernews or startups

la64710• 10 days ago

Oh the caste system of the west

timedude3• 10 days ago

I see a lot of comments claiming that slavery was abolished. It was not, we just made the transition to another form of slavery, one where most people think they are free. In reality, they work every day while most of their earnings are taken from them by force every month ('taxation'). The well known slave Frederik Douglas was one of the first examples of this. Douglas made a deal with his master to do whatever he liked as long as he gave his master a cut. The same dynamic is now implemented worldwide. Watch the movie Jones Plantation. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26964727/

anon7000• 10 days ago

Well, taxation is not “most of your earnings.” Not even remotely close. If we’re talking theft, maybe look at the companies reaping profits off your labor without sharing it.

I think your definition of slavery is highly insulting. Slavery is bad not because two people agree to have this profit sharing scheme as you seem to be implying.

Slavery is evil because one person is nearly fully and entirely controlling another person’s entire life, usually for the “owner’s” gain, without the other person’s consent.

timedude3• 10 days ago

Isnt taxation evetually more than half of your earnings? Eventually close to 70 or 80 percent. Depending on what plantation you live

motbus32• 10 days ago

She will re receive a compensation of 50.000 reais. Which on every, with current exchange rate should be about 3 USD per week of work. One can't get a better bargain for a slave!

Woman in Brazil enslaved for 55 years by 3 generations of the same family

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