Brazil: Recovery, voice, transformation

Yesterday, shortly after Xavier and Aninha of the Pastoral Land Commission came to tell us about their work helping people out of bonded labour and slavery in the rural north of Brazil, we saw images of a violent eviction of participants in a CAFOD and EC-supported programme in São Paulo promoting housing for the poorest.

More than 2,000 people were evicted from a squatter community in southern São Paulo by 240 riot police – called “Shock Troops” – in the southern part of São Paulo. With the teargas, rubber bullets, and police cordons, most were barely able to get their meagre belongings.

The images were a stark reminder of how, even though the Brazilian constitution is on the side of the people, it does not take much for the rich and powerful to keep one step ahead of the poor in the courts.

Witnessing this eviction from afar brought me back to June, when I visited a newer Camp in the eastern part of São Paulo.

There I met Juliana, a gaunt woman who could have been anywhere from her late 20s to early 40s. She proudly showed me her tarpaulin house in Alto Alegre Camp.

Juliana and her partner were invited off of the streets by the Homeless Movement of Central São Paulo (MSTC) supported by CAFOD partner APOIO.

They lived for years on the streets just 30 minutes away from Alto Alegre – the experience nearly destroyed Juliana and her family.

Maria do Planalto, a woman of uncommon conviction and strength, is one of the de-facto coordinators of Alto Alegre Camp, a beautiful piece of land with seven opportunistic landgrabbers fighting over it in court (take a brief video tour of Alto Alegre).

Maria says that when Juliana arrived, she was extremely skinny, her cheeks completely sunken in from poor nutrition. What was most amazing is that Juliana could not speak.

Maria recounts that the physical recovery came first – Juliana slowly gained weight. The communal kitchen in the camp served three round meals a day which was part of this “rescue”.

But recovering the ability to speak came through the sense of organization and community that the Movement fosters in the camp - regular meetings in which people learn about rights, citizenship, and thinking about a “life project”, and the importance of struggle to gain dignified housing.

Her youngest son, not yet two years old, slept softly beneath a the static of a small black and white TV, nestled in the side of the A-frame tent. She showed me one of her proudest possessions, a framed photo of her seven-year-old son who was at school.

She glowed when she spoke of him. Juliana was proactively working to register her son at the school close to the Alto Alegre Camp (which still exists months later). The Movement holds out hope that the land will be expropriated and used for affordable housing for people like Juliana.

The recovery from deplorable conditions on the streets or of slavery on plantations does not simply end with the physical. Our partners CPT and APOIO work to help people to speak again – to transform their lives and to make government and the law work for the people.

Posted by JanetG