Campos' group of armed police, prosecutors and labor officials plan to inspect 80 sites this year, mostly in the Amazon, up from 60 in 2004. Last month, the task force helped free workers from illegal camps in five Brazilian states.

About 25,000 people in Brazil work under conditions similar to the slavery the government abolished in 1888, according to the Catholic Church. They often have jobs in backland ranches, covert brick factories and rainforest camps that make charcoal used to produce pig iron. In the last 15 years, 17,000 captive workers have been freed by police, the Labor Ministry said.

"This has been a crime since abolition, but in spite of that people are still being exploited,'' said Campos, 43, who has run the Labor Ministry's Division of Investigation for the Eradication of Slave Labor for five years. "We continue to find people forced to work like slaves.''

Slaves are used to clear the Amazon rainforest for cattle ranches and soybean fields from the northeastern state of Para to Mato Grosso near the border with Bolivia, Campos said.

They also cut wood for charcoal that mills in the eastern Amazon states of Para and Maranhao buy to produce some of the world's cheapest and purest pig iron.

Campaign Against Slavery

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, 60, who was born into poverty in northeastern Pernambuco state, beefed up the campaign against slavery by increasing the number of teams that execute raids on labor camps to 10 from seven. In 2003, the first year of Lula's term, the squad carried out twice as many raids on illegal work camps as in the previous year.

The Labor Ministry and police also have teamed up with Environment Ministry agents in an effort to stop slave labor and Amazon deforestation as related problems.

"They are clearing the rain forest with slaves and without environmental licenses,'' Campos said. "That means they are committing various crimes at once.''

In October, Campos teams arrested executives at two companies, Siderurgica do Para SA and Siderurgica Maraba SA, which make some of the Amazon iron, for buying unlicensed charcoal, said Verna Damasceno, a labor inspector and mobile group member who participated in the raids.

In related operations against illegal woodcutting, Brazil's Environment Ministry levied about $220 million in fines on nine Carajas-region iron mills.

"You might find it hard to believe some of the conditions people are kept under,'' said Damasceno, who has been part of the anti-slavery task force since 1997 in an interview from her office in Tailandia, Brazil, 2,100 kilometers (1,300 miles) northeast of Rio de Janeiro. "People have terrible food, no access to water, no toilets, safety equipment, they've built up debts to the labor contractors and are often guarded by armed thugs.''

Portuguese

Slavery began almost immediately after Brazil was claimed for Portugal by Pedro Alvares Cabral in 1500. Cutters of dyewoods and early sugar planters tried to use Indians as slaves. Lacking resistance to European diseases, the slaves died in huge numbers.

The Portuguese, whose exploration of Africa made them rivals to Arab traders for the capture and sale of African slaves, shipped 4 million Africans to Brazil, primarily from Angola, Africa's Guinea coast and Mozambique between 1530 and 1850. The slave trade was mostly abolished by the British Navy's South Atlantic Squadron after Brazil failed to enforce treaty provisions that helped guarantee its independence from Portugal.

Princess Isabel abolished slavery 117 years ago on behalf of her father, Dom Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, who was traveling in Europe.

Good Policies

Slavery today in Brazil isn't based on race. When people who have worked in slave conditions aren't needed, they often find themselves let go far from major towns, with little or no pay to get home. Forced to borrow to survive, they return to the control of their employers who show up the next season, pay their debts and put them back to work, said Patricia Audi, Brazilian representative of the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency.

"We do not like to call this semi-slavery, it's slavery period, these people do not have the right to come and go, they are truly held against their will,'' Audi said.

While workers in other countries are oppressed under similar conditions, "at least Brazil is developing good policies to fight it,'' Audi said in an interview from her office in Brasilia.

Pressure on Companies

Part of Brazil's campaign is to demand companies that buy slave-made products change their practices, Damasceno said. "We need to attack the whole chain of production of iron,'' Damasceno said. "People have to take some responsibility for the type of activities they are supporting.''

The crackdown on slave labor is changing practices at Cia. Vale do Rio Doce, the world's biggest iron miner and the largest employer in the region. Vale, in conjunction with Nucor Corp., the second-biggest steelmaker in the U.S., has started a program to ensure the charcoal its iron-ore customers buy comes from non-slave labor, said Vale Chief Executive Roger Agnelli, whose Amazon mine provides the ore to the local ironmakers.

Agnelli said the government has encouraged Vale to sell ore to the mills that allegedly use illegal charcoal to promote development in Para and Maranhao.

"As long as my customers are not convicted of illegal conduct, I can't just stop selling to them without facing a lawsuit,'' Agnelli said in an interview in his office in Rio de Janeiro.