The Homeless Workers’ Movement (MTST) attends a demonstration for the eviction of the occupants of the “Povo sem Medo” or “People Without Fear” in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on October 31, 2017.
Paulo Whitaker / Reuters
Last month, housing activists marched arm by the empty road, heading to the governor’s palace in Sao Paulo state to call for an end to forced evictions that dramatically increased the pandemic in Brazil.
Military police with equipment fired rubber bullets and blocked the road in front of them. Within minutes, police drove everyone out with tear gas, leaving several mendacity on the ground, breathless.
“We marched to denounce the expulsions that Governor Joo Doria has driven,” Jussara Basso, the movement’s coordinator in Sao Paulo, said in a video of the march. “While it seems in the press to tell other people to stay at home, a housing policy for singles has not been created and no houses have been built.”
To @jubasso_juntas explains why I sem-teto this agora em marches to palace dos Bandeirantes. pic.twitter.com/SEpnRYFqYy
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“This is a very unhappy moment in our history,” he told The World.
Despite the pandemic and emerging unemployment, the number of forced evictions in Brazil has nearly doubled in recent months. Since the start of the COVID-19 crisis, more than 1,700 families have been expelled from their homes in Sao Paulo state alone, according to the Observatory of Forced Removal at ABC Federal University. This number increases every week, and thousands more are at risk of being forcibly evicted.
The militants are counterattacking. Late last month, a coalition of more than 50 Brazilian social teams began a crusade to end evictions. They’re calling for legal and legislative action.
“Being deported right now is a matter of life and death. Having a space is a matter of life and death. It’s not just the federal government, mayors and local governments protect people.”
“Being deported right now is a matter of life and death,” said Dito Barbosa, a lawyer specializing in housing and human rights and one of the main organizers. “Having a space is a matter of life and death. It’s not just the federal government, mayors and local governments protect people.”
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The United Nations also intervened, twice calling on the Brazilian government to suspend forced evictions from the coronavirus pandemic.
“Forced evictions deserve not to occur at all,” Le Monde Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN special rapporteur on good enough housing, told Le Monde Balakrishnan Rajagopal. “They constitute a serious violation of foreign human rights laws and a serious affront to human dignity and development. I am also involved in the effect of evictions on the spread of the virus, which is already widespread.”
Rajagopal said that unfortunately many countries were proceeding to expulsions, despite the pandemic, but that Brazil “is one of the most serious in the world in terms of intensity.”
Brazil is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with a massive concentration of income source in the richest 1% of the population. Even before the pandemic, poverty had expanded for several years. There is a national housing deficit of 7.8 million units. This means that millions of families cannot afford basic rent and are forced to live in precarious housing, favelas or slums, occasionally without sanitation or even running water. And its number increases during the pandemic.
Brazil’s economy is expected to fall more than 9% this year, for the International Monetary Fund. Unemployment is 13% and continues to rise. According to a May poll, 80% of Brazilians said they had been financially affected by the crisis.
There’s a motion of law in the National Congress to suspend deportations for the pandemic.
“This bill can move forward quickly, it just depends on political will,” said Congresswoman Natlia Bonavides, who backs the bill. “The challenge is that we don’t have a consensus on this factor because a lot of members of Congress make up monetary elites. That’s why the external tension will be so great.”
“Only with a lot of tension can we approve this project,” he said.
But even if that happens, he will probably still face the veto of President Jair Bolsonaro, who has continually minimized the virus and pressured for wanting to reopen the economy. In June, he vetoed the segment of some other bill that would have suspended evictions from families who could not afford the pandemic rent.
Meanwhile, COVID-19 crisis figures continue: the country reached 3 million infections and 100,000 deaths last weekend. The number of evictions is also expanding without transparent the way forward.
“The challenge will get worse with the pandemic. What is required is the minimum. Pandemic evictions are a violation of the right to life.”
“The challenge will get worse with the pandemic. What is required is the minimum,” said Ana Paula Pimentel Walker, a Brazilian-born urban planning professor at the University of Michigan. “Pandemic deportations are a violation of the right to life.”
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Erika Cavalcante da Silva, 36, lives with her husband and 4 children in a 9-by-12 wooden hut they built last year. It is in a network called Fe en Dios, on the outskirts of the city of Riberao Preto in Sao Paulo.
In mid-April, she saw backhoes demolishing 20 of her neighbors’ homes. The government ordered the demolition. He said that with the interference of heavy rains and the assistance of local organizers, they were going to prevent it. Since then, the community has grown, but police are constantly threatening to return.
Meanwhile, due to the COVID-19 crisis, Silva says he has lost the most of his household chores. Her husband, who has lung problems, had to give up his task as an Uber engine. The monthly government they won amid the pandemic is running out this month. He says he doesn’t know what they’re going to do.
“I’m afraid, ” said Silva. “I’m afraid of dying because my daughter, who is pregnant, gets a coronavirus. City officials think criminals live in the favela, but here we are families.
Housing advocates blame the confluence of recent occasions on growing evictions, increasing the tension to reduce new favelas and urban and rural “housing occupations,” or illegal settlements such as Silva’s, which led to the currency crisis. With emerging unemployment, many working-class families who could not afford their wages ended up on the streets, moved in with relatives, or joined new favelas and developed occupations on the outskirts of the city.
Related: Black Lives Matter protests renew parallel debates in Brazil and Colombia
Other points behind evictions would possibly be similar to genuine personal property interests and the government’s propensity to act on pandemic evictions, when housing activists are calmer, activists say.
“Some governments are taking credit for the situation. The mayor of Sao Paulo is calling for legal action to speed up the retirement of 400 families in Campos de Eliseos, amid a pandemic. This also happened in the state of Rio. Grande do Sul. The government [requests] that an eviction be carried out as a matter of urgency “.
“Some governments are taking advantage of the situation,” said researcher Talita Anzei Gonsales of the Forced Removal Observatory. “The mayor of Sao Paulo is calling for legal action to speed up the withdrawal of 400 families in Campos de Eliseos, amid the pandemic. This also happened in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. The government [requests] that an eviction be carried out as a matter of urgency “.
These evictions are violent. During a forced move in Piracicaba, Sao Paulo, on May 7, police fired rubber bullets at an organization of makeshift houses, showing a YouTube video. Journalist María Teresa Cruz, from the Brazilian media Ponte Jornalismo, described the scene that day in a video of a nearby roof. He had to avoid it while clouds of tear fuel fluttered over the domain and in nearby neighborhoods.
Postse em Piracicaba (SP) reintegrates https://t.co/p6QmZQ2yOm
“There was no aggression through the evicted residents. I can tell because I witnessed it firsthand. The police’s reaction is disproportionate,” Cruz told World. “They fired many tear grenades and many rubber bullets even in the favela along the Professions Matrix. The other people in the house were suffocated by the fuel coming through the windows of their cabins. This forced them to go out and enter the line of fire.
This kind of thing happens every day all over the country.
“They ran over a child who was only 2 years old,” said a guy dressed in a green mask in an August 6 video of a family eviction in Jabaquara, in the city of Sao Paulo.
“There we were shot by a tear fuel grenade. They fired rubber bullets. We are here to claim our rights.”
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