From 1974 to 1986, Volkswagen operated a massive cattle ranch in Brazil’s Amazon region. While benefitting from tax breaks from the country’s military dictatorship, its workers were subjected to forced labor, violence, and conditions legally defined as slavery. Now, decades later, a Brazilian court is weighing whether the German automaker should finally be held accountable—thanks to one Catholic priest who refused to let the story disappear.

A decades-long crime hidden in plain sight

From 1974 to 1986, Volkswagen do Brasil controlled the Vale do Rio Cristalino ranch in Pará state, a 75,000-hectare property in the Amazon. Workers were lured from often impoverished and distant regions with promises of fair pay. Instead, they arrived to find armed overseers, debt bondage, withheld wages, and beatings. Escapees were hunted down by gunmen. “We were sold,” survivor Raul Batista de Souza told The Washington Post.

Volkswagen executives, documents show, were aware of the abuses and later flagged the issue as a reputational threat. But no legal case was ever brought. The crimes might have remained buried, had it not been for Father Ricardo Rezende.

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