Volkswagen faces Brazil hearing over dictatorship-era slavery claims
German carmaker Volkswagen faces an audience with Brazilian prosecutors Tuesday over allegations of human-rights violations at a farm it ran during Brazil’s military dictatorship, including slave labor, rapes and beatings.
Prosecutors have assembled a 90-page dossier they say documents years of atrocities committed by Volkswagen managers and hired guns at a cattle ranch the company owned in the Amazon rainforest basin in the 1970s and 80s.
In the latest attempt to bring justice for abuses committed under Brazil’s 19641985 military regime, the federal prosecutor’s office for labor affairs summoned VW representatives to a hearing in Brasilia to answer for evidence of abuses including torture and killings at the property in the northern state of Para, known as Fazenda Vale do Rio Cristalino.
“There were grave and systematic violations of human rights, and Volkswagen is directly responsible,” lead prosecutor Rafael Garcia told AFP.
The audience will be an initial contact “to see if it’s possible to reach a settlement” without opening criminal proceedings, he said.
Volkswagen has declined to comment on specifics of the case, saying it first needs “clarity on all the allegations.” But the company is “committed to contributing very seriously to the investigations,” a spokeswoman for Volkswagen Brasil by email. VW Group to settle UK ‘dieselgate’ claims for £193mn
In 2020, Volkswagen agreed to pay 36 million reais ($6.4 million at the time) in compensation for collaborating with Brazil’s secret police during the dictatorship to identify suspected leftist opponents and union leaders at its local operation, who were then detained and tortured.
That settlement caught the eye of Ricardo Rezende, a Catholic priest who spent years compiling evidence of abuses at Volkswagen’s farm after moving to Para in 1977 and hearing what he says were horrifying stories from victims.
Rezende wondered if the company could also be held to account for that case, and decided to share his files with prosecutors,.
“You can’t fix someone suffering torture by paying reparations. The suffering of the women whose sons and husbands went to the farm and never came back there’s no reparation for that pain,” said the priest, now 70. “But there could be a symbolic reparation. I think it’s necessary.”
Rezende’s hundreds of pages of testimony and other documents convinced prosecutors to launch a task force, which spent three years assembling evidence boiled down to the dossier they will now present to VW.