Slave Next Door (30 page)

spoiled by bondage. Across Africa and Asia children are enslaved to

catch, clean, package, and dry fish. They feed a global demand for

everything from shrimp cocktail to cat food. One of the world’s largest

consumers of seafood is Japan, but the United States isn’t too far

behind. Americans imported 2.5 million tons of seafood in 2006,

worth over $13 billion.2 And when it comes to shrimp, the United

States imports significantly more than the seafood-loving Japanese.

Americans love shrimp, and the little crustacean that was once an

expensive specialty food is now as ubiquitous as chicken. More than

three million tons of frozen shrimp were imported to the United States

in 2006.3 The huge demand for shrimp in the United States and other

rich countries has generated a gold rush along the coastlines of the

developing world. From India to Bangladesh, from Indonesia to

Ecuador, Guatemala, and Brazil, coastal forests, mangrove swamps,

and natural beaches are ripped up to build hundreds of thousands of

acres of shrimp farms. In all of these places adults and children are

enslaved to cultivate and harvest the shrimp.4 In some cases whole fam-

ilies are caught in debt bondage slavery; in others children are kid-

napped and hustled off to shrimp and fish farms on remote islands.

Children are regularly enslaved in fishing and shrimping, since kids can

do the work and are easier to enslave and control.

In Bangladesh, boys as young as eight are kidnapped and taken out

to remote islands like Dublar Char off the southwest coast. Sold to the

fishing crews for about $15, they are set to work processing fish on

shore for eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. If the boats return

with a large catch, they may work several days with no sleep at all. Like

robots they clean, bone, and skin fish; shell mussels, shrimp, and crab;

and wash squid to remove the ink. Other children sort, weigh, check,

and load the haul, processing and preparing the fish for freezing and

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shipment. The slaveholders sexually abuse the boys and beat them reg-

ularly. They get little food and no medical care, and they sleep on the

ground. If they sicken or are injured and die, they are thrown into the

ocean.5 Dublar Char was raided and the children were freed in 2004

when researchers linked to the U.S. antislavery group Free the Slaves dis-

covered the situation. They worked with the State Department’s anti-

trafficking office to bring diplomatic pressure on the Bangladeshi

government, which led to a raid by military police. (The local police

were on the take from the gangs running the island.)

No one knows how many other remote islands conceal such slave

camps. Much of the fish and shrimp from these islands enters the global

markets and then comes to the United States. Dublar Char is just one

example of the slave operations that supply our hunger for seafood.

Around the island of Sumatra in Indonesia the sea is dotted with what

appear to be ramshackle rafts. They are actually fishing platforms,

crudely lashed together and moored up to twenty miles off the coast.

There are some 1,500 fishing platforms in this region, each holding

three to ten children whose only avenue of escape is a twenty-mile swim.

Promised a good job, they are left on the platform to cast nets, catch

fish, and clean and dry the catch. In heavy weather the platforms can

break up; then children can be swept overboard or may simply fall

through the holes in the rough bamboo deck. On irregular visits, the

boss collects the fish and administers beatings to increase productivity.

As in Dublar Char and so many other places, the children are sexually

abused, and if they become ill there is no relief. If they die of illness or

injury, they are simply rolled into the water. The revenues from

Indonesian fish exports reached $5 billion in 2006; America is one of

the top destinations for frozen shrimp, canned tuna, tilapia, and sea

crab from that country.6

H A R D T O AV O I D

The products of slavery don’t stop with fish, cotton, coffee, and steel.

Criminals around the world look for ways to cut costs and increase

profits, and what better way to cut labor costs, especially in labor-inten-

sive industries, than slavery? Mining in North America is generally done

with enormous machines and skilled workers; mining in the developing

world tends to use many of the same techniques known in the Bronze

Age. In Ghana, boys and men dig shafts into the earth searching out

flecks and nuggets of gold. Crawling through narrow makeshift tunnels,

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they work in cramped, poorly lit mines where the air is thick with dust

and they are constantly at risk of deadly accidents due to falling rock,

mine wall collapse, and explosions. Outside the mine, the gold is sepa-

rated from rock using mercury, a deadly poison. Handling mercury and

breathing its fumes damages organs and especially nervous systems.

Recall that in the eighteenth century, before mercury’s toxic effect was

fully understood, hat makers used mercury salts to shape and treat felt

for hats. The high incidence of nerve and brain damage and the result-

ing uncontrollable shaking and tremors are the source of that common

expression “mad as a hatter.” In the gold fields some miners receive a

little money based on the gold they find, while others are locked into

debt bondage slavery.

Gold mining in Ghana is just the tip of the iceberg. Primitive mining

consumes people, and especially children, in many other countries as

well. Enslaved men, women, and children mine gold in Brazil, the

Philippines, and Peru. It is estimated that some twenty-five thousand

people pan gold from the Amazon, producing seven metric tons a

year.7 Juan Climaco is a judge based in the Amazonian town of

Huepetuhe in Peru. “We are talking about people forced to work in

the worst conditions imaginable,” he said, “without pay, and they

really have no way out.”8 Amazonian gold flows into the global market

and can end up in anything from electrical parts to gold bars to the

ring on your finger.

That ring might also have a gemstone that comes from the hands of

slaves. In Sierra Leone adults and children are enslaved in the diamond

fields in the Kono district. Olara Otunnu, the special representative of

the secretary general of the United Nations, stated, after visiting the

mines, “I was horrified by what I saw.”9 These diamonds also flow into

the global market. Better-quality stones go to traditional diamond-cut-

ting centers like Antwerp, where they are graded and cut for jewelry.

Lower-quality gems, more than half of global production, are sent to

India, where, in Gujarat, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children in

debt bondage slavery cut and polish the stones. These gems move into

the market for less expensive jewelry along with the cheaper zirconium

gems the children also process. Set in jewelry or exported raw, these zir-

conium gems end up in the United States, pushed at us in television ads,

at jewelry stands at the mall, and in advertisements in the back of budget

magazines.

Not far from the Peruvian and Brazilian gold mines, slaves are

cutting timber. A report by the International Labour Organization

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in 2005 estimated that thirty thousand people are enslaved in

Amazonian logging camps; the Peruvian government endorsed the

report.10 Geyner Pizango and his brother were enslaved to illegally cut

mahogany along the Brazil-Peru border in July 2004. His brother was

seriously injured by a skidding log and lay untreated in the camp for

more than a month. In October 2004 a Brazilian army patrol raided the

camp. The patrol destroyed the camp and all of the mahogany logs and

then jailed Pizango, his brother, and other workers for two months.

Deported back to Peru, his brother died eight months later, aged twenty-

two. “It’s hard to think of worse exploitation than what we went

through,” Pizango said, “The Brazilians called us modern day slaves,

and they were right. We were sent to the jungle, imprisoned for trying to

make an honest wage and treated like animals.” The head of Peru’s anti-

slavery commission said slavery in logging was “widespread and there’s

very little anyone can do about it.”11 The two largest timber import

companies in the United States imported more than three million board

feet of mahogany in 2006.12 American manufacturers then purchase

this wood to make high-quality furniture, cabinets, window frames, and

musical instruments.

In addition to raw materials like timber, a constant trickle of manu-

factured goods, made with slave labor, enters the United States. For

example, most of the fireworks used to celebrate the Fourth of July come

from China and some from India, where child slavery in fireworks is

well documented. Also from India come shoes, clothes, jewelry, house-

hold goods, sporting goods, craft items, and hand-rolled
beedi
ciga-

rettes made with slave labor.

At the end of 2007 news reports pointed to child slaves in textile fac-

tories in New Delhi, making embroidered shirts for the Gap and other

retailers. Hand-embroidered clothing came into fashion in America

around 2004, and articles extolled the look in
Vogue,
the
Face,
and
I-D

magazines. But as Ginny Baumann, who manages antislavery projects in

India and Nepal for Free the Slaves, explained, “In 2006 and 2007 there

have been numerous raids on factories where hundreds of children were

enslaved to embroider this fashion clothing.”13 In late October 2007,

British reporters found children working in filthy conditions and

describing long hours of unpaid work, threats, and beatings.14 Beaded

children’s blouses found in the sweatshop were marked with serial

numbers that the Gap admitted corresponded with its own inventory.

To be fair, this was not a Gap factory but an Indian company that had

been subcontracted to produce the blouses by one of the Gap’s Indian

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suppliers and that did so in violation of the Gap’s contracts and rules

about child labor.

But when it comes to slave-made products in our shops, the largest

amount by far comes from China. The Chinese government has found

a remarkable way to boost its income. Over the past twenty years the

national prison system has been converted into a system of prison

factories.
These factories produce goods for the lucrative export

market, and most of these goods flow to the United States. Glancing at

the stickers on products in any American “big box” retail store will

identify thousands of Chinese-made goods. These products sell for

prices that seem impossibly low. How, for example, can a desk lamp

be made from wires, glass, metal, and electrical fixtures, assembled,

packaged, shipped across the Pacific Ocean, and then shipped within

the United States and stocked onto shelves and still generate a profit

for the company when it sells for only $4? Could one part of the

answer be that the person who assembled and packaged that lamp

was enslaved?

It might seem reasonable that convicted criminals serving their sen-

tences should work to pay their keep, but that is far from the situation

in Chinese prison factories. In China, a person can be arrested and

imprisoned
without trial
for “crimes” such as professing a forbidden

religion or expressing opinions in disagreement with the government.

Though sentenced for as long as fifteen years, these prisoners have never

been tried, have never had the benefit of the due process of law, and

once imprisoned have no rights or protections. Ramin Pejan, writing in

a journal of American University’s school of law, explains:

The PRC [People’s Republic of China] uses
Laojiao
[the prison factory

system] to detain individuals it feels are a threat to national security or it

considers unproductive. . . . Because those in
Laojiao
have not committed

crimes under PRC law, they are referred to as “personnel” rather than

prisoners and they are not entitled to judicial procedure. Instead, individ-

uals are sent to the
Laojiao
following administrative sentences dispensed

by local public security forces. This vague detainment policy allows the

PRC to avoid allegations that the individual’s arrest was politically moti-

vated and to assert that they were arrested for reasons such as “not engag-

ing in honest pursuits” or “being able-bodied but refusing to work.”15

Clearly the prison factory system is a cruel injustice and is often used to