RIGHTS-BRAZIL: Beating Deaths Push Plight of Homeless into Spotlight

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 24 2004 (IPS) - The beating deaths of six street dwellers in the past five days in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city, in attacks in which nine others were seriously injured have sparked a national outcry and highlighted the plight of the homeless.

Ten people sleeping in the streets of downtown Sao Paulo were brutally attacked, suffering blows to the head and the face by a blunt instrument, in the early hours of Thursday morning. Five of them died.

Five other homeless people were attacked between Friday and Sunday, one of whom was killed.

Neo-Nazi groups or skinheads are suspected of carrying out the attacks, which have thrown fear into the city’s street dwellers.

The number of people turning up at the shelters has increased 25 percent in the past few days, Hedwige Knist, coordinator of the Pastoral do Povo da Rua, a Catholic church group that assists street people in Sao Paulo, told IPS.

Many homeless have also headed from the centre of the city to outlying neighbourhoods, she added.

A census carried out by the Pastoral in Sao Paulo last October found that 10,400 people sleep rough in the city, up from 8,700 in 2000, due to a “process of losses” mainly caused by economic problems, unemployment and family breakdown, said Knist.

The greater Sao Paulo is the second-largest city in the world, with a population of roughly 18 million.

In its 36 shelters, the city offers beds for more than 6,000 people, which leaves a deficit of 4,000 beds, says the Pastoral. In wintertime and periods of emergency, the shelters are able to expand their capacity by 20 percent.

But many street dwellers refuse to sleep in shelters, largely because they do like the strict rules, such as curfews and rigid eating and sleeping schedules. Others are alcoholics, already have “roots” in the streets, or still have ties with their families, said Knist.

But people can only stay overnight in the shelters for a maximum of six months, or slightly longer in exceptional cases. In the shelters, the homeless take classes aimed at bringing about their social and family reinsertion, which are provided by several institutions through agreements with the city government.

The murders have once again highlighted the urgent need for designing more comprehensive public policies targeting the homeless – the population that most visibly reveals the country’s social wounds, said Knist, who has been with the Pastoral for eight years.

For many of the homeless, “getting off the streets” and rejoining society requires not only immediate social assistance, but a job, housing, health care, and training – conditions that the city government must help put in place, she said.

Others “who live in the streets full-time and do not accept assistance from the network of services” suffer more serious problems of mental health and alcoholism, which means the social safety networks must be expanded or improved, she argued.

The massacre moved the entire country. Sao Paulo Mayor Marta Suplicy declared three days of mourning. The National Secretariat on Human Rights assigned its ombudsman Pedro Montenegro to accompany the police investigations.

It is clear that the murders were committed by an “organised group”, which means greater social protection for street dwellers is needed, since the killings were not an isolated incident, said Montenegro, who referred to similar attacks and murders that have taken place.

One of the highest profile cases occurred in 1997, when a group of young men killed an indigenous leader, Galdino Jesus dos Santos, by dousing him with gasoline and setting him on fire in Brasilia.

Dos Santos, who was in the capital on a mission from his Pataxó community in the northeastern state of Bahia, was sleeping at a bus stop that night because it was too late to return to the house where he and other indigenous people were staying.

The most notorious murder of street people in this South American country of nearly 180 million was a Jul. 23, 1993 massacre of eight homeless children near the Candelaria cathedral by off-duty police officers in Rio de Janeiro.

But most of the frequent murders of street dwellers in Brazil’s cities are isolated incidents. The recent slayings in Sao Paulo had a greater impact due to the number of victims involved and the signs that the killings may have been part of a “social cleansing” campaign.

In the southern city of Porto Alegre there is fear that right-wing extremists will be “inspired” by the Sao Paulo attacks and stage their own killings, Clarina Glock, a journalist who coordinates the publication of a street paper, “Boca de rua”, which is produced and sold by the homeless, commented to IPS.

The organised groups of extremists in Sao Paulo who harass and attack people from the impoverished northeast, the main source of internal migration in Brazil, do not exist in Porto Alegre.

But “there are groups of skinheads,” and any delay in identifying the perpetrators of the killings in Sao Paulo could encourage similar attacks in other parts of the country, said Glock.