By Tom Phillips in Marabá.
June 6, 2009

"[These workers] go anywhere they hear there might be a chance of work to support their families," says José Batista, a Marabá-based anti-slavery campaigner from the Pastoral Land Commissionof Brazil's Catholic Church. "They are people who arrive thinking there is work for everyone, drawn by the propaganda. But they arrive, can't find work and don't have anywhere to go and they end up staying in the hotels waiting for someone to hire them."

There is little that can't be bought on the muddy streets around the Correntão; satellite dishes, mobile phones and truck tyres, toilet seats and goats, class A drugs and underaged prostitutes. Day and night battered open-backed trucks clatter past, packed with supplies, spattered with terracotta-coloured mud and carrying migrant workers to surrounding farms.

"The only people here who are from Marabá are our children," says João, a former gold miner and the owner of one of the city's pioneer hotels where bunk beds cost between 5 and 15 reais (£1.50-£4) a night.

Walmir dos Santos, 39, a migrant worker from Maranhao state, began his path into slavery at Kilometre Six.

"I went out looking for a job and I met this guy and we went off," he recalls. Dos Santos says he arrived at the Correntão one morning, found work in a charcoal furnace by noon, but had to wait a month to be rescued from his heavily-armed employer by the anti-slavery taskforce.

"They said Pará was good for work. It hasn't been very good so far," he says.

Eugenio Pereira da Silva, an illiterate chainsaw operator who was also recently freed by the government, says many of his fellow workers started life in pioneer hotels. "People come from all over and stay in the hotels. When they find a patrao (boss) they can get out and go and work for him. This kind of thing happens a lot."

The hotels are one part on a chain of exploitation that took root in Brazil in the 1960s as the government sought to occupy the world's largest tropical rainforest. Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians poured into the Amazon region and landowners looked to the impoverished northeastern workers as cheap labour to help them profit from the rainforests destruction.

"We were treated like slaves," says Francisco Raimundo Mendes, a 48-year-old from the northeastern state of Maranhão, who claims his employer had refused to provide him with medical treatment after he suffered a hernia while loading tree trunks onto a truck for 7.50 reais a day. "It was the greatest suffering in the world."

But Da Silva is upbeat after being told by government officials that he would receive several thousand reais in compensation from his former employer.

"We were drinking the water from the river and the animals drank there too," the father of five recalls. "If they [the government inspectors] hadn't turned up we'd still be working there now,"

What would he do now, without his job? "I don't have any studies, I can't read and things just keep getting more difficult for me," he sighs. "I have to work. I'll have to find another job in a farm or something."

- This article was first published in the Guardian