Inspectors from Portugal’s Judicial Police (PJ) presented their work at Beja Court yesterday, 17 December, describing how they had carried out surveillance of migrant workers’ movements as part of ‘Operation Espelho’, and conducted a search of a workers’ house in Serpa that they said was unfit for habitation.
On the second day of the trial of 22 individuals and 12 companies accused of exploiting migrant workers in the Alentejo, which began in the morning and resumed in the afternoon, the court heard the first witnesses in the case.
At least two Judicial Police (PJ) inspectors said that, within the scope of ‘Operation Espelho’, which culminated in police action back in November 2023, they had taken part in preliminary surveillance operations.
Inspectors monitored transport routes used to move workers, departure and arrival times at the houses where they were accommodated, the vehicles used for transport, and the identity of those driving them.
Cuba, Faro do Alentejo, a village in that municipality, and Serpa were among the locations placed under surveillance, they reported.
Inspectors found a residence housing foreign workers in Serpa, where they reported finding between 10 and 12 migrants in overcrowded living spaces.
“They had arrived in the Alentejo only recently,” one inspector said, adding that residents told police that “there were even more people living in the house, but they were not there as they had already left for work”. His account was confirmed by a colleague: “When we arrived, there were beds that were no longer occupied, and we were told they had already gone out to the fields.”
The house was in “poor condition”, one inspector told the court, explaining that all rooms, except for the kitchen and two bathrooms, had been “converted into bedrooms”, with “mattresses on the floor, bunk beds, broken tiles, and windows with shattered glass”.
“There was no insulation, the house was extremely dirty, and the conditions were well below the minimum acceptable,” he stressed.
The other inspector described a similar scene, referring to a house “with mattresses on the floor, not at all clean, and bathrooms that were extremely dirty”.
Earlier in the day, the court heard testimony from two officers of the National Republican Guard (GNR) from the Territorial Post in the municipality of Cuba, who said that before the police operation, when the migrants were living in the town, two victims had been evicted from the house where they were staying.
One of the officers added that migrants had been living in inhuman and precarious conditions, and that some had even turned up at the GNR station complaining of hunger and pleading for food. The Guard later identified their residence as also being overcrowded and in a deplorable state.
A Senegalese migrant who testified before the panel of judges claimed that he was paid €35 for an eight-hour working day, but received nothing if he did not work, for example, due to adverse weather conditions. By the end of the month, he said, his wages amounted to around €500, well below the minimum wage.
In this case, which went to trial on Monday, almost all of the individual defendants are charged with 16 counts of human trafficking, with one of the alleged traffickers facing 19 chargers, as well as offences including criminal association, aiding illegal immigration, participation in an organisation facilitating illegal immigration, and money laundering.
Some defendants are also accused of document forgery or possession of a prohibited weapon, according to the indictment. The Public Prosecution Service alleges that the facts date back to an unspecified time prior to 1 January 2020, when the defendants allegedly set up a network to bring illegal immigrants into Portugal, mainly from Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, India, Senegal, Nepal, Timor-Leste and Pakistan, and to exploit them as a source of near-forced, low-cost labour.
Source: Sul Informação
