Land Invasions and Contemporary Slavery Gabriel Cepaluni UNESP-Franca * August 10, 2020 Abstract This paper presents an original panel data set of modern-day slaves from Brazil. We demonstrate that municipalities with more land invasions have fewer numbers of slaves. Based on economic models of labor coercion, we suggest that land invasions offer an outside option in the labor mar- ket for poor and unskilled workers. The result is robust to the addition of many relevant controls, a battery of statistical techniques, and estimation with different samples. Additionally, we exam- ine the extent to which municipal characteristics concerning the private sector, public services, and local politics influence the likelihood that municipalities have both land invasions and slavery. Our findings have broad implications for the quality of democratic governance and the working conditions of some of the world’s most vulnerable citizens. Keywords: Modern-day slaves, land invasion, human rights, development studies, Brazil. Word count: 8568 *My thanks to Marco Antonio Faganello for his superb research assistance, and Paulo Arvate for his contribution in the early stages of this project. I am grateful to Michael Touchton for their advice and suggestions. 1 1 Introduction Slavery is an abject institution for today’s moral standards. However, coercive labor relations were fre- quent throughout history. Inevitably, the debate surrounding slave work is part of the history of social thought. Aristotle claims that some people are natural slaves, and it is best for them to serve a master (Aristotle, 1984). John Locke rejects the idea that a person could voluntarily consent to enslavement. However, he argues that enslavement of those who are guilty of capital offenses or captured in war is permissible (Locke, 1947). Karl Marx describes the capitalist-worker relationship as a form of "wage slavery" (Marx, 1971). Recently, Acemoglu and Wolitzky(2011) argues that standard economic models of the labor market assume that transactions in the labor market are "free." However, coercive work transactions were the norm for most human history, and it is still common nowadays. Although traditional slavery — especially African slavery — has been much researched (e.g., Fo- gel and Engerman(1995); Nunn(2008)), only a relatively few quantitative researchers have studied contemporaneous coercive labor relations (Beber and Blattman, 2013; Phillips and Sakamoto, 2012; Hernandez and Rudolph, 2015; Mahmoud and Trebesch, 2010). One reason for this scarcity is that modern slavery is a hidden human rights violation. Researchers or even the State often do not have easy access to some of the remote areas where the modern slaves work (Scott, 2010; McCarthy, 2014; Landman, 2020). In this sense, we take advantage of a rare opportunity to study modern slavery with an extensive original data set. Our data set comprises slaves rescued as a result of inspections from Brazil’s Ministry of Labor and Employment, and a rich set of information at the municipality-level for 1995-2003. We demonstrate that municipalities with more land invasions have fewer slaves than municipali- ties without invasions. In our most conservative estimates, one land invasion decreases around 0.15 slaves in Brazilian municipalities from 1995 to 2013. Inspired by economic models of labor coercion, we suggest that land invasion offers an outside option in the labor market for poor and unskilled work- ers (Domar, 1970; Acemoglu and Wolitzky, 2011). Landless movements "compete" with slave-owners, acting in the same marginalized municipalities1, also recruiting unskilled workers. Brazil’s constitu- 1Figure1 shows that the higher incidence of modern-day slavery occurs close to State borders. 2 tion allows the expropriation of land promoted by landless movements that do not comply with the Brazilian labor code that prohibits modern slavery. Consistent with our argument, the members of the most active Brazilian landless movement — the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement, or Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) — have a strong normative stance against slave labor. As a former-modern slave and current member of MST declares: "I was a slave in many farms, and my chil- dren, my grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will continue to be slaves. I think we are the ones who have to organize ourselves, get together to stop and say ’no’ to slavery. I believe that the way to overcome world hunger and misery is the distribution of land."2 We find that the number of firms has a positive impact on land invasions. In contrast, the average number of minimum wage salaries decrease them. Concerning public services, both drinking water and sewage increases land invasions. As for local politics, land invasions decrease during electoral years, and the possibility of reelecting the mayor also reduces invasions. Finally, we find that the num- ber of employees increases slavery and drinking water, reducing slavery, while sewage and vaccines increase it. These results imply the private and the public sector, as well as self-interested local politi- cians, influence the relationship between land invasions and slavery. However, social spending is not reducing land conflicts and the extreme exploitation of workers. Our study builds upon theoretical models of coercive labor relations (Domar, 1970; Acemoglu and Wolitzky, 2011), debating to what extent the predictions of these models work in a real-working set- ting. We also contribute to the quantitative literature on modern slavery (Beber and Blattman, 2013; Phillips and Sakamoto, 2012), and land conflicts (Hidalgo et al., 2010; Albertus, Brambor and Ceneviva, 2018; Albertus, 2015). As far as we know, we are the first to establish a quantitative link between land invasions and modern-day slavery. Closest to our research finding, Buonanno and Vargas(2019) ex- amines the legacy of traditional slavery on violent crimes in today’s Colombia. In our study, we also explore different local conditions that favor the emergence of modern slavery and land invasions. Fi- nally, our study has implications for the debate on the quality of democracy in developing countries to the extent that human rights and dignity are crucial components for a truly free society (Sen, 2001; 2http://reporterunesp.jor.br/2019/05/14/trabalho-escravo-no-campo/ 3 Diamond, Morlino et al., 2005). We organized the paper as follows. We review the literature on labor coercion and land conflicts and make some theoretical predictions. Then, we describe our data and the main variables of this study. After that, we present the methodologies employed in this article and the results of our analysis. We conclude discussing our main findings and their implications for modern slavery studies. 2 Modern Slavery and Land Conflicts 2.1 Labor coercion The International Labor Organization (ILO) defines forced labor as an involuntary work performed under the menace of a penalty. The employer coerces the person to work through the use of violence or intimidation, or by more subtle means such as debt, retention of identity papers or threats of de- nunciation to immigration authorities (ILO, 1930). In 2016, more than 40 million people in the world were victims of modern slavery, with 24.9 million in forced labor. Of the 24.9 million victims of forced labor, 16 million were in the private economy, another 4.8 million were in forced sexual exploitation, and 4.1 million were forced by State authorities (ILO, 2017). Brazil was the last country in the Western world to officially abolish slavery in 1888. Nevertheless, the country has not extinguished coerced labor completely. Art. 149 of the 1940 Brazil Penal Code asserts that reducing someone to a condition analogous to slavery is a crime. That is, according to the law, it is illegal to subject a person to degrading working conditions or restricting their freedom of movement (Brasil, 1940). The penalty for contemporary slavery established in Art. 149 from the 1940 Penal Code is 2-8 years of imprisonment and a fine. The same penalty applies to employees who restrict the use of any means of transport by the worker and take possession of personal objects to retain them in the workplace. The penalty increases by half if the crime occurs against children or adolescents; or due to the prejudice of race, color, ethnicity, religion, or geographic origin (Brasil, 1940). Although the 1940 Penal Code established the crime of coerced labor, the Brazilian State only started to combat the phenomenon in 1995 after the official recognition of slave labor in its terri- 4 tory. Today, however, the uniqueness of the Brazilian legal and institutional anti-slavery apparatus makes the country a crucial case to study this form of human rights violation. During 1995, the federal government created, through Ordinances No. 549 and 550 and the Presidential Decree No. 1538, the Special Mobile Inspection Group (Grupo Especial de Fiscalização Móvel — GEFM), within the frame- work of the Secretariat of Labor Inspection (Secretaria de Fiscalização do Trabalho — SEFIT), and the Executive Group for the Suppression of Forced Labor (GERTRAF). GEFM investigates complaints of exploitation of slave labor in rural areas.3 In 2003, the country created the "Register of employers that kept workers under conditions analogous to slavery," otherwise known as the "Dirty List." The list functioned partly as a "naming and shaming" mechanism. However, it also cuts off flows of govern- ment funds to these companies. The National Pact for the