The Volkswagen Group faces new charges related to the dictatorship in Brazil.
This time, the second largest car manufacturer in the world is accused of “slavery” practices between 1974 and 1986, several German media claim this Sunday.
According to the public television channel ARD and the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, Volkswagen is summoned on June 14 before an industrial tribunal in Brasilia.
The company takes this case “very seriously” as well as the “possible incidents” which would have occurred “and on which the investigations of the Brazilian judicial authorities are based”, assures a spokesperson for Volkswagen.
However, the group did not want to say more at this stage “due to possible legal proceedings”.
The charges against him date back to the period 1974-1986, during the military dictatorship that raged in Brazil between 1964 and 1985. Former employees of the group during this period have been asking for compensation for several years, but until here without success.
Rape as punishment
The complaints examined by the Brazilian justice state, according to the German media, of recourse by the car manufacturer to "slavery practices", to "trafficking in human beings" and accuse the group of having been complicit in "violations systematics of human rights”.
At the time, the group had planned to build a large agricultural site on the edge of the Amazon basin for the meat trade, the “Companhia Vale do Rio Cristalino”.
Hundreds of daily and temporary workers were recruited for deforestation work, via intermediaries, but probably with the consent of the manufacturer's management, according to the German media which was able to consult more than 2,000 pages of testimonies and reports. from police.
They report that the workers were sometimes victims of abuse and violence from intermediaries and armed guards on the site.
The testimonies notably mention ill-treatment of the workers who tried to flee, and even suspicious disappearances.
The wife of one of them was raped as punishment, according to German media.
A mother says her child died as a result of violence.
Workers buried at their place of work
“It was a form of modern slavery,” the Brazilian prosecutor in Rio in charge of the investigation, Rafael Garcia, told German media.
He mentions inhuman working conditions on the site, “with workers who had malaria, some of them died and were buried on the spot without the families being informed.
Volkswagen obviously not only accepted this form of slavery but also encouraged it, because it was cheap labour.
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Volkswagen has already had trouble with Brazilian justice for facts dating back to the time of the dictatorship.
In 2020, the group agreed to pay 36 million reais (5.5 million euros) to compensate the families of ex-workers tortured or murdered during this period.
The former employees and their families claimed that Volkswagen's security service in Brazil had collaborated with the military to identify possible suspects, who were subsequently arrested and tortured.
A collaboration confirmed by an independent report commissioned by the company in 2016.
