Posted on 07/23/2025 4:28:24 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
History forgot the horrors endured by laborers on the automaker’s massive cattle ranch in the Brazilian Amazon. But a priest had recorded it all.
SANTANA DO ARAGUAIA, Brazil
When Ricardo Rezende Figueira saw the headline, he felt a chill run through him. It was about Volkswagen. The company said it was finally ready to atone for its past. After admitting that its staff had cooperated with Brazil’s military dictatorship to target workers for political persecution, the automaker had begun to negotiate reparations.
Rezende read to the bottom of the article, then sat for a moment, quiet.
The story didn’t say anything about the Volkswagen cattle ranch. Nor a word about the Amazon rainforest, where the company’s leadership had once presided over a property nearly twice the size of New York City. It sometimes seemed to Rezende as if no one still remembered what had happened there — the forced labor and privation, torture and violence, deception and horror. But Rezende did. He’d recorded it all.
Perhaps it wasn’t too late, he recalled thinking.
It was early 2019. Rezende left his small apartment and walked across the street to Rio de Janeiro’s federal university, where he taught human rights and coordinates a commission to study modern slave labor. At 73, gray-haired and bespectacled, he no longer resembled the shaggy Catholic priest who had led an investigation into alleged atrocities at the Vale do Rio Cristalino Ranch, owned by an eponymous subsidiary of Volkswagen Brazil. But the documentary evidence he’d gathered during that time was still with him, inside a filing cabinet. It had sat there for years.
Rezende called Rafael Garcia, who prosecutes slave labor cases for Brazil’s Labor Ministry. “Did you see that Volks is recognizing what it did?” Rezende recalled asking him. Maybe, he continued, it was time to...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Now do IBM!
Fordlandia was a failed attempt by Henry Ford
to establish a rubber plantation and industrial town
in the Amazon rain-forest in the late 1920’s.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordlandia
You can take VW out of Nazi Germany, but you can’t take Nazi Germany out of VW.
How do you get 20 Jews in a VW Bug?
Old joke.
I’m sorta of old.
Me too.
Oh man I know the punchline but I will not type it.
And yet I naively thought they just made cars.
The company acknowledges bad cond7ct. Never forgive. No mercy. Kill the killers that we might join their rank as killers.
So very Christian. Meanwhile, many we abort: already worse than them.
Do tell!!!!
“”””Oh man I know the punchline but I will not type it.”””
It was funny when I was a kid......before I could understand it.
I don’t want to know. When I was in HS we got eight guys in a bug and drove to an event at the school. We only had to go about a mile.
…..in the ashtray.
Google it then...wish you hadn’t.
That joke was in the movie Another Day In Paradise starring James Woods and Melanie Griffith.
Well, at least the Nazis named the original Beetle the KdF-Wagen, not the Amf-Wagen.
Don’t forget what Nestle has been doing in relation to water.
Woods” response; “How do you give a redneck a circumcision?”
Kick his sister in the chin.
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