Woman in Brazil enslaved for 55 years by 3 generations of the same family

Razengan

> Although the family has agreed to compensate her, Maria, who lived in near-total isolation and without contact with her relatives, will remain with her employers What the fuck? Why did the law need the family's "agreement"?? Why is nobody going to jail for imprisoning someone for 55 years??

leoc

See also the late Alex Tizon's "My Family's Slave" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-s... , with a 2017 HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14350059 .

zaik

$40k compensation for 55 years of service...

forinti

Its a common occurrence for families to take in poor girls to do house work in exchange for food and lodging. And with the insidious nature of Brazilian racism, they will pretend that she is part of the family. They might even take her on vacations (to work, of course). If you grow up with this mentality it might even be hard for you to see the injustice. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so, decades after its neighbours. The slaves never got compensation but their owners did.

hobo_in_library

Hot take: As bad as this is, I wonder if it would be kinder to leave her with the family for the rest of her life. This lady is in her 60s, does she even know any other way to even live? Life with that family may be better than whatever Brazil's equivalent of welfare shelters are. Seems like that may have been why the case workers left her with that family for now.

t1234s

I was talking to a doctor who went to medical school in Brazil and said it was normal for upper-middle class people to have a live-in domestic servant. Many of the floorplans for condos or houses include a servants quarters. They were telling me theirs cost around $12 USD a day which is not a bad deal.

zkmon

I hoped the article would mention whether the woman desires to be "rescued" or wants changes in the way she lives now.

comrade1234

My wife's family were wealthy Chinese near Hong Kong. Her grandmother took in a poor girl as a servant. She was part of the family but also basically a slave. The grandmother arranged her marriage when the girl was older. We met the girls granddaughter when we visited china - she was a new college student. The two families still think of themselves as related.

scottconover

I’m new to HN. How does this relate to the theme of Hacker News?

carlosjobim

"Statistics suggest that Maria was undoubtedly poor and, most likely, Black." That is a new way of reporting news, that journalist Gortázar seems to have invented here. When you don't know anything about the victim, just make something up from "statistics". Where else can we apply this technique? "Maria entered their lives around 1971 — the year Henry Kissinger visited China, John Lennon wrote Imagine, and Mexico hosted the first Women’s World Cup." Good to know. "The traditional maid’s room is gradually disappearing in Brazil, but buildings with separate social and service elevators — for domestic workers, visiting technicians, neighbors with dogs, or residents carrying groceries — remain commonplace." Those are for separating workers carrying broken dusty floor tiles or ladders or a bunch of fiber cables from the other people using the building. Anyway, ignoring the lacking quality of the journalism, more countries should do like Brazil and call slavery for what it is in legislation, instead of using euphemisms like "human trafficking".

diego_moita

A similar history, in the U.S.: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-s...

tom86150

What disgusting subhumans. They should rot in jail until they close their eyes. Nobody can tell me that such a life is not exploiting and slavery. They dont need to play stupid and pay a laughable amount of money for a destroyed life. But thats how some people got rich...pretty disgusting.

atum47

Yup, my mom and her sisters were all sent off to work on family houses when they were about 10 - 12. They were born in the country side, and my grandpa didn't care for them at all.

OrvalWintermute

I’m not quite how this relates to tech, hackernews or startups

la64710

Oh the caste system of the west

timedude

I see a lot of comments claiming that slavery was abolished. It was not, we just made the transition to another form of slavery, one where most people think they are free. In reality, they work every day while most of their earnings are taken from them by force every month ('taxation'). The well known slave Frederik Douglas was one of the first examples of this. Douglas made a deal with his master to do whatever he liked as long as he gave his master a cut. The same dynamic is now implemented worldwide. Watch the movie Jones Plantation. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26964727/

motbus3

She will re receive a compensation of 50.000 reais. Which on every, with current exchange rate should be about 3 USD per week of work. One can't get a better bargain for a slave!