Excerpt from article:

OSHTEMO TOWNSHIP -- The glass doors to the Wal-Mart Supercenter's sprawling food section slide open and Didier Leiton steps inside.

The Costa Rica native doesn't do his food shopping in places nearly so massive, yet in a way, he is intimately familiar with some of the produce before him at the Ninth Street store near Kalamazoo.

A pile of pineapples is stacked in front of him, for $2.98 each. He grabs one with his left hand and reads the label... 

Last Sept. 27, 16-year-old Andres Damian Florez Rodriguez was on his way home from school when he was forced into a van by three armed men. Andres is the son of Jose Domingo Florez, a leader of the Coca-Cola bottling union in Santander. The assailants drove along, beating the boy while they received radio instructions. Then they gave him a message to convey: "Tell your papa that we won't rest until we see [the union leaders] quartered in pieces."

It may be more than 200 years since there was a legalised slave trade, but today the illicit trade in humans is thriving.

It is estimated that more than 27 million people are trafficked or enslaved in an industry worth almost $US31 billion ($A33.3 billion). It is growing so fast it is third in size to the black market for drugs and arms... 

If you eat chocolate or drive a well-known brand of car with tyres from one of the bigger-name companies, chances are these products have raw ingredients linked to human slavery, exploitation and trafficking.

For each day Phal Savin worked sewing garments in a Cambodian factory, she made $1.08.

The 13-hour days she spent making clothing amounted to a frugal pay, she said, that was supposed to be enough to feed her five children and pay her rent and utilities.

And until recently, that’s how the single mother supported herself and her family. After growing tired of the long days and small earnings, Savin said, she decided to form her own union – a step she thought would help bring higher wages to Cambodians working in the factory...