RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- U.S. lawmakers have again fallen for a steel industry propaganda campaign.

The cause this time is a news article that rehashed what has been known for years about the inhumane conditions of charcoal workers in Brazil. Charcoal is used to make pig iron, which is transformed into any number of consumer goods for sale in the United States.

Every several years, usually around election time, the United States steel industry stirs up its lobby in an effort to close the U.S. market to foreign competitors. Democrats and Republicans are both subject to the barrage of this big-money lobby.

Year to date imports of steel were up 45 percent through October this year compared to last year, according to a November 28 estimate by the American Iron and Steel Institute. Brazilian imports were up 54 percent in the period.

Seeing that they are losing the game against leaner and meaner competitors, American steel makers try to throw a spit ball.

This happens with amazing regularity. The lobbyists haul out documents, studies and charts "proving" that other countries are playing unfair by being more competitive. Meanwhile they whip up the unions with emotional rhetoric and give the American consumer a guilt trip about which household appliances and trucks they buy.

The last time this happened, the issue was trade dumping.

In the case of Brazil, the dumping charges never really made sense and it won the right to retaliate at the WTO. Brazil got hauled into the dispute because it plays a better game, not because it plays unfairly.

Now that the American steel industry has had its favorite gambit taken away at the WTO, the issue has turned to dehumanizing labor conditions. But the goal of the lobby is the same: to convince lawmakers that other countries are to blame for America's disappearing capacity to produce industrial goods at competitive prices.

According to a report Nov. 28 by Bloomberg News, U.S. Reps. Eliot Engel of New York and Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, both Democrats, plan to hold hearings on the issue in 2007. Representative Engel seems destined to become the chairman of the House Committee on International Relations' Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere.

Given a long history of disputes over steel, not to mention Brazil's internationally recognized efforts to improve social conditions, Rep. Engel's stated intention to torpedo an essential trade partner the minute he gets the chance is an ill omen of things to come in hemispheric trade.

For those who were not aware, Bloomberg on Nov. 2 also ran an article about a Brazilian crackdown on forced labor in the Amazon. As often happens with the foreign press in developing countries, the article was a textbook case of parachute journalism, where financial reporting meets the Hollywood movie "Blood Diamond."

As a result, any company even slightly associated with Brazilian pig iron quickly stated their shock and horror, apparently giving the U.S. steel industry exactly what it needed to court the incoming lawmakers with the same stale protectionist agenda as always.

This is not to discount the merits of the news report, which was thorough and accurate, nor to ignore the misery of the Amazonian charcoal workers, but the issue of forced labor in Brazil has been known about and reported by the local and international media for years.

In fact, Brazil is at the vanguard of countries trying to do something about it. In 2005, the International Labor Organization's Global Report cited as exemplary the results obtained in Brazil by the adoption of policies aimed at eradicating forced labor.

And it is not just the government that is trying to end it but the private sector as well, with the creation of a civil organization called CIC, or Citizen Charcoal Institute, that has vigorously inspected 945 different charcoal manufacturers and blacklisted violators over the past two years, according to a note from the Foreign Relations Ministry.

It is laudable that U.S. trade policy takes into consideration human rights, though one cannot help wondering if human rights will become the new name for protectionism, in the same way that phyto-sanitary issues have been used to protect American farmers and ranchers against the much more competitive Brazilian agricultural sector for years.

There can be no apology for slavery, but it is shabby foreign policy for U.S. lawmakers to turn this issue into political capital, given that both public and private sector already recognize the problem and are taking clear steps to eradicate it.

John Waggoner is a foreign correspondent based in Brazil who has written on international trade for over ten years.