The hunt for slave outposts in the Amazon

Although he doesn't let it show, this is the part Silva likes best. He takes pride in finding forgotten labor camps and telling haggard slaves they are free to go. He enjoys tracking down fazendeiros and making them pay. But his favorite moment of all is handing over piles of bills to people who have never dreamed of ever seeing such riches.

He's been doing this job for three years now and knows the type of men who come to the rain forest. Many of them will waste their windfall. Silva refuses to give one perennially drunk man his money until the next morning when he has sobered up. But that, he says, is beside the point. There is a special satisfaction in seeing justice. "There," he says to Araujo and hands him 3,714 reais ($1,270), an amount that would have taken him 14 months to earn at Brazil's minimum wage. "Can you write your name?"

"Yes, sir," says Araujo, as he takes the pen and scrawls his name on the receipt.

Araujo packs the money away and his eyes bulge. "I am so happy," he says as he leaves the building to head home to Porto Alegre do Norte, a small town 80 miles from here that is home to most of the slaves. "I feel like I got what I worked for. Now I am going to start a new life, buy a few calves and let them graze quietly in Porto Alegre where my brother has land. I am going to buy new clothes for my three children and I am going to buy them new clothes and shoes."

Although Silva has secured payment for the workers, he is well aware that the victory is fleeting and incomplete. The government has doubled the maximum penalties for slave labor, to eight years, but criminal convictions are almost impossible to achieve. The few fazendeiros like Pereira who are indicted have money to spend on lawyers who grind the justice system to a halt with endless appeals. He will probably just end up paying a fine.

"We're putting out fires," says investigator Marco Antonio Molinetti, an experienced member of the team. "Nothing has changed fundamentally. The only way you are going to really eradicate slave labor is by passing the law [currently languishing in Congress] that allows the government to confiscate the land of those keeping slaves. Do you think a guy ... would risk losing 14,000 cattle and all the land they are on? No way."

The government's inability to pass that key deterrent is only one of the obstacles facing the antislavery lobby. The Brazilian Supreme Court has spent more than a year in deciding whether slave labor falls under federal or state jurisdiction.

Finally, not all levels of the government are working together. When Silva asks sheriff Cristian Lages if he will be recommending that a criminal investigation take place, Mr. Lages shakes his head. "I don't think the conditions are degrading. I don't think a crime has been committed," he says. Silva, a normally patient man, loses his cool.

"What are you talking about?" he asks indignantly. "What we saw out there was about as bad as I've ever seen. If you can't see slavery there then you'll never see it. If that isn't slavery then I might as well resign and recommend they disband the Mobile Anti-Slavery Units right now. You are my friend, Cristian, and I like you, but I am going to ask that you not be assigned to work with us again."

The words hang unanswered, a lingering pall over the last night of the unit's work - a night that was supposed to be a celebration. The next morning, the team heads home. The forest is still burning and as they drive onto the main highway out of town, slivers of ash fall onto the windshield like dirty snow flakes. "It's sad," says Silva, as he accelerates. "It makes me think of death."

• On Sept. 1, The Monitor ran a special report, "Slavery is not dead, just less recognizable," on slavery worldwide.

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