Gulliver

Inditex is the largest fashion retailer in the world, best known for its clothing brand Zara. Founded in 1975 by Ortega Amancio, Inditex has epitomized the age of cheap, disposable fashion - made in contract sweatshops and sold for throwaway prices in the West. In 2011, a government raid in Sao Paulo, Brazil, revealed that company contractors were using Bolivian immigrants working for 7-12 U.S. cents a piece. In 2017, workers at the Bravo Tekstil factory in Istanbul, Turkey, went into Zara stores to add tags to garments that read: “I made this item you are going to buy, but I didn’t get paid for it.”

JBS, the largest meat processing company in the world, was founded by José Batista Sobrinho, a rancher in Anápolis, Brazil, in 1953. The Meat Atlas, a non-profit publication that tracks the industry, estimates that JBS slaughters 42 million chickens, 170,000 cattle and 350,000 pigs every single week. JBS has featured at the top of the list of companies linked to environmental destruction in the Amazon rainforest. Multiple reports from NGOs like Amnesty and Greenpeace have repeatedly linked JBS to farmers and ranchers who have been engaged in widespread deforestation. The conglomerate has also been accused of corruption, bribery, and price-fixing in both Brazil in the U.S. In 2017, Joesley and Wesley Batista, two major shareholders of JBS, admitted to spending US$129 million to bribe nearly 1,900 politicians in Brazil in recent years, and agreed to pay a US$3.2 billion fine.

JinkoSolar is the biggest manufacturer of solar panels in the world, delivering approximately one out of ten solar panels in the world, according to the company’s own statistics. Founded in 2006, most of the company’s solar panel factories are in China but it also has plants in Florida, Malaysia and Vietnam. Researchers from Sheffield Hallam university in the UK accuse the company of using forced labor from the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang.

In 2015 JinkoSolar won a contract to provide 180 megawatts of electricity to the states of Jalisco and Yucatán in Mexico. The company chose to build a 250-hectare solar park in Cuncunul and Valladolid but failed to consult with the local Mayan population. In February 2019, local residents sued JinkoSolar, citing the potential impacts of the project such as the deforestation of 206 hectares, destruction of habitat for five endangered species (including the ocelot and the Tamandula anteater), 26 species with conservation status and 20 species under special protection. The project was canceled after a court ruled in the community's favor.