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A friend of mine works at the Medical Control Authority, a part of the State Department of Health. From what I understand, it oversees the allocation of hospital beds all over the state. As they say, their job is to find “the best allocation for each patient.” But this is not what this text is about. Just add, as a curiosity, that my friend confirmed that the Central has few allocation slots for a sea of requests (no surprise at that).

The purpose of this digression, however, is to comment on the description of a particular patient’s request for hospitalization, reported to me by my friend. I will not go into detail here, of course, to protect the identities involved. The case is an elderly gentleman, with a history of many days of a consuming disease, with progressive disability, to a point where the poor man is bedridden, unable to walk or speak, emaciated and very weak. In this extremely difficult situation, and here I introduce my emphasis, “the patient’s boss, the owner of the farm where he is a worker, sought his family to take care of him.”

As well? The patient was not living with his family? Were he in his boss’s land? In what situation? And why did the boss, if the patient (apparently) resided on his country estate, where he worked, not seek medical attention for his “employee”? Believers in the modern and cruel “naivety” of the system may think that nothing can be proved with this story, but in my view we are faced with one of the modern woes: the return of slavery.

Modern slavery is different from ancient slavery. In place of chains and slave quarters, a subtler model of incarceration: workers do get a salary, but they have to buy food, supplies, and a place to sleep from their own boss. With a simple and premeditated evil equation, what workers pay outgrows what they earn, making them… debtors! Thus, owing more and more money, they are fooled into thinking that they always have to work harder and harder to pay their “debts.” In the end, they leave with absolutely nothing, no product of their hard work. Seriously, in any minimally developed country and in the mind of any minimally human person this is utter nonsense.

If the iron chains were replaced by a fraudulent ledger, the physical whipping and punishment was replaced by modern versions. Thugs, remote facilities on farms, lack of contact of any kind with the outside world, veiled (or less so) threats to family and loved ones, are the modern version. Want something more like those classic psychological prison horror movies?

Well, here in our country the word “slavery” seems to have been informally banned from the media (conveniently controlled by large corporate groups) and from legal jargon, replaced by the “politically correct” phrase “slavery-like work”. The famous first-century Syrian (Greek) physician, Luke, best known for writing one of the 4 gospels accepted by the Christian canon, was a slave. Serving a Roman nobleman, he had a life full of perks, but he had neither possessions nor freedom. No one seems to have much doubt in calling his labor condition slavery. If current Brazilian euphemism were accepted at the time, neither Luke nor most famous Christians would have been considered slaves. They would only have worked on “conditions analogous to slavery,” as simple as that. The jerk medal for those who created this infamous expression, please!

And the cruelty only increases: even with a haze of euphemisms masking its true nature, modern Brazilian slaveholders are not satisfied, and in collusion with the corrupt Brazilian judiciary and legislative power, they try to “wash” their hands like Pilate once and for all did, to continue the biblical analogies. Arrogant, finding themselves above the law (we choose the president and the ministers, said a powerful senator/landlord on a television show) and of any justice, they intend to turn any attempt to denounce their abusive practices to the utmost futility, and to condemn his “slave-like workers” to die in anonymous servitude.

So we return to our lonely patient waiting for a place in a failed health care system. Poor man, who will look after him after sacrificing his best years and his health by working as a slave to an unscrupulous landlord who would make nausea in early Christians? Who will be with him while he dies poor and lonely after being deceived for years by the Brazilian “meritocracy system”? Who will at least lift a finger against it?