Behind the Bastards
Part Two: That Time Volkswagen Operated a Slave Plantation in Brazil
16 Oct 2025
Chapter 1: What historical context led to Volkswagen's involvement in slave labor in Brazil?
Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that you're listening to right now. And this is part two of our episodes on Volkswagen's slave plantation in Brazil. So you probably know what's going on here. You're not dropping into part two of this specific episode just on your own. That would be weird. I hope not. Uh-huh. They'll both be depressing, but to just pick the second part of it.
That's maniac shit. That's like 5150 shit, right? Like that's a 72 hour hold for you. Sea kettle. Yeah. What are you doing? And we're coming in, of course, on the day that Diddy just got sentenced. So that's fun. Have you caught this yet? This happened in between us recording part one and part two. The court art is something else. Very special. He does not look happy.
I had hoped for more than that. But yeah, he's more than four years. So at least it's not... It's not nothing. I don't know. What do you want? This is 2025. Like... I am like, wow. He went to trial? Yeah, yeah. He's staying in prison. He's not going to get time served for what he already did. That's not nothing. Yeah? Yeah.
Chapter 2: How did the Brazilian military dictatorship support Volkswagen's operations?
It's sad that I'm looking at that and being like, well, I was worried it would be worse. But look at this picture of him. I'm also really vibing on this drawing of him. I love good court art. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, it's beautiful. He does not look happy. His hair is totally white. Also... This has to be a choice. Clearly, it looks like a bailiff behind him.
You can see they've drawn his badge, and it looks like an Anarchy Circle A symbol on the bailiff's badge. I don't know why they made that choice. You're not reading into it, to my untrained eye. Absolutely. That is a Circle A, right? That's just a Circle A? Hell yeah. Let's talk about something that makes sense, you know? Something that makes us feel good, that makes us feel optimistic.
Oh, wait, no, we're talking about slavery in Brazil. We're not talking about any of that at all. Maggie, you want to plug anything before we get back into talking about Brazil's slave plantations? Well, Volkswagens in Brazil. I mean, I am so excited to get back into talking about that. Mm-hmm. But in case you need a little bit of a headspace before, yeah, you can check out my YouTube channel.
I do video essays on cultural stuff and film. And then, yeah, over on Nebula, there's a nice little show, Amy's Dad and Dream House, kids show for adults, adult topics under the guise of a kids show.
Chapter 3: What were the living and working conditions for enslaved workers on Volkswagen's plantation?
We don't, however, cover business practices. So I think we'll cover that here today in the second part of this podcast. Excellent. Maybe just give some advice. Yeah, we'll be talking a lot about that. And weirdly, I mean, we just started talking about the strange bedfellows that politics make.
But like one of the good guys in this is the Catholic Church or at least a Catholic priest, which doesn't happen often on this show. But it does happen more when we're talking about Latin America, you know. That's true.
Chapter 4: Who was Father Ricardo Resende and what role did he play in uncovering the truth?
So we've got some liberation theology guys. So our Catholic listeners, this is what you get to feel good about. Congratulations. You get one. You get one. You get one every now and then. We have a good priest who comes in. Usually when we bring up the Catholic Church on the podcast about bad people, it's a dark story. But not today. Not today, folks. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.
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When the military junta started putting out feelers to multinational corporations, seeing who might be interested in investing in the Brazilian economy, VW executives weren't just going along with the flow. They were eager supporters of the military dictatorship.
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Chapter 5: What evidence did Father Resende gather about the abuses at Volkswagen's farm?
A write-up by the Organization for World Peace summarizes the reaction of members of the VW board to these changes. Volkswagen board member Friedrich Wilhelm Schultz-Wenk rejoiced when secret police arrested trade union leaders on factory premises.
In so doing, he endorsed a regime that perceived its own citizens as mindless automatons that committed widespread torture that ran hidden concentration camps to repress uncooperative indigenous tribes and precipitated the environmental destruction of the Amazon. Hoo guy. Friedrich Wilhelm Schultz-Wenk. Check. Huzzah! The secret police have arrested union organizers. Woohoo!
Yeah, the Nazis didn't go away. They just moved around a little bit. They shuffled, you know? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. There's a good Chumbawamba song about that. There is. Now, as I noted earlier, Volkswagen was participating in a wider system embraced by the military junta and a lot of foreign corporations that had a profit interest in Brazil, which is a large country.
There's always been a lot of money in selling to and utilizing Brazil's natural resources. Mm-hmm. That OWP write-up lists other corporations like Mitsubishi, Nestle, Goodyear, Swift, Bomber Indus, and Anderson Clayton as all investing in Brazil during this period at the express request of the military dictatorship.
The whole reason these companies wanted to work in Brazil is because the junta would let you tear apart the Amazon, which climate scientists generally consider to be the lungs of the world, for quick profit. And because labor unions and the rights of workers were among the first things cracked down on by the dictatorship, there was no oversight for how your workers were treated.
So you could really turn a profit doing this, right? As long as you didn't care about how certain people were treated. Right. And we don't. Yeah, I mean, obviously nothing like this has ever happened before or since. This is the only time this happened, just in Brazil, just with these companies. Of course, of course.
So from 1974 to 1986, Volkswagen operated their Parra State Farm through a local subsidiary and tried to generate a profit from ranching and logging. It's unclear to me how many workers were victimized during the span of time. Court filings have since indicated at least 300 people were hired through what were known as irregular contracts.
Some sources I found put the real number at close to a thousand people. One of the only ways to escape was through contracting malaria or some other serious illness. And this was not always a way to escape, but sometimes you could get out because they just didn't want to deal with you. There was no real medical care for workers beyond the most basic treatment of wounds. And sometimes you
Couldn't even count on that. Depending on when and where it happened, it was uncommon in some cases for workers to have any kind of medical treatment for even those basic injuries. People on the edge of death might be allowed to leave, but it was at least as common for them to be worked to death and disposed of.
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Chapter 6: How did the media and public react to the allegations against Volkswagen?
Some of the bones were full of strings, as if the person had been tied up before they died, says Gisela Pereira, national director of the MST, Landless Workers Movement's production sector. The crimes, however, were never properly investigated.
It was a very common logic to put the person to work, and then when she made some charge, they sent her away and eliminated her on the way, explained the sister of one such worker, Isabel Rodriguez, a pedagogue and farmer who has been working at the MST for 35 years.
And this is something you'll hear a lot, specifically with Volkswagen's workers, that a lot of these people, they're not just worked to death and buried. Some of them were strung up. This is a punishment when like workers would refuse to work, when they would try to escape, if they would get caught, if they would resist in any way the gatos, they would be strung up and sometimes hung until dead.
you know, as a way to make sure everyone else kept working. Right, right, right, right. Yeah. There's many parallels to, you know, a lot of the fishing industry. They also, you know, trap people out on a boat and tenuous contracts that they can't fulfill. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of. Yeah. These are the kind of things there's no oversight.
Any sort of like unionizing, any sort of like workers rights has been utterly cracked down on by the regime, which is part of what's appealing to Volkswagen. Right. Is that they can just have these contractors do whatever. As far as they're concerned, there's no one policing how they treat these people. Right. As that previous quote said, they're not looking at these workers as human beings.
These are automatons. They're robots. You plug them in, you work them until they break, and then you throw them away. And if one of them isn't working right, you string them up as an example to the others, you know? Right. And there's still no cars around. They're not making cars. They're not making cars. They're clear-cutting forests for cows. Right, right, right, right.
This isn't even in your wheelhouse, VW. What the fuck? I just need that to sink in. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. This would be like if Cool Zone Media started a cattle farm in Brazil. It's like, this is so far outside of our wheelhouse. Like, why are you even, for the first, like, even outside of the ethical stuff, why are you in this business?
The answer is they thought they'd make a buck. They didn't. Because labor rights and organizing had been so comprehensively shattered by the military junta, the first outside entity to look into the horrifying situation at Volkswagen's farm was a Catholic priest named Ricardo Resende.
As a new priest and a young man, he was stationed at a diocese in the Paris state, relatively close to the Volkswagen ranch. He was made the regional coordinator for the Bishop's Conference Land Pastoral Commission, or CPT, which was formed in 1975 to support peasants and rural workers.
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Chapter 7: What were the legal consequences for Volkswagen regarding their labor practices?
Unionizing is effectively been like I mean, people are being put in secret concentration camps for like being labor organizers. Right. But you can't do that to the Catholic Church. I mean, you can't obviously some priests and nuns throughout Latin America who are part of the same liberation theology, which we'll talk about thing is Resende are killed, are assassinated. But you can't whole scale.
If you're the military, you can't just go after the Catholic Church whole hog. Right. Like that is a bridge too far because everyone's Catholic, basically. Right. Right. Like if you do that, you are going to get it. It's the same problem the Nazis had. Right. Where they didn't like the Catholic Church. Himmler especially saw it as an enemy.
But they had to co-opt and work with it because you can't just ban Catholicism in Germany like that is going to get you in trouble. Like even the Nazis didn't feel like they had enough of a handle on things to do that. Yeah. It's the six, you know. Right. Yeah. Right. Right. Right.
You have to care somewhat about how much you're pissing these people off because these are kind of these are the people who are real people in your state. Right. And so we can argue that like this land pastoral commission, it's not like enough. There should have been much more here.
But Resende and his diocese get a lot of credit because they are they are the only people who can really do something. Right. Because they have some ability to operate under the junta without getting just completely annihilated.
And it would be fair to say, again, while this is not on its own a sufficient thing in order to replace what's been lost in the crackdown on workers' rights, Father Resende is a pretty admirable person in all of this, I think. And he is unusually dedicated to the spirit of his work. As I noted earlier, Resende was a follower of what's known as liberation theology.
This was at the time a new creed that was particularly common in the Latin American segments of the Catholic Church and was dedicated to a broad support for emancipation from every kind of oppression, right? And Resende personally considered the fight against forced labor a sacred calling, right? This was a religious duty to him.
Which is good, and he made it known publicly that his office would investigate all serious allegations that people were being forced to work. Resende gets moved into this program in 1975, and he first starts hearing allegations that Volkswagen has a plantation in the Amazon and people are being enslaved there in 1977, two years later.
The very first claims come from a union organizer named Natal Ribeiro, who said that he had been hired by, I think he was a former union organizer, but he goes to Resende and says that, you know, I was hired by these gatos and they forced to pay me for my work. And he tells Resende that like, yeah, there's a farm out there. It's guarded by people he described as professional pistoleros.
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Chapter 8: What is the current status of the investigations into Volkswagen's past actions?
Let's do that one. Right, right. It's a perfect ad for Volkswagen right here. Yeah, Volkswagen, the hottest cars. And that's that's that's bleak. You know what? Forget I said that. Here's some ads. Wow. I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.
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Listen for free on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionist History, we're going back to the spring of 1988, to a town in northwest Alabama, where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control. 35 years. That's how long Elizabeth and her family waited for justice to occur. 35 long years.
I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way, and why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make suffering worse. He would say to himself, turn to the right to the victim's family and apologize. Turn to the left, tell my family I love them. So he would have this little practice.
To the right, I'm sorry. To the left, I love you. From Revisionist History, this is The Alabama Murders. Listen to Revisionist History, The Alabama Murders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The moments that shape us often begin with a simple question. What do I want my life to look like now? I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford.
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