Customer Corner : Volkswagen Caminhões e Ônibus – Brazil’s Truck Titan Built On Blood, Lies And Exhaust

Welcome back to the Customer Corner on tcap.blog, where we drag the slimy underbelly of corporate giants into the harsh light of day. Today it is Volkswagen Caminhões e Ônibus (VWCO), the Brazilian truck and bus arm of Volkswagen – the outfit that loves to pose as the backbone of Brazil’s logistics while dragging around a history full of dictatorship collusion, slave-labour allegations, emissions cheating and labour abuse.

If you have ever bought the “innovation and reliability” spin, buckle up. We are talking about a firm accused of spying on workers for a military regime, linked to ranch operations where prosecutors say men were kept in conditions analogous to slavery, and tied into the global Dieselgate sewage pipe. And right there in the mix sits Cummins – engine supplier, emissions cheat and perfect scandal match.

This is exactly the sort of customer Cummins deserves.

The Dictatorship’s “Partner”: Spying, Arrests And Broken Lives

Roll back to the 1960s-80s, Brazil under a military dictatorship. While the regime disappeared and tortured opponents, Volkswagen do Brasil – the parent of VWCO – was not some helpless bystander.

Investigations by a São Paulo truth commission and prosecutors found that company security at the São Bernardo do Campo plant kept files on “subversive” workers and passed information to the political police. Union activists were arrested on site, some then taken to infamous torture centres like DOI-Codi. Survivors describe beatings, electric shocks, the full horror show.

After decades of stonewalling, VW finally signed a deal with Brazilian prosecutors in 2020, agreeing to pay around 36 million reais in reparations and funding for memory projects – without admitting legal liability. A mixture of payments to former workers, public funds and memorial initiatives. Peanuts for a global group, but an implicit recognition that yes, something rotten happened on their watch.

No executive has seen the inside of a cell. The people who suffered are left with scars and a footnote settlement. The factory keeps pumping out trucks and buses. Justice, Volkswagen-style.

Slave Labour In The Amazon: A Ranch From Hell

Then there is the Amazon chapter.

From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, Volkswagen ran the Vale do Rio Cristalino cattle ranch in Pará – roughly 139,000 hectares of “development” carved out of rainforest. Officially it was diversification, agribusiness, progress. Prosecutors and researchers tell a different story.

According to a major case filed by Brazil’s Ministério Público do Trabalho in 2024, workers were recruited with promises of decent jobs, then allegedly trapped in conditions “analogous to slavery”:

Debt bondage through inflated “expenses”
Armed guards and isolation making escape almost impossible
Violence and threats
Overwork, malnutrition, squalid housing

Priest and activist Ricardo Rezende Figueira was documenting this back in the 1980s. His testimony and workers’ accounts are now part of the court record. Prosecutors are seeking 165 million reais in collective moral damages, explicitly linking Volkswagen’s ranch to dictatorship-era abuses in the Amazon.

The case is ongoing. VW disputes the allegations. But again the pattern is grimly familiar: massive corporate project, workers chewed up, rainforest torched, and only decades later does the company even have to sit in the dock.

Dieselgate’s Brazilian Echo: Amarok, Fines And Toxic Air

You would think that after collaborating with a dictatorship and running a nightmare ranch, Volkswagen might at least stay inside the law on emissions. Then Dieselgate happened.

Globally, VW admitted installing software “defeat devices” to cheat NOx tests on millions of vehicles. Brazil got its slice of that scandal. Investigators focused on models like the Amarok pickup using the EA189 engine family – the same basic technology at the centre of the US and EU cases.

Brazil’s environmental agency IBAMA fined Volkswagen 50 million reais in 2015 for irregularities linked to that engine line. Later, a Brazilian court ordered VW to pay around 1.09 billion reais in collective compensation to roughly 17,000 Amarok owners for deceptive practices around the vehicle’s emissions and performance claims.

Behind those numbers are real people. Families breathing dirtier air than they were told. Asthma spikes. Public-health impacts that never show up in the marketing deck.

VW paid fines and compensation. Executives kept their jobs. The trucks keep rolling.

VWCO x Cummins: A Match Made In Emissions Hell

Now we come to the Cummins link, because this is Customer Corner and we are following the supply chain back to Indiana.

Pick a workhorse in the VWCO line-up like the Volkswagen Constellation 25.360. VW’s own spec sheet proudly states it is powered by a Cummins ISL 8.9-litre engine, 360 hp and 1,600 Nm, with SCR emissions kit slapped on the side. Other regional sites and truck press repeat the same: Constellation 25.360, Cummins ISL, Euro V, SCR, the full “clean diesel” fairy tale.

Cummins loves this stuff. It is their route into Latin America’s freight arteries. In 2019, truck media were still cheerfully writing up Constellation 25.360 launches with the Cummins engine as a selling point. Big torque, long-haul, clever aftertreatment. Everyone happy.

Except Cummins has its own record.

In late 2023 the US Department of Justice announced that Cummins would pay 1.675 billion dollars – the largest Clean Air Act penalty in history – for installing defeat-device software on hundreds of thousands of Ram pickup engines. Regulators said the company cheated on emissions tests, contributing to excess NOx pollution that harms health and the environment. Cummins “did not admit liability” but paid up anyway.

So in VWCO’s engine bay you have a supplier the US government has called out for massive emissions violations, bolted into the front of a brand built on dictatorship collusion, slave-labour allegations and Dieselgate residue.

At this point if Cummins announced they had been voted “Bus Engine Supplier Of The Year in Brazil” by the Indiana Bus Fan Club, you would believe it. That is about the level of ethical scrutiny in this ecosystem.

Scandal recognises scandal. They deserve each other.

Labour Woes And The Illusion Of Progress

Even outside the Amazon and Dieselgate, VWCO’s labour story stinks.

Back in 2009, Brazilian labour prosecutors hit Volkswagen’s truck arm with a 2.2 million real penalty for violating agreements on working conditions and outsourcing at its Volta Redonda operations – a case framed as collective moral damages for health and safety failures and irregular “flexibilisation”.

Unions have long accused VW’s commercial-vehicle units of treating workers as disposable, especially whenever restructuring or “efficiency” programmes land. Cost-cutting drives and automation talk are wrapped in slick language about competitiveness and future-proofing, but for the people on the line it is the same old message. Be flexible. Be grateful. Or be gone.

Add that to the Amazon ranch, the dictatorship collaboration, the Dieselgate echo, and you get a company very comfortable externalising pain.

The Outrage: When Do These Bastards Ever Pay?

Step back and look at the pattern.

Collaboration with a military regime that jailed and tortured workers.
An Amazon ranch where prosecutors say men lived and died in conditions akin to slavery.
A global emissions fraud that poisoned the air while marketing “clean” technology.
Labour fines and ongoing job insecurity for the people who actually build the trucks.
A comfy engine partnership with Cummins, itself busted for defeat devices and still treated as a respectable supplier.

What happens to the people in charge? A few settlements. No admissions. No jail time. No meaningful personal consequences. The worst they face is a slightly awkward question at a conference before the ESG slide flashes up and everyone nods along.

Meanwhile, the people on the receiving end live with trauma, lost livelihoods, wrecked health and a climate crisis those trucks keep feeding.

It is obscene. It is normal. That is the problem.

Verdict: Perfect Customer, Perfect Fit

Volkswagen Caminhões e Ônibus is not just “a big player in Latin American trucking”. It is a textbook case of how a brand can be soaked in human-rights abuses, environmental crime and labour exploitation, then buffed back to a showroom shine with PR, settlements and the passage of time.

From TCAP’s point of view, that makes VWCO an absolutely perfect match for Cummins – a customer whose history lines up neatly with Cummins own emissions cheating and ethical contortions.

If you are a Cummins investor, remember this when you see their customer list rolled out as a badge of honour. These relationships are not neutral. They are choices. And when you keep cropping up next to outfits like VWCO, it tells the world what really matters to you.

Spoiler. It is not justice.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project