18 | International Union Rights | 25/4 FOCUS | INDIGENOUS PEOPLES & UNIONS It is in the arid forests of the Chaco, a rich environment naturally adapted to intense heat and scarcity of water, that the Paraguayan government plans to consolidate the country as one of world’s top beef exporting hubs. The State’s long-term agenda was pushed forward by the former president Horacio Cartes – himself a big rancher in this biome that covers more than half of the country. Over the course of the next decade, the goal is to create in Paraguay a herd of 20 million head of cattle. That is the equivalent to three times the Paraguayan population. The cattle farming business in Paraguay has been growing at a pace as striking as the advance of illegal deforestation and reports of precarious work. The most serious cases affect indigenous people, including children, who form the backbone of the workforce supporting the expansion of farming activity in the Chaco. A common complaint concerns low wages, quite often below the legal minimum. The workforce is also subjected to productivity-based pay systems, which sometimes lead to complex relations of debt bondage with the employer. It is common for temporary services, such as land clearing and fencing, to be intermediated by ‘contractors’ – labour recruiters who usually pay the indigenous people a part up front and the rest when the task has been completed. These contractors often charge for boots, clothes, food, transportation or even accommodation. In this context, workers kept isolated in farms might be coerced to continue labouring for months under very degrading conditions, in order to pay alleged debts. Located 450 kilometers from the Paraguayan capital, Asunción, the town of Filadelfia is the entry point to the Chaco. It was founded nearly 90 years ago by Mennonite, Christian and Protestant colonists who migrated from Europe and settled in the region. In the indigenous communities around Filadelfia, the complaints related to working conditions have been made primarily against the Mennonite colonists, most of whom are involved in cattle farming. Modern slavery In addition to recurring denunciations by unions and social movements, the few inspections that have been conducted recently by the Paraguayan State have set off warning signals. In November 2016, a group of 35 indigenous people was found in inhumane conditions at a cattle ranch named Estancia Ruroka, in the department of Boquerón. The farmer, a member of the Mennonite community, was convicted of the crime of human trafficking. He is also a member of Chortitzer, one of the three large Mennonite cooperatives that run Cencoprod, a company that dominates the economy of the Chaco. The workers were Aché indigenous people recruited in their native community, some 800 kilometers from the farm. The group was filling charcoal kilns with the trunks of native trees – a process that generally precedes the planting of grassland for cattle raising. The conditions were very precarious. Having only improvised tents as a shelter, some slept on mattresses on the ground, others on wooden boards. Meals were cooked in the woods, hygiene conditions minimal. They were supposed to work for six months, but after three they couldn’t take it anymore. In an area where temperatures can reach up to 50 degrees Celsius, workers were not given regular access to drinking water. A call for help was submitted to Paraguay’s Public Prosecutor’s Office. It was the first inspection in the history of the Chaco that rescued indigenous workers from conditions of modern slavery in farming activities. Months later, a second inspection found teenagers engaged once again in the production of charcoal, working in inhumane conditions. The Public Prosecutor’s Office itself evaluates that, if more inspections were made, new cases of slave labour would almost certainly come to light. In March this year, the Paraguayan Ministry of Labour opened an office in Filadelfia specifically to receive complaints from indigenous people who work in the cattle ranches. But the office does not have the capacity to make field trips nor the autonomy to conduct on-site checks of irregularities. This is because, in Paraguay, government inspectors can only enter farms with a court order. As such, the workers not only have...