Pod Insights Behind the Bastards Part One: That Time Volkswagen Operated a Slave Plantation in Brazil About this episode Robert sits down with Maggie Mae Fish to discuss how Volkswagen went from Hitler's favorite auto-company to the owner of a slave plantation in the Amazon during the Reagan Era.
(2 Part Series)
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Transcript 11,096 words · 8 speakers
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0:05 Robert Evans? Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history, a topic I am well suited to address because I am one of the worst people in all of history, or at least I feel that way because I am calamitously hungover. I am the villain in my own life and very angry at myself. Here to express rage at me, my guest and friend Maggie Mae Fitz. You see how I'm doing today Maggie?
0:33 Speaker 01 Oh my god, I'm in rage!
0:34 Robert Evans? You see where my head is?
0:35 Speaker 01 It's a fire!
0:36 Robert Evans? I'm fucked up.
0:37 Speaker 01 Oh my god, it's almost like I'm not hungover either.
0:40 Robert Evans? I need more fucking electrolytes.
0:44 Robert Evans? Sure, Thursday night's a normal party night.
0:46 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
0:47 Robert Evans? When you have a normal human schedule like us.
0:50 Speaker 01 I was gonna say for our kind, yes it is.
0:53 Robert Evans? Yeah, for our kind, normal, normal, healthy people in the entertainment industry. Maggie, you and I go way back, we were colleagues at the old place, cracked.com, and you have grown and spread your wings from there, like all of our wonderful colleagues, and you have a YouTube channel now, and you just came out with a new project that I'm very excited to check out. Do you want to talk a little bit about what you're doing and plug your pluggables before we get into this episode?
1:23 Speaker 01 Absolutely. Well, you know, I think it's apt, we're gonna be talking about supposedly someone terrible.
1:28 Robert Evans? Something terrible.
1:29 Speaker 01 Good, oh, I'm so prepared. Much like, yeah, the show's called Amy's Dead and Dream House, it's on Nebula, it's also about terrible things, terrible things that happen to you in adulthood, you and all of us, so I'm very excited. I'm so excited to learn today, Robert.
1:49 Robert Evans? Well, we are gonna be talking about something terrible, that I did not know about, actually.
1:54 Speaker 01 Really?
1:55 Robert Evans? This is, this is one that kind of took me by surprise, the topic of this episode, because we are going to be chatting a little bit about a car company you might know of called Volkswagen. Do you know much about Volkswagen?
2:07 Speaker 01 Volkswagen New Beetle Driving You Wild.
2:11 Robert Evans? Sure, yeah, absolutely, that's one thing they're known for.
2:14 Speaker 01 Barbie had one, at one point.
2:17 Robert Evans? Barbie had a Volkswagen, yeah.
2:19 Speaker 01 And, some tenuous connection to Nazism, is that?
2:26 Robert Evans? It's not tenuous, I'll tell you that much right now Maggie. We'll be talking a little bit about that. I knew that Volkswagen was connected to the Nazis, like a lot of car companies, right? Like, there's no good car company. There's no car company that's just got a spotless, clean record, no war crimes, no one evil was ever involved, you know? Like, fucking, obviously, everyone's aware of the fun journey that Elon Musk and Tesla have been on lately, but Ford Motor Company was founded by a notorious anti-Semite, right?
3:00 Speaker 01 Yes.
3:00 Robert Evans? People are aware of that.
3:02 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
3:02 Robert Evans? In Michigan, yes. Ford wound up being a valuable part of the United States' war effort, right? They made a lot of cars that were used by the military. But Ford himself, Henry, would have been much happier if the US had sided with Nazi Germany, right?
3:18 Speaker 01 Absolutely. He's raring to go in my memory of history.
3:22 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah, raring to go with his Nazi newspaper about anti-Semitism. And it gets deeper than that. Obviously, Toyota and Mitsubishi got their start building war machines for the Empire of Japan, and that's not clean work, you know? As much as I love my Toyota.
3:37 Speaker 01 D'oh! I didn't know, okay, okay.
3:41 Robert Evans? Oh, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Toyota and Mitsubishi made a lot of cars, a lot of vehicles for Imperial Japan, which did not get up to anything good with them. And obviously, every major German automaker that existed in the 30s contributed to the Third Reich, right? Not just in terms of making cars for the Wehrmacht, but utilizing slave labor, all that good stuff. So that's not super surprising, right? Just the fact that a lot of car companies have evil backstories or were involved with shady regimes. We're going to be talking about something that did surprise me, which is that Volkswagen operated a slave plantation in Brazil in the latter half of the 20th century.
4:20 Speaker 01 What?
4:20 Robert Evans? I didn't know much about that.
4:25 Speaker 01 Whoa, oh, your words are catching up to my hungover brain.
4:31 Robert Evans? Yes, we're talking about Volkswagen's Brazilian slave plantation today.
4:37 Robert Evans? You know, get everybody off on a good mood. Obviously, we very rarely encounter fascism in our day-to-day lives or on the news, so...
4:44 Speaker 01 I certainly haven't.
4:45 Robert Evans? It's always, it's refreshing to hear some history, you know?
4:49 Speaker 01 To just remind me of the...
4:51 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah. Things used to be bad before we as a species really figured everything out.
4:56 Speaker 01 Right, right.
4:58 Robert Evans? Yeah.
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6:42 Robert Evans? So, this won't be entirely surprising if you're familiar with Volkswagen's origin story, the fact that they had a slave plantation. Let's talk a little bit about VW's origin story, right? Because it's a dark one. You know that like, there's a tenuous connection, right? And so we're gonna get into kind of what that connection entailed.
7:05 Speaker 01 Okay.
7:05 Robert Evans? In February of 1933, right at the dawn of the Nazi regime, this is right after Hitler took office.
7:11 Speaker 01 Okay.
7:11 Robert Evans? Adolf Hitler appeared at a car show in Germany to announce the start of a people's motorization, right? And this was his plan, and the plan that the Nazi party was really pushing, to motorize the Reich. The goal was eventually to have every family have their own car, which was an ambitious goal at this point, right? We're still talking about, like, the military is handling most things with horses, right? I mean, even through World War II, that'll be the case with the Germans. Automobiles, though, were a really direct symbol of the future. And futurism was a cornerstone of fascism. The early fascists, and this starts in Italy, you know, this isn't something that has its origins even with German fascists. Italian fascists are obsessed with cars, because they're obsessed with speed.
7:55 Robert Evans? Airplanes are the same thing, right?
7:57 Speaker 01 Oh, that does make sense, actually. Yeah.
8:00 Robert Evans? Yeah.
8:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, okay, yes.
8:01 Robert Evans? Yes, and that's kind of like fascism is at this point. It's not just looking back to these kind of like, quote unquote, "traditional values" and this, you know, desire to return to these kind of more medieval attitudes of social organization. There's also a lot of obsession with like, the future and with speed and all of this stuff. A big part of Hitler's appeal and like, a major cornerstone of his campaign is that he flies everywhere, right? This is the first time in a democracy that a major political candidate had traveled primarily by air to a bunch of their appearances. And it was, it allowed him to reach a lot more places, and it also, it fed into this image that like fascism is this ideology of the future, you know?
8:39 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm. Not familiar at all. Uh, yeah, that's, uh, ringing no bells.
8:45 Robert Evans? Today, they're embracing AI and shit, right? But like, it's the same basic idea, right? This kind of like reckless embrace of like, speed and technology. And yeah, so one of Hitler's immediate priorities is kind of announcing and trying to really like, propagandize the fact that like, the Third Reich is going to be a motorized society, you know? And in 1934, the next year, the Reich Association of the German Auto Industry entered into talks with a pioneering automobile designer, Ferdinand Porsche. That last name's probably familiar to most people, right? This is the guy who started Porsche, right?
9:20 Speaker 01 The guy.
9:21 Robert Evans? Obviously.
9:21 Speaker 01 The Porsche.
9:22 Robert Evans? The Porsche, yes.
9:23 Speaker 01 Mr. Porsche.
9:24 Robert Evans? Yes. And they sit down with Porsche and they ask him to create a cheap and efficient personal automobile, something that would be affordable for like the average German family and something that like you could basically replace, you know, the horses and other methods of transit with with this cheap personal car, right? And the name that they give to this this people's car is the Volkswagen, which just pretty much literally means the people's car, right? The Volk is the people.
9:53 Speaker 01 From the very beginning, yeah, okay, okay.
9:55 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah, that's where the name comes from. Great.
9:58 Speaker 01 Get all your six, you know, 6,000 children into the tiny car. You're motorized, you win.
10:03 Robert Evans? Yeah, get all, get your huge Nazi family into this tiny car. And yeah, it'll be great. So unlike many of the Reich's policies, Hitler personally directed the search for a people's car. There was a bunch of shit that like Hitler was, I mean, even like to an extent like the Holocaust was a thing that like he delegated a lot. He is directly involved in like the quest to motorize Germany in an extent that's kind of rare for him, right? Cause he is a big delegation guy, you know?
10:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, this is like well beyond where he's just delegating everything and like
10:35 Robert Evans? Yeah.
10:36 Speaker 01 Having sex all the time. Okay.
10:38 Robert Evans? Yeah, like this is something he's personally obsessed with, just kind of, kind of in the same manner that like he's obsessed with the rebuilding of Berlin and all of these kind of like architectural programs where they're creating these like massive buildings that will be symbols of the new Reich. He's personally involved in that and he's personally involved in this quest to motorize Germany.
10:56 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
10:56 Robert Evans? And Hitler never knew how to drive himself. Uh, he was not a driver, but he took great pleasure in being chauffeured around the country. One of his hobbies was just having people drive him around.
11:06 Speaker 01 Right.
11:06 Robert Evans? Uh, he liked going on rides. Cars were more exciting back then, you know? We hadn't gotten completely burnt out on them. And Porsche, Ferdinand Porsche, had been an advocate for something like the Volkswagen for years prior to the Nazis coming to power. So this was one of those things that was really convenient for Porsche.
11:25 Speaker 01 Mm hmm. Kismet, yes.
11:27 Robert Evans? Yeah, exactly. It's kismet, you know? And his biographer, Wolfram Peida, describes both Porsche and Hitler as made for each other, right? And quote, Hitler needed a creative mind to produce his compact car suitable for mass production and Porsche needed a political backing to enable him to build it without financial pressure, right?
11:45 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
11:46 Robert Evans? So this is a match made in, I mean, not heaven, but it's, it's really convenient to both men.
11:51 Speaker 01 Hell, the other place. Yeah.
11:53 Robert Evans? Yeah. In Porsche, I mean, he's not not a Nazi, but his primary, he's, he's obsessed with this quest to make, you know, a cheap automobile that's available for everybody. And he just kind of, he doesn't really give a shit.
12:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, to sell.
12:06 Robert Evans? Who he has to work with to make it happen, right? His dream is just to get this car made.
12:10 Speaker 01 So he's a good guy.
12:11 Robert Evans? He's a great man, right?
12:12 Speaker 01 He's a great entrepreneur, working for himself. Yeah.
12:15 Robert Evans? Yeah. He just doesn't give a shit like about, you know, the fact that it's going to be produced by slaves, about like, what matters to him is getting this car out. He has, he's, he's got tunnel blindness over this Volkswagen. Now, from the jump, the Volkswagen was not a purely civilian endeavor. In 1934, Porsche's company published a brochure laying out that their future car also had to be practical for particular military purposes, right? And this is both like Germany has limited resources. There's this kind of understanding that if a war breaks out, these civilian cars will probably get pressed into service and also...
12:51 Speaker 01 A bunch of Volkswagens?
12:52 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
12:54 Speaker 01 The front of the line? Okay.
12:56 Robert Evans? Beats walking.
12:57 Speaker 01 Okay.
13:00 Speaker 01 It's so unintimidating.
13:01 Robert Evans? Yeah. You ever tried to walk to Russia, Maggie? So the Volkswagen becomes a cornerstone of what's called the Strength Through Joy Program, which is a major set of policies that's organized by the Reich Association for Leisure Activities. Now, I've seen Strength Through Joy translated by German publications as Strength Through Pleasure. And I think this is probably a case where a lot of English translators maybe do a better job of capturing the initial meaning because strength through pleasure makes it sound weird in a way that it, it wasn't. Like, the idea was, you know, the Nazis, when they came to power, they had to signpost and, and kind of adapt a lot of left-wing talking points. You know, initially, early on, there was a left wing of the party. They get purged during
13:45 Robert Evans? the Night of Long Knives. And part of that is, well, the socialists are always talking about stuff like vacation days and, you know, a big thing that the USSR did and that Communist Yugoslavia did was they would build all these gigantic, like, recreation hotels and whatnot that are like resorts that were meant for like working class people, right? This was a major thing that they were doing. And the Nazis tried to have their version of that, in part because... You know, this is just a way in which they were kind of trying to compete with the left, but also in part because this was part of the promise of fascism, right?
14:20 Speaker 01 Right. We will do this and this and this, but you will get a fancy Hilton. Yes.
14:25 Robert Evans? Yeah.
14:25 Speaker 01 To swim in on. Yes.
14:27 Robert Evans? Exactly. We're gonna steal all this shit from these groups of people that are going to be forced out of society and annihilated. And as a result, you'll get a vacation every year. You'll get to go to the beach with your family. You'll get a car. That was the idea, right? This is never something that they fully achieve, but this is the, this is the idea behind the Strength Through Joy program, right? Is we're kind of buying the loyalty of the working class, of the classes that had been unionized and had previously in German electoral history gone more towards left. The idea is we're going to kind of get them on our side by promising access to all of these luxuries.
15:03 Speaker 01 Right. It's the Google method. You get, you know, a couple ping pong tables.
15:07 Robert Evans? Right.
15:07 Speaker 01 They'll stay after work. Yeah.
15:09 Robert Evans? Yes, it's exactly how Silicon Valley used to work, right? Strength through joy, productivity through joy. And so the motorization of Germany is a big part of this, right? The idea that a normal party member would be able to afford their own family car in a country that had been as strapped with poverty and economic collapse as Germany, that had gone through something as devastating as a famine so recently. That's really appealing, right? And it, it makes fascism look really powerful. The fact that, well, you know, a few years ago, everyone was starving. And now we're talking about giving everyone their own car, right? Again, they never do this, but it's important to Hitler and it's important to the image of Nazism that they were trying to do this, right?
15:53 Robert Evans? That this was something that they were, you know, talking about, right?
15:56 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
15:57 Robert Evans? And cars were expressly a luxury commodity when Hitler took over. When, when he comes to power, only about 1/50th of the country owned automobiles.
16:06 Speaker 01 Okay.
16:06 Robert Evans? And the idea is that, you know, cars are not cheap, right? And the Volkswagen is supposed to cost just 999 Reichsmarks. And there will be like an installment plan so regular citizens are able to afford it. And it's a big deal. Automobile ownership is Intensely politicized from the very earliest years of the Reich. The German General Automotive Club expelled all of its Jewish members in 1933. And after Kristallnacht in 1938, Jews were legally forbidden from driving or owning cars in the Reich. Hitler approves the first Volkswagen prototype near the end of 1935. And in the late spring of 1938, construction begins on the first factory in Wolfsburg.
16:46 Robert Evans? Hitler himself made an appearance at the ceremony, basically cuts the ribbon as they're creating and building this factory in Wolfsburg. And at this point, the Volkswagen, which is known initially, they don't start calling it the Volkswagen. It's called the KDF Wagon, which I think is just like the Strength Through Joy Wagon, basically.
17:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, sure.
17:05 Robert Evans? Right, yeah, they found a better name. We can all agree Volkswagen rolls off the tongue better than the KDF Wagon. Oh yeah, no, I, my friends got this classic KDF Wagon. It's still got the swastikas on the back end and everything.
17:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, right. Kill fuck death wagon.
17:22 Robert Evans? Right. Oh, kill death fuck wagon. Yeah, there we go. So the idea in Nazi propaganda is that the KDF Wagon is going to be the symbol of the National Socialist People's Community. And the plant in Wolfsburg would be known as the City of the KDF Car. In short order, Hitler promised more than 1.5 million of these cars would be produced every year. Now, they never achieve this. This is never more than a propagandistic boast because they start building the factory in 1938. And World War II kicks off like a year later. And so as soon as Germany gets into a war with everybody, the military need for different vehicles and tanks trumps the desire to get civilians automobiles.
18:04 Robert Evans? You can only do one at a time, basically, given the nature of the German economy and their access to resources.
18:11 Speaker 01 And look at that, they have, they already have the factory going. That's so convenient.
18:14 Robert Evans? Yeah.
18:15 Speaker 01 Wow, really planning ahead.
18:17 Robert Evans? Right, right. It just moves immediately over to like military production, right? And resource shortages were so severe during this period of time that Volkswagen has to almost immediately pivot to using slave labor to meet production quotas as soon as the war kicks off. And I want to quote from an article in the Holocaust Encyclopedia summarizing how this process got going. Volkswagen was among the first companies to take advantage of the forced labor of Soviet prisoners of war. The factory employed a variety of categories of workers, including German employees and migrant workers, but also prisoners of war, concentration camp inmates, including Jews, and increasingly large numbers of Soviet and Polish civilian foreign forced laborers, known as Eastern workers. A first concentration camp on the site, Arbeidsdorf, was established on factory property in
19:01 Robert Evans? April of 1942. Forced laborers eventually made up approximately 60% of the workforce at the city of the KDF car. So throughout the war, the early Volkswagens, you know, and the military vehicles they pivot to making are being made primarily by slaves, right? Like, that's from the jump. VW is, uh, cars made by slave labor, which is great.
19:23 Speaker 01 That's great. I mean, you know, now we just have, yes, a very similar.
19:28 Robert Evans? Yeah, now we just use slaves to get the rare earth minerals, right? You know, we've...
19:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
19:35 Robert Evans? There we go.
19:36 Speaker 01 We use kids for cars now, so, you know, it's, it all shakes out.
19:39 Robert Evans? Well, their tiny hands can reach the precious minerals in the Congo that we need.
19:44 Speaker 01 Right, right. As they get their hair stuck in the weaving.
19:46 Robert Evans? Well, sure, yeah, you're gonna lose some kids. Speaking of child slave labor, you know who doesn't use that? Whatever sponsor comes next. Unless it's like Haribo. If it's the gummy bear people, they definitely use child slave labor. Just as a heads up.
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21:45 Robert Evans? We're back. So, we're talking 1942, the city of the KDF car is primarily using slave labor. Now they're not making cars for civilians, they're making cars for the military, concentration camp inmates, because they need, they have to be skilled laborers. You can't just grab anyone to help make a car, right? You need people who have certain abilities, or certain, like, knowledge. So they're, they're kind of combing concentration camps. They're going to places like Auschwitz, right? And in fact, a Volkswagen engineer travels to Auschwitz in 1944 to pick out 300 skilled metalworkers from the recently transported Hungarian Jewish population. War needs being what they were, large portions of the factory had been turned over to making munitions.
22:28 Robert Evans? So they're not just making vehicles, like, they're increasingly, just because of how desperate the war is, using these auto factories to make, like, tank shells, and artillery shells, and bullets and stuff.
22:38 Speaker 01 Okay.
22:39 Robert Evans? Another 650 skilled Jewish female laborers are brought in to make shells and explosives at the Volkswagen factory. Their facility became a sub-camp of the Neuyen Gama concentration camp. And by the war's end, the plant consisted of four concentration camps and eight forced labor camps. The number of eastern workers alone neared 5,000 people, half of them female. The number of skilled female laborers brought another issue, which is that a lot of these female workers are arriving at the slave Factory pregnant, right? Or they become pregnant while they're working at the facility for reasons I shouldn't have to explain, you know?
23:15 Speaker 01 Yes, yes.
23:17 Robert Evans? And this is a problem, right? For the Nazis, because you have kind of two choices. One of them is ship these people back to where they had been taken from, which is what they do initially, right? When they find that they've got pregnant Eastern workers is they just send them back to whatever camp they'd come from.
23:32 Speaker 01 Oops, put them back.
23:34 Robert Evans? Right, right, right.
23:35 Speaker 01 Oh, no.
23:36 Robert Evans? Ah, no.
23:37 Speaker 01 Ew.
23:38 Robert Evans? I'm not ready to raise a baby, says the Third Reich. But this isn't like a great solution because they need these people, right? These are not interchangeable. These are skilled like metalworkers and the like, right? So they want these people because they don't have enough people who know how to do this kind of shit. And they can't just send all of them back because they're by definition doing work that the Reich doesn't have enough bodies to accomplish. Fritz Sockel, who is the German Secretary for Labor Allocation, reverses this policy late in the war. Like their morale actually does kind of matter to an extent. So you can't just like take their kids. I mean, that's what they're going to do. But you have to, you have to at least pretend that you're going to take care of these kids, right? Because it does sort of matter how productive these laborers are.
24:19 Speaker 01 They're going to Legoland.
24:22 Robert Evans? A nice farm.
24:22 Speaker 01 Weekend, a nice farm to get cigarettes.
24:25 Robert Evans? And so late in the war, old Fritz establishes the first nursery facilities at the Volkswagen concentration camps for children of foreign laborers.
24:35 Speaker 01 It's so dark.
24:37 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah. It's really bad because as you might have imagined, a Nazi nursery for the children of slave labors, not a great place for kids. Now, on paper, these are, these are being described and being described to the, the, the pregnant workers as birthing centers and places where infants will be watched and cared for while their parents work, right? Obviously, the Nazis have no real interest in taking care of Untermensch children. They, they don't want these people to exist at all.
25:05 Speaker 01 They don't have universal childcare for their slave labor? Wow.
25:09 Robert Evans? Yeah.
25:10 Speaker 01 I have some strongly worded letters to write.
25:12 Robert Evans? Yeah, exactly. I can't believe the Nazis would do something this bad. So the first nursery facility gets opened at the Volkswagen camp in early 1943. And I want to quote from the same write-up again. "Medical supervision of the maternity ward and children's home became the responsibility of the factory physician and overseer of Volkswagen's medical facilities, Dr. Hans Korbel. In time, children were sent to a similar home in the nearby town of Ruin, where the mortality was close to 100%. It is thought that 365 infants and toddlers, the children of female eastern workers who labored at Volkswagen, died at Ruin." So, this is just a death camp for little kids, right? They're kind of pretending it's not, so that these people are functional, but that is what they're doing, is they're just killing these kids.
25:57 Robert Evans? Now, at the end of the war, the Volkswagen factory manager is a guy named Anton Piech, P-I-E-C-H, and he winds up in charge of a military unit made up of Volkswagen employees acting as reserve soldiers who are supposed to be like defending this factory. It doesn't work well, and as soon as it becomes clear the war is lost, old Anton flees to Austria and hides out on the personal estate of Ferdinand Porsche, who's his father-in-law. He takes about 10 million Reichsmarks with him when the Nazis lose, and he tries to hide out there. It's not going to be super successful, because like, it's Austria, you haven't fled that far, like, it's still going to be occupied? And yeah, he's going to get charged criminally for his involvement here, as is Dr. Korbel,
26:40 Robert Evans? who ran that child death camp nursery thing. Korbel actually gets charged by the British occupying officials with criminal neglect in 1946, and he's executed in 1947. And again, I just really want to emphasize, these are all Volkswagen employees, right?
26:55 Speaker 01 Yes.
26:56 Robert Evans? And Dr. Korbel is going to be one of the very few VW employees to pay for his war-era crimes. Porsche and Piech, you know, obviously we know who Ferdinand Porsche is, Piech is the guy who was managing the factory, they're both arrested and held in custody after the war, but the Allied authorities never got around really charging them with any crimes. Volkswagen continues to operate after World War II, and the Wolfsburg plant remained the headquarters of the company up until the modern era. They never changed their HQ from like, the place where they had slave factories. Because again, this is this very German thing, if it's like, well, the buildings are perfectly good, like, it's not the buildings fault. Why would we change where we're based out of?
27:38 Speaker 01 No one!
27:39 Robert Evans? We have the factory right here!
27:42 Speaker 01 Wow, the vibes.
27:45 Robert Evans? Yeah, I remember visiting Saxonhausen, which is a concentration camp near Berlin. It was primarily for political prisoners like 10 or 15 years ago. And, you know, as we're going through, they point out this building and it's like, and that's where, you know, the, the camp guards would be trained. And I was like, oh, you know, what is it today? And like, well, it's a police training facility today. And I was like, you guys couldn't just make another building? Like, you're training cops here now? Like, what the fuck?
28:10 Robert Evans? Did no one sit down and talk about this?
28:14 Robert Evans? Okay. Cool stuff, Germany.
28:17 Speaker 01 Sick joke.
28:20 Robert Evans? I mean, we're hardly ones to talk these days, but come on.
28:23 Speaker 01 Oh, oh, excuse me. We build our own cop towns from scratch.
28:27 Robert Evans? We do, but we still, people still getting married at plantations, right? You know?
28:32 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
28:34 Robert Evans? So it took 40 years for there to be any kind of open reckoning with Volkswagen Company history on like a serious scale. You know, this is a kind of thing that builds increasingly, you know, once there's a couple of decades distance from the war years.
28:48 Speaker 01 That's interesting. Okay.
28:50 Robert Evans? Yeah, it takes a little while. Not that like there's none initially, but it does take a while for things to really build up. This kind of culminates in 1986 as a part of kind of this pressure for them to reckon with their past. Volkswagen hires a historian named Hans Mumsen to write a warts and all history of the company. And this is, you know, starts a partial reckoning, which culminates in 1991, when the company created a fund to compensate former slave laborers to the tune of some 12 million marks. Additional reparations attempts are executed over the years. And so there are some, there's some effort taken to like pay back people that Volkswagen profited from enslaving, right? That, that happens some near the end of the 20th century.
29:33 Robert Evans? Now, I wouldn't describe this as even the minimum, you know? It's worth though, really driving home the fact that even the proactive steps Volkswagen took in this period only happened because their hands were forced by constant attempts by activists to make the auto giant reckon with its history.
29:51 Speaker 01 Right.
29:52 Robert Evans? examples of this is a there's a really good art piece by an Austrian artist Wolfgang Flatz called It Was All Adolf, which is made using the hood of a VW Beetle. You can see that it's like the hood of a Volkswagen Beetle, an old one, kind of rusted with a swastika in the center and then the colors of the German flag running underneath it.
30:11 Speaker 01 That's good. I wonder if this was before or after Volkswagen Barbie. It feels like it could be.
30:16 Robert Evans? I believe this is before. Well, no, no, no. I think this would have been right around the same time. That was in the 90s, right?
30:23 Speaker 01 I think so.
30:24 Robert Evans? I think this would have been contemporaneous to that, you know, more or less. Yeah.
30:29 Speaker 01 Good art.
30:30 Robert Evans? Yeah, I like it. Of course, with a backstory like that Volkswagen took great pains over the next 80 something years of their long and storied corporate history to avoid anything morally questionable. You'd never catch Volkswagen, for example, enslaving hundreds and hundreds of people in order to make a buck. Only of course you would, because going into the 50s and 60s, all of the men, not all, but a lot of the guys running Volkswagen were former Nazis. In fact, many, if not most of like Volkswagen's executive suite were guys who'd worked at Volkswagen during the Third Reich and just hadn't been punished at all. And they just kept working at Volkswagen after the war.
31:08 Speaker 01 That is like so common though, right? Like, right? Okay.
31:12 Robert Evans? This is the norm. This is the Norman German industry, the Norman German politics, a lot of, obviously, there are guys who had been on the left and who had gotten punished, who wind up in politics after the war. But a lot of former Nazis wind up in business and politics, running companies after the war. Because most of them don't get punished. And so this all is relevant to Brazil, because in 1964, less than 20 years after the end of World War II, Brazil gets taken over by a military dictatorship, right? The democratically elected government gets overthrown and the military takes over. The Brazilian military junta would govern the country with an iron fist until 1985, so a little over 20 years. Like many dictatorships, they did engage in massive infrastructure projects, right?
31:56 Robert Evans? This is a big part of like what the junta, where they're kind of claiming their legitimacy is that. Building highways, you know, we're modernizing the country. We're pushing for large numbers of civilians to move from these kind of more developed crowded urban areas and develop more of these massive chunks of empty jungle wilderness, right?
32:16 Speaker 01 Yes, to get their own car, uh, to have their giant vehicle.
32:20 Robert Evans? Right.
32:21 Speaker 01 It rhymes, it's true.
32:23 Robert Evans? Yeah, it rhymes and a big part of this is like, well, we kind of got to get rid of a lot of the Amazon, you know? That's just wasted space. If Brazil's gonna be a modern country, we gotta pave over that motherfucker, you know?
32:32 Speaker 01 We all agree on that, yeah.
32:34 Robert Evans? Too much Amazon's a real problem for Brazil, you know? We gotta get rid of that shit so we can have cattle farms and the like. So, the fact that the military junta does engage in this kind of building and industrialization process, it's cited a lot by defenders of the regime, including Jair Bolsonaro, who just got convicted of doing a coup. But Bolsonaro is very much influenced by the military dictatorship, right? He is a guy who will always see this as like, the military dictatorship was doing the right thing and that's what we... His whole time in power was trying to go back to those days in a lot of ways, right? And this is why he was a huge advocate for the illegal logging and clear cutting of the Amazon, you know?
33:15 Robert Evans? This is a thing that was important to him and it's really, I'm not gonna say it starts entirely under the military junta, but the military junta makes it a major part of the regime, right? Is that we're going to get rid of this fucking jungle and develop it. And so, what you're seeing in this period from the 60s to the early 80s is the birth of the systematic state encouraged annihilation of the rainforest. This has continued to be a celebrated cause among the Brazilian right wing ever since. The overwhelming ideological need on behalf of the military dictatorship to develop the wild parts of Brazil led them to offer multinational corporations a mix of tax breaks and public funds if they would invest in projects that would help with the clear cutting of the Amazon. Cattle ranching was the preferred way of doing this, right?
34:00 Robert Evans? Because if you're going to create a cattle rancher, you gotta cut down a shitload of forest. Because cows don't do great in super dense forest, right? You wanna replace all those trees with pasture, right? And if you have huge herds of cattle, the jungle's not going to grow back because the cows are going to stomp everything down and
34:17 Speaker 01 Right, they're going to eat it.
34:19 Robert Evans? Right, exactly.
34:20 Speaker 01 Shit everywhere, yeah.
34:21 Robert Evans? Shit everywhere. This is, so this is kind of seen as like, this is the perfect way to get rid of our Amazon problem and ensure that we have more meat, right?
34:29 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
34:30 Robert Evans? Now, the process was in line with the military government's overarching resource strategy in this period. Basically, the, the, the translation was integrate so as not to surrender, right? And this is kind of an answer to colonialism, international capitalism, where we're inviting this stuff in, but we don't just want these foreign companies to strip our land of value, right? We want them to make, obviously, it's important, they need to make a profit or they won't be interested, and we want to make a profit, but we also want to develop land for other use by Brazilians, right? That's kind of the ideological underpinning of what's happening here.
35:03 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
35:04 Robert Evans? Per an article in The Washington Post by Terence McCoy and Marina Diaz, quote, Volkswagen Brazil, then the largest carmaker in Latin America, accepted the challenge. In the untamed municipality of Santana do Araguaia, the Vale do Rio Cristalino Company, a subsidiary whose leadership included Volkswagen Brazil's president Wolfgang Sauer and human resources director Adman Ganem, obtained a large parcel of land. Executives back in Germany envisioned a herd of more than 100,000 cattle and an answer to world hunger. "This world not only needs cars," Volkswagen president Rudolph Leeding declared in 1974, "but also meat." This slave thing isn't like to make cars, they're getting into the cattle business. A natural move for Volkswagen.
35:49 Speaker 01 I mean, uh, I mean, when they explain it, it makes so much sense, you know?
35:56 Robert Evans? Yeah, the world needs not just cars, but meat too.
35:58 Speaker 01 I'm getting the vision, okay.
36:00 Robert Evans? Yeah. So Volkswagen settles on a chunk of forested land in the southeastern state of Para, which is about 140,000 hectares in size, this like chunk of land that they're going to turn into a ranch, which means that Volkswagen's, like, this, this plot that they have purchased is larger than like the capital of Brazil itself. This is a massive piece of property. And the farm becomes known as the Fazenda Volkswagen. Now Volkswagen, being an auto company, didn't have people on staff who knew how to clear-cut land or operate a cattle farm, because that's kind of outside of their wheelhouse.
36:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
36:35 Robert Evans? So they opted to hire outside contractors who could do the job for them, right?
36:39 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
36:40 Robert Evans? We'll bring in some guys, and they'll know how to do this stuff.
36:44 Speaker 01 Right.
36:44 Robert Evans? And using contractors in this way, this is not just a Volkswagen thing, right? As I said, the military dictatorship is inviting all sorts of foreign multinationals into the country to do stuff like this, to operate farms, to clear the rainforest, and the standard is that you have a subsidiary company that is in charge of whatever efforts you're doing here in Brazil, and that company hires local contractors to find you laborers. And the colloquial name for these contractors is gatos, or cats.
37:14 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
37:14 Robert Evans? And I haven't seen like a good explanation for why they're calling these guys cats, but that's like what these guys who are finding you kind of itinerant laborers, right? That's what they're called.
37:24 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
37:25 Robert Evans? The gatos are paid a flat fee to find workers and meet certain production quotas.
37:30 Speaker 01 Uh-oh.
37:31 Robert Evans? Right? Yes, anyone who's studied the history of capitalism, you know how this is going to end, right?
37:37 Speaker 01 Okay.
37:39 Robert Evans? We could go back to the very birth of capitalism during the Age of Sail, under the Dutch and British East India Companies, right?
37:45 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
37:45 Robert Evans? There's a starvation, genocide in Bengal at the end of the 1700s that kills somewhere between like 10 and 30 million people, and it's a product of the British East India Company has these local guys, these are like generally like English employees, but they're like local contractors and whatnot.
38:01 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
38:02 Robert Evans? They want to get the most profit out of their territory by maximizing how much food they're extracting from like these different regions, these villages, and they don't really care if there's enough food for the people who live there, because anything that's not being shipped out and monetized is money that they think is going out of their pocket.
38:23 Speaker 01 Right.
38:23 Robert Evans? And so tens of millions of people are going to starve to death, so these guys, these local employees of the company, can maximize their own vig, right?
38:31 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm. A classic potato famine situation.
38:35 Speaker 01 Take all of it. Yeah.
38:36 Robert Evans? Right. This is an old story, right? And Volkswagen's going to put a kind of a different spin on it, but you can sort of see like this is not like coming out of nowhere, right?
38:47 Speaker 01 Right. They're gonna tell it again.
38:49 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah, exactly. The gatos hired by Volkswagen trawled distant towns in the sticks, places like Mato Grosso and Tokatin, in order to find workers, and they promised these people good contracts. On paper, these are good jobs. There's high pay. They're promising them you'll get free medical care. You'll have quality housing. And so these laborers, and these are generally people who come from bumfuck nowhere, right? Are signing on, thinking like, okay, well, I'll be away from home for like six months or a year, and I'll save up a bunch of money, and I'll come back to my families with this healthy nest egg that we can use to fund the next stage of our lives, right?
39:23 Speaker 01 Like a cat.
39:25 Robert Evans? Like a cat. Exactly like a cat.
39:27 Speaker 01 Like a cat. Yeah.
39:29 Robert Evans? Per the Washington Post, quote, "That's not how things worked out, not for any of them. The gatos drove them to isolated chunks of forest, up to 80 kilometers from the entrance of the Volkswagen farm itself. They were expected to pay for their housing, for their food, and for their medical care. Since there were no towns, certainly not ones the armed guards watching them would allow them to visit, they had no choice but to pay whatever price the gatos decided to charge for these services. In short order, they found themselves in debt. When the actual circumstances of their labor proved to be much rougher than they'd been promised, any who tried to return home were stopped by men with guns." One employee, Manuel Lima, told interviewers later of his experiences, which began in April of 1981. And you know, this gets started in the 70s, but most of our stories of these guys, our accounts kind of start in the 80s.
40:14 Speaker 01 That's so recent.
40:15 Robert Evans? Right. This is happening when Reagan's in office. "The only water was from a filthy well swarming with mosquitoes. We all got sick, feverish with malaria. As I was weak, I left midway through the logging. Seventeen of us sought the pay we were owed, but they didn't want to pay." And Lima and his group are forbidden from leaving, right? They're like, okay, give us our money. We're too sick to continue. They're like, you aren't owed any money, and also, you're not allowed to leave. And so the gatos forced them to return to clearing the forest at gunpoint. Lima and six of his friends are only allowed to leave five months later because they had been worked so near to death that the gatos decided keeping them was more trouble than it was worth. They did not get paid for their work. Quote, "We left penniless and gravely ill," he recalled.
41:00 Robert Evans? That's cool.
41:02 Speaker 01 That's cool.
41:02 Robert Evans? Yeah.
41:03 Speaker 01 Looks like it all worked out. Your dreams came true.
41:05 Robert Evans? Looks like it all worked out. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I am reading this and being like, wow, you know, writing comedy for the internet, not such a bad gig, you know? A lot of us did leave penniless and gravely ill, but not that bad, you know?
41:17 Speaker 01 Not that bad. Woo, wow.
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43:08 Robert Evans? And we're back. So we're telling the stories of some of these Volkswagen laborers who aren't technically, they're working for a subsidiary of Volkswagen. They're directly employed by a contractor. So VW can say, well, these were never our employees, but like, they're working Volkswagen's land.
43:24 Speaker 01 We had no idea.
43:26 Robert Evans? Yes.
43:26 Speaker 01 We didn't know.
43:28 Robert Evans? How could we have known? Another laborer, Elias de Carmo, was interviewed in November of 1983 about his experiences. He recalled, "We worked four months clearing the land through rain and biting flies. On Sundays, we walked 16 kilometers for meat and other food for ourselves and our companions. At the end of the felling, we didn't get a single cent." The gato hermenio said we still owed 13,160, you know, of the local currency, right? So, and what you're seeing here, what's happening to these people, the term for this is debt peonage, right? So this is not chattel slavery, right? These people are technically employees, unlike, you know, slaves brought over from the, you know, Atlantic slave trade.
44:08 Speaker 01 It's the modern, uh...
44:11 Robert Evans? Right. It's woke slavery, you know?
44:14 Speaker 01 Yes.
44:14 Robert Evans? They're being paid.
44:16 Speaker 01 Yeah. Employees.
44:18 Robert Evans? Kind of. They're being paid. Now, they have to pay for their healthcare and food and their housing, obviously, first, and that winds up being more money than they can possibly earn. And they can't leave until they've made up for the debt that they owe the company as soon as they start working, but they're not like, you know, owned by the company, right?
44:40 Speaker 01 Legally, legally.
44:41 Robert Evans? Yeah. Legally, it's different from chattel slavery, right?
44:46 Speaker 01 And how dare you?
44:47 Robert Evans? And like, the logic is, whenever these people are like, but you're not letting them leave, their argument is like, well, but they owe us money. You wouldn't expect, this isn't a charity. You wouldn't expect Volkswagen, or you wouldn't expect these gatos to lose money because their employees couldn't avoid going into debt, right? You know? And the reality is, they don't have any choice. For one thing, they're out in the middle of the jungle. They can't just go like, buy or like, rent houses, because there's not like, villages and towns that they're allowed to live in. So they have to... Get their food and stuff from these Volkswagen, basically, or these different legatas. They don't have a choice here. So they're just fucked as soon as they get hired. One unnamed worker later informed a fact-finding delegation of Sao Paulo legislators,
45:31 Robert Evans? quote, "All I did was work to pay for jeans, flip flops, and a little food. Nine months of relentless labor, cutting trees for the multinational under the orders of the contractor, and I was trapped with no way out." Now, I think we've set up here how gnarly this system was and hideous. I think it's important here that we take a little bit of a substantial digression, because it would be wrong for me to talk about Volkswagen's operations in Brazil as if they were just descended from the company's birth as an organ of the Nazi state. Know what it'd be right for me to make it seem as if the military junta that ruled Brazil for much of the latter third of the 20th century was something totally novel in the nation's history. Slave labor was rampant during the military dictatorship and after, because it's still a major problem
46:15 Robert Evans? in Brazil to this day. It's rampant because slavery has always been key to the Brazilian economy since its birth as a colony. The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database was first published in 1999 and is a collection of detailed files on some 35,000 slave trafficking voyages starting in 1520 and continuing until 1866. It represents the most detailed accounting of the history of chattel slavery as an import industry. And while these files represent just a fraction of the total number of humans forcibly transported from Africa to the New World and elsewhere, it still includes files on some 90,000-plus enslaved Africans. And according to this database, Brazil took in more enslaved Africans than any other place on the face of the planet,
47:00 Robert Evans? right? Brazil is the number one place where the Atlantic slave trade sends people. Nowhere else even. No single place comes close, really, right?
47:11 Robert Evans? Yeah, and this is something I don't think a lot of like Americans are particularly, I think Brazilians are, but a lot of Americans aren't aware of this.
47:18 Speaker 01 We just assume we're the best at everything.
47:20 Robert Evans? Yeah, that we were doing the most of this and like, to be clear here, as we'll talk about, we were intimately involved in the Brazilian slave trade, so we're not clean on this either.
47:28 Speaker 01 We played a supporting role in their number one slot.
47:31 Robert Evans? But this is a huge deal in Brazil. Per an AP article by Eleanor Hughes, nearly 5 million kidnapped Africans disembarked in Brazil, more than 12 times the number taken to mainland North America. Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery in 1888. So that's pretty stark, and that's why these problems continue, because it's always been so key to how Brazil has operated. For additional context, the estimated total number of people taken from slave ships from Africa to the Americas is around 10 million. This means Brazil, or Portuguese America as it was known for most of this period, accounted for somewhere near half of the entire Atlantic slave trade. Right? Like, massive. It's impossible to exaggerate.
48:16 Speaker 01 Wow.
48:17 Robert Evans? Now, the importation of enslaved Africans to the United States was legally halted in the first quarter of the 19th century. Obviously, slavery continues in the US after that point, but we're not legally importing slaves, right? From the Atlantic, it still happens to an extent, and people are still selling enslaved people, obviously, until, you know, the end of the Civil War. But it continues, the importation of these people continues in Brazil for much longer. Slaves provided the main source of workers in coffee plantations in Brazil after 1831, when Brazil finally abolished the importation of slaves, right?
48:50 Speaker 01 Uh huh, okay.
48:52 Robert Evans? Yeah, it's key to the growth of coffee as a world industry.
48:55 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
48:56 Robert Evans? And even after 1831, when the formal ban is put in place, around a million enslaved Africans are forcibly imported to Brazil, and what Yale University press author Leonardo Marx described as "one of the greatest crimes of the 19th century, even by 19th century standards." Which is saying something, because we did a lot of crimes against humanity in the old 19th century.
49:21 Robert Evans? Yeah.
49:22 Speaker 01 Put things in perspective, huh?
49:25 Robert Evans? Yeah, they're doing bad by the standards of like slavery in the 19th century. Brazil is on another level.
49:31 Speaker 01 Wow.
49:32 Robert Evans? Leonardo goes on to write, "The new context of illegality, however, changed some of the characteristics of the slave trade to Brazil. In order to circumvent authorities, especially the British Navy, slave traders increasingly employed US resources in their operations. US-built ships became a predominant feature of the transatlantic slave trade for their speed and quality. Good old American manufacturing, as was the case in most sectors of maritime commerce. More complicated was the fact that the US flag also started to be used by slave traders as a cover to protect them from the actions of the British Navy. The United States was one of the few countries that refused to establish anti-slave trade treaties with the British that included the mutual right of search, which had been one of the causes of the War of 1812. Consequently, the country managed to suppress the slave trade to its
50:14 Robert Evans? own dominions, but it had much less success in curtailing its participation in the traffic to other places such as Brazil. US companies based in Rio de Janeiro simultaneously became the main sellers of US ships and the main exporters of slave-produced coffee. Most of this coffee went to the United States, whose consumption of the hot beverage expanded as part of the construction of its own national identity, as opposed to the tea-drinking British."
50:35 Speaker 01 Oh.
50:36 Robert Evans? We are intimately involved in why slavery is such a big deal in Brazil, right? We're providing the ships, we're providing legal cover to the people doing this illegally, and we're buying all the coffee that these slaves are producing, right?
50:48 Speaker 01 Right. Well, it's for us to form our own identity, and that's like really important.
50:54 Robert Evans? And to be fair, the British, their hands are not clean because they're into tea instead of coffee. They start a war in China over this, right?
51:02 Speaker 01 Touche.
51:05 Robert Evans? Yeah. Look, if you like a hot caffeinated beverage in the 19th century, you're getting involved in something fucked up. Also, the 20th and 21st centuries, whatever, you know?
51:16 Speaker 01 You know, you don't gotta hand it to Mormons, but they were against hot beverages. That, you know.
51:21 Robert Evans? Yeah, they've got their Mormon tea with a fedra in it. Yeah, that's good. That's, that's local. Yeah. So, US entities remained intimately involved in the Brazilian slave trade until the 1850s, when it was unevenly but largely suppressed. Slavery did not officially end inside Brazilian territory until the early 1890s. And again, there's still a problem with slavery today. Like, there's a sizable amount of effort that goes on in Brazil to deal with modern day slavery. During the long period in which slavery was practiced openly in Brazil, there were regular periodic escapes of enslaved workers who would form their own settlements, sometimes containing more than a thousand runaways during their height. And the state where Volkswagen operates its ranch, Para,
52:04 Robert Evans? was a particular hub of these communities due to its isolation. This is relevant to the reason the military junta focused on developing the area, right? The fact that there's so many of these, like, freed slave colonies, that that's part of the history here, that a lot of the people who are going to be working and enslaved on this plantation are themselves the descendants of slaves, right? Or at least partially the descendants of slaves. Since the time of Portuguese colonization, this region of the country, which is so isolated and heavily forested, had represented a barrier to every kind of authoritarian system in the territory. The jungle stood in opposition to the colonial government, to the racial caste system, and now to the dictatorship. They chose to tame the jungle using the raw manpower of, in many cases,
52:48 Robert Evans? descendants of the same slaves who'd once sheltered in the jungles they were now tearing down, right?
52:53 Speaker 01 Symbolism, duh. Oh my god.
52:57 Robert Evans? Right, yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty bleak, right? But it also makes sense, like, these, the fact that these areas are so hard to reach means that they're a threat to the power of the regime. And so that's an additional reason to want to do this.
53:10 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
53:11 Robert Evans? Yeah. And slavery is so baked into the very fabric of Brazil's economy that its return during the period of the junta's time in power was reversion to the mean more than anything else. The website Amazon Today has done a good job of documenting other less famous cases of confirmed slave work during the Same period that Volkswagen's ranch was in operation. Quote, "In June of 1985, the farmer Sebastián Terboy from Rodonia was accused of keeping more than 100 mining farm workers under a captive regime on their farms, one of which was on the border with Bolivia. The workers were recruited by the cat Itamar Magal Virdipino and transported on behalf of Salvador Fernandez, owner of a restaurant. They were forced to work in deforestation from four o'clock in the morning until the sun disappeared, did
53:53 Robert Evans? not receive the promised payment, slept in canvas camps and were watched by 20 armed guards." So this is not, again, this is something that's much bigger than just Volkswagen. And these are always very similar cases, right? You're seeing here, like, this isn't even a multinational corporation. This is like a guy who owns a restaurant that is, this is like his side business, is, you know, helping to keep these people enslaved in order to mine for him.
54:16 Speaker 01 Well, you know, he watched the podcast. He listened to all their advice. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
54:21 Robert Evans? Right.
54:21 Speaker 01 Yeah. Fellow entrepreneur.
54:24 Robert Evans? Right. He caught a YouTube ad telling him, like, you know, the ultimate kind of passive income is just owning people, right?
54:31 Robert Evans? So, "Another complaint made by representatives of the Federation of Workers in Agriculture in 1995 found slave labor being practiced at a farm called Nova Deli in Para. Seven workers were found to have been kept for years and only given food. Investigation into this farm revealed another, owned by the same person with a clandestine cemetery in it, filled with, quote, 'bones and signs of incineration of bodies covered by tires and black plastic.' Such graveyards are a common sight in uncovered Brazilian slave plantations."
55:00 Speaker 01 Covered by tires. Sorry.
55:02 Robert Evans? Yeah, right. I think just to hide it, right? You burn some tires on top of it and it kind of obscures what's buried there. "I found another more recent article from 2024 in The Intercept, which discusses a farm that was expropriated by the Brazilian state in 2008 under an amendment to the constitution in 2001 that allowed land from people holding slaves to be confiscated and turned over to the descendants of its victims. Such actions are important, but they don't reverse the damage generations of slavery did to the fabric of Brazilian society, some of which is what allowed the junta to take power in the first place."
55:36 Robert Evans? On local institutions in Brazil from the Latin American and Caribbean Center by Andrea Papadia, quote, "A widespread reliance on slave labor may have heightened racial cleavages, making resource sharing through taxation and public goods more difficult. Second, a high incidence of slavery deprived a large share of the population of a political voice and limited competition between municipalities, since slaves could not vote with their feet. This reduced the strength of citizens' demands and the accountability of local politicians. Thus, slavery is likely to have affected the development of fiscal capacity and provision of public goods, both directly and indirectly. On one hand, slaves lacked even the limited political voice that free Brazilian citizens had. On the other, slavery influenced the settlement of foreign migrants, and therefore, the extent to which this dynamic group of citizens was able to shape local institutions."
56:21 Robert Evans? Right? So, the fact that this such a huge chunk of the country is enslaved, it means both the state develops in such a way where this chunk of the populace goes most of the length of the state's existence without having any kind of a voice in politics, and that contributes to the development of these authoritarian systems, right?
56:40 Speaker 01 Right.
56:41 Robert Evans? Again, you can look at similar things have happened in the United States, right? And are continuing to happen, you know?
56:46 Speaker 01 It's so perfect. It's the perfect formula.
56:48 Robert Evans? Yeah.
56:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
56:49 Robert Evans? Yeah, exactly.
56:51 Speaker 01 Brilliant, incredible. Oh, wow.
56:53 Robert Evans? Yeah. And, you know, up to this, the present day, in Brazil, black and biracial Brazilians are likelier to be poor, to face imprisonment, and to die early than their peers. Only about a quarter of Brazil's lower house of Congress come from this segment of the population. So Volkswagen's operations in Brazil were nothing new for it or for Brazil, except for one crucial fact, which is that they would eventually be subject to a reckoning. And we will talk about that and more in part two. How are we feeling, Maggie?
57:22 Speaker 01 Woo! Oh, good, good.
57:27 Robert Evans? Yeah, I'm feeling great.
57:28 Speaker 01 This is so fascinating. I feel great.
57:31 Robert Evans? Yeah.
57:31 Speaker 01 I'm raring for some revenge.
57:34 Robert Evans? Yeah, we will talk a lot about what happened next and how this all continued. Uh, but first, why don't you plug your pluggables?
57:41 Speaker 01 Oh, yes. Uh, how, how does one transition? I feel like my brain's been cooked.
57:47 Robert Evans? Mm-hmm.
57:47 Speaker 01 Well, I, you know what? If you, if you're feeling down, if you're feeling a little sad after this episode, you know, over on Nebula, yeah, there's a show called Amy's Dead and Dream House. Uh, it also tackles, yeah, some pretty dark topics. But, you know, the fun guys of a kid's show, so go check that out. Uh, and then, yeah, you can find my video essays, uh, just at my name, Maggie Mae Fish. We do a very fun one coming out about true crime and propaganda. So, you know.
58:18 Robert Evans? I can't wait.
58:19 Speaker 01 Fun, just fun things at the top of my brain right now, you know?
58:23 Robert Evans? Well, check that out. Check out Maggie's whole oeuvre of work and, uh, you know, check out the history of slavery in Brazil. Uh, it's probably something we should all read more about. It's pretty bleak. I don't know. Also, maybe, I, I was gonna say, don't buy a Volkswagen, but really, there's not a car you can buy without some sort of nightmare history to it, uh, or nightmare present to it.
58:45 Speaker 01 It really is what, uh, what Towsmen are you picking up, you know?
58:49 Robert Evans? I will say Volkswagen's worse than most. You know, they got caught a couple of years ago for just like massively committing fraud on a, in an enormous scale, like lying about the emissions of their diesel vehicles.
59:00 Speaker 01 Oh, shit!
59:01 Robert Evans? Yeah, like it's a huge deal.
59:03 Speaker 01 Ah.
59:04 Robert Evans? And then we could talk about like the fact that they, they operate factories in Xinjiang in China that they have a really questionable human rights record too. But I don't know, you're, you're not gonna find a clean automaker here. So steal a car, that's what I'm saying, everybody. Steal all of your vehicles.
59:19 Speaker 01 Steal a car?
59:21 Robert Evans? That's the only ethical way to buy a car. Yeah, auto theft.
59:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
59:25 Robert Evans? Mm-hmm. Great, all right, well, that's part one, everybody.
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