In the Peruvian Amazon, debt peonage is an important aspect of contemporary Urarina society.
Land reform in the 1950s largely eliminated a centuries-old system of debt peonage.
However, bonded labor and debt peonage remained acceptable into the 20th century.
The private banks licence from society to create money has created out of control debt peonage.
Many issues faced the working poor, such as debt peonage and company stores that kept the populace poor.
The debt peonage, the system of inherited debts, has been abolished.
In song, folktale, and union rhetoric the company store was often cast as a villain, a collector of souls through perpetual debt peonage.
But most of Brazil's modern forced labor cases involve debt peonage.
Forced labor however continued, either against the law or by debt peonage or other methods which the laws of the various countries did not count as slavery.
The Maya, though technically and legally free, were enslaved by debt peonage to the big landowners.