Women in the Americas in early modern North America. Throughout the Americas, bondage existed—in warmer climates, where plantation systems developed, or in the northern areas, where women were either transported as criminals or worked as indentured servants. As early as the 1530s, Portugal began using slave labor in Brazil to work sugarcane plantations. Initially, the Portuguese used indigenous people as slaves, but in 1574, the crown decreed that unless the native people were cannibals, already slaves, or were spoils of a "just war", they could not be enslaved. The Spanish also used native people as forced labor, but because under the "encomienda" system, neither
Parliamentary Confederation of the Americas Among the organization's affiliates is the Women's Parliamentarian Network. COPA operates in four languages, Spanish, English, French and Portuguese. For the first time since the II Conference in 2000, COPA's Executive Committee is scheduled to meet in the United States in late June (Los Angeles, California). Parliamentary Confederation of the Americas The Parliamentary Conference of the Americas, or COPA, was created in 1997 under the auspices of the United States' Council of State Governments and National Conference of State Legislatures, the Quebec National Assembly and a Brazilian legislative organization. The first Conference was held in Quebec City, Province of Quebec,