BRAZILIAN SLAVE LABORERS RETURN FROM CUTTING DOWN FOREST IN AMAZON BASIN, 2003-09-22 (photo)

Brazilian slave laborers walk along a fence line to return from a day of work cutting down forest on the Bom Jesus farm in the Amazon basin, some 1,600 kilometers north of Brasilia, where they have been illegally exploited for the past six months, September 22, 2003. As teams of government inspectors and federal police step up their quest to free an estimated 25,000 slave laborers, there is no doubt that Brazil's feudal slavery traditions are still alive and well in pockets of its hardscrabble northeast, more than a century after the practice was abolished. REUTERS/Rickey Rogers PP03100003 RR