São Paulo - What's happening outside our window

By Alex

Two months ago, on Easter night, 800 families took advantage of Jesus’s rebirth and the predictable laziness of Brazilian police during all holidays to invade and take up residence in this property that’s been abandoned for more than 15 years. Now eight vehicles from the military police and a fire truck are parked in front of the building. There are also two trucks employed to “help” move out the inhabitants.

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People are taking their furniture to the trucks and the city’s going to decide what to do with it. “We’ll live on the street now, under the bridge,” said Antonio Cesar, a 30-year-old man who works in City Hall.

From our terrace, we couldn’t really see what was going on inside the building before these families took it over. We’d always wanted to go in there, but we didn’t have the guts (or a ladder to jump the wall). Maria Aparecida filled us in on what we’d been missing. “Bad people lived in here before,” she said. “It was a spot for dealing drugs. We came in and cleaned all up. We’ve painted the place and brought our furniture in. We took more then 30 trucks with garbage out of here. We expelled the drug dealers. But the government doesn’t see that. They don’t see what we do with these places.”

She said they invaded this place to denounce the housing situation, which has no provisions for underprivileged people. The only way to get to politicians is by pressuring them and making them look foolish. Squatters come in huge swarms, plopping down all at once. Sometimes police break them up peacefully; sometimes they use tear gas. "In São Paulo alone there are 460,000 vacant places with no social function at all," she says. "The workers with low income don’t get any help from the government. So we succeeded—we criticized the capitalists who are excluding the poor population.”

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By Alex 2 years ago Like · Comment · Share