My Street, My Life Program – 04/19/2023 – Conrado Hübner Mendes

We trivialize the urgency of promoting the existential rights of the most vulnerable groups in Brazilian society. We are so dedicated to the violation of rights that we also trivialize the very notion of trivialization. In this circuit of indifference, inaction and complicity, the PIBB (Brazilian Brutality Internal Product) remains our main seal of inhumanity.

Among these groups, the homeless population is the most politically underrepresented and has no channels to influence decisions or make demands. Isolated individuals, in general with broken social, family and affective bonds, without community ties, with low capacity for organization and mobilization, not even a “group”, strictly speaking, manage to form.

Citizens by law, sub-citizens in fact, occupy the lowest rung of sub-citizenship. And we don’t even need to remind you how the dimensions of gender, race, sexual orientation and physical or intellectual ability dig even deeper into this well. When youths set fire to and killed the indigenous leader Galdino Pataxó, 25 years ago, they claimed to mistake him for a “homeless person”.

The urban janitorial policy of the City of São Paulo has radicalized arbitrariness against this population. “Fucking politics” would be the non-euphemistic version. Cases of physical, verbal, patrimonial and institutional violence intensify without control and accountability.

Violate municipal legislation that requires prior communication of urban cleaning actions; delivery of the counter-seal of the seized goods; prohibition of subtraction of objects such as medicines, blankets and pillows (Decree 59.246/2020 and Ordinance 4/2020).

They violate Resolution 40/2020 of the National Human Rights Council, which determines that authorities “restrain illegal acts of removal of documents and belongings” and respect the inviolability and privacy “of the improvised home of the homeless person”.

The Public Defender’s Office and the Luiz Gama Human Rights Clinic describe actions that have multiplied in recent years: removal of tents and belongings (clothes, pads, blankets, geriatric diapers), without prior notice and counterseal, with physical and verbal aggression; occasional use of rubber bullets and pepper spray by municipal guards.

In one case in Vila Matilde, municipal agents arrived with tractors to, after removing the goods, dig holes and make it difficult for the presence of tents. They reproduced the darkest and most traumatic images of mass graves during the pandemic.

The mayor is silent about violations. In an attempt to leave their mark, mediocre or malicious managers become hostages of electoral cyclothymia. They need to show some service for the next elections and are trying to solve a structural and historical problem quickly. The country has already taught that jet-washing operations end badly.

Public policies for the homeless population have a repressive and hygienist tradition. They also have a tradition of consistently making mistakes and aggravating the problem. They are usually done in the empirical dark, without qualitative and quantitative evidence.

The idea that one can propose solutions for the world without investigating it is a serious symptom of ignorance and stupidity. Of arrogance and authoritarianism too. This is when responsibility is not attributed to a lack of character, will, effort and competence. The misfortune and misfortune of individuals is reduced to a moral failing.

Among the little evidence that we have, it is known that no policy for this population obtains results if it is not accompanied by housing and work programs, respecting the autonomy of each one. But this rare evidence has been preferred to ignore.

In the city of São Paulo, these individuals are not only deprived of the right to own property or housing. On the street, they try to have, at most, the freedom of not feeling hungry, sleeping without being cold and waking up without fear. But the municipal authority illegally deprives them of ownership of survival, hygiene and minimum well-being belongings.

How to ask for urgency for something always urgent, always ignored? The STF, under the rapporteurship of Alexandre de Moraes, has the opportunity to recognize this serious violation of fundamental rights and demand that urban authorities respect the basic rules of non-arbitrity and non-violence.

May the municipality of São Paulo comply with its own decree. And that normative parameters for the protection of the most vulnerable citizens among the vulnerable are respected in the country’s cities. Little is asked, just a grain of constitutional decency, not the end of urban cleanliness. With rights, without fear, without violence.

Winter is coming and the cold, on the street, kills.

PRESENT LINK: Did you like this text? Subscriber can release five free hits of any link per day. Just click the blue F below.