Binka Le Breton interview, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2003

          When we think of slavery, most of us automatically picture  black Africans in America’s Deep South, picking cotton on the plantations and singing Negro spirituals.  We automatically think of slavery as being a very old-fashioned and barbaric concept, a thing of the past, like public hangings and children in the coal mines.  We would be very, very wrong to think that.  And utterly horrified, most of us, in our nice civilised  country to know that there are currently twenty seven million slaves in the world.  To know that trafficking in human beings is ranked third in the hierarchy of most profitable businesses, surpassed only by the trade in arms and drugs.
          Binka Le Breton was an ordinary middle class white woman, well educated and well off and living in Washington with her husband Robin who worked for the World Bank.  The couple had been posted all over the world-Kenya, Indonesia, India, Brazil-as part of his job and Binka, being a concert pianist had always entertained the ex-pats, wherever they went.  Upon Robin’s retirement, with the kids safely in College, the couple decided to realise a dream that they had nurtured all their lives.  They decided to buy a farm in Brazil, in the rainforest and to make a new life for themselves in that country.  Land was easily affordable and the Brazilian government was in favour of immigrants bringing money into an extremely poor area, where small farmers were earning subsistence income by hacking away at the trees and planting coffee.  Coffee, Binka points out, -as we order a couple of cappuccinos in Dublin’s Westbury Hotel-might cost an arm and a leg in Ireland these days, but the poor farmers are paid a pittance for their crops and in order to survive, they need to encroach further and further on the already endangered rainforest.
          All over the world, everyone needs to make a living.  Some of us have higher standards than others and all of us want to buy what we need at the best possible price.  So if ten cents off the price of a packet of coffee means one less meal for a family in Brazil, what do we care, here in Ireland?  Do we even think about where our coffee comes from, who is planting it, who is sweating over it, picking it, packing it and who is making money on it?  Most of us, Binka says, are far too busy worrying about how we are going to pay our mortgages, make the repayments on the car and take our kids on holidays to have time for such concerns.  And then there are the likes of Bono and Bob Geldof who make these things their business, and force us to sit up and take notice.
          Binka Le Breton is one such person.  She’s not a rock star, but nevertheless she’s touring the world, along with representatives of Trocaire, raising awareness about slavery in Brazil.  During Lent, 100,000 Irish people supported Trocaire’s campaign to end slavery, after they pointed out that the number of modern day slaves is more than double the number of people taken from Africa during the four hundred years before slavery was abolished.   Binka and her husband have established a Rainforest conservation center, but saving the rainforest isn’t possible, Binka realised, unless you get to the heart of why it is being destroyed in the first place.  And accountability for the destruction of the rainforest and the environment in general must be shared by everyone who decides to buy the cheapest hamburger, or the cheapest coffee.  Everyone who buys anything without caring what makes it so cheap.
          Which brings us back to slavery.  Many of us who are entrenched in the consumer culture of the Western World can identify with the notion of being indentured.  Most of us are working to pay off some kind of debt, be it the credit card, the house, the car or whatever. Very few of us can afford to stop working, even when we reach the age of retirement, because the lifestyle that we have become accustomed to is so expensive.  But deep in the Brazilian Amazon jungle, hundreds of thousands of unskilled workers are being literally enslaved by their employers.  Held to ransom for debts that they have been trapped into accumulating and forced to work from dawn to dusk in the most appalling conditions, in the hopeless attempt to pay off these debts.  Beaten and tortured and often killed, if they attempt to escape.   It is this form of slavery that Binka discovered, while researching land ownership in Brazil and it is to the cause of freeing these people that she has now dedicated herself.  As an educated European, she says, she grew up in a society where the law protects the innocent, but in Brazil, the law is unenforceable and corruption and violence are endemic.
           ‘Trapped’is the third book she has written about her adopted country, and it is  her horrific account of modern day slavery in Brazil.   In the book she talks to the ranchers, the slaves, the government officials and all the other players in the chain.  Albertino and Batista are two of the lucky ones.  After being unable to get work in their own village, they met a man who offered them extremely good money,- twice the usual daily rate, plus food and an advance- to come to Para, in the Amazon region and clear the jungle for a rancher.  After travelling by truck and ferry for several days, they found themselves on a muddy trail through a thick forest, pushing the truck which had got stuck in the mud.  It rained and rained, there were mosquitos everywhere and the men were forced at gunpoint to work from dawn until dusk, clearing trees.  They were given only rice and beans to eat and they weren’t allowed to leave.  But having been shot, they made a run for it during the night and escaped, walking until they reached a trading post where a helicopter was radioed and they lived to tell their tale.  Unlike an unquantifiable  amount of illiterate, ill-educated  workers who, finding themselves in this situation see no way out but to keep working for no pay.
The Brazilian government have finally admitted that the problem exists,  and flying squads now patrol the Amazon region, hoping to find slaves and free them.   But Binka wants to put pressure on the big businesses who are benefiting from slave labour.  Vokswagen have already capitulated and sold off a ranch in the region, but more can be done.  ‘We’ve got to make it uncool to use slaves,” she smiles.  ‘As uncool as it is to smoke!  How do you think that can be done?”
I suggest that a Hollywood blockbuster, starring Denzel Washington and Halle Berrry might raise awareness.  She looks ate me with a curious expression.  ‘Do you know something?  You just might be right.’  Whether she’s serious about the movie or not, Binka is determined to make as many people aware of this problem as will listen to her.  Because as she quite rightly says, this is a story that absolutely must be told.
‘Trapped”by Binka Le Breton is published by Latin American Bureau and is available from Trocaire, 19.44 euros.  For more info call 01 629 3333