what's goin' on (part 1)

29 years out my life and still
living down south here in old brasil
i look...for some explanations

i didn't write as quickly as i could
cuz there's shit's going down in and around my hood
i don't...really know what it means

so finally, on the eve of christmas eve, i'm getting back to english, trying to deconstruct the last couple of weeks of hardcore weirdness around these parts.   starting with a slight digression...arianna huffington has a piece here extolling the virtue's of brasil's progress under lula, and the emergence of the “south american” dream:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/it-might-be-time-to-rebra_b_800515.html?ref=fb&src=sp

it's a very surface-level analysis with some notable holes (for example:  should we really care about the government’s definition of middle class when it doesn't adjust for family size?  and what exactly is going to happen in são paulo and the rest of the country if car consumption keeps going up and infrastructure stays at a standstill?)  but overall, i think she has a point:  on a macro level, brasil as a country is doing some pretty amazing stuff.  it's what i've seen recently on a micro level, of brasil as a society, that's got me a little freaked out.  exhibit a:


 
this video was shot 10 days ago, when 23 poor working families briefly took over an abandoned building in lapa on avenida mem de sá, about 20 minutes away from where i live.  it's impossible to say how long the building's been abandoned since the ownership papers have apparently gone missing, but it's been about 20 years.  under the brasilian constitution, all property has to serve a "social function".  basically, that doesn't mean you can't have an empty guesthouse on your sprawling country estate, but it does mean that if the federal social security administration (the last documented owner of the property on mem de sá) leaves a building abandoned in downtown rio for a couple of decades, it pretty much loses the right to administer it.

there's a long process, of course, between squatting in a building and proving that your occupation serves a valid "social function."  i don't understand most of the legal details involved, but there are some basic rules that pretty much everybody's clear on.  and in the process of forcibly clearing away the squatters and their supporters, the cops managed to break pretty much all of them:

(ALL PHOTOS BY THAÍS MORELLI)

 1.  i wasn't there when the riot cops arrived and started beating everybody up, but none of the dozens of people i talked (including journalists) remembers hearing the police give an order to disperse.  apparently, they just moved in with nightsticks and pepper spray.  then they decided to break out tear gas and rubber bullets (which they apparently shot into the crowd instead of on the ground, which is what they're supposed to do)

2.  legally, the riot cops couldn't do what they did, because they're military police officers, rather than federal police.  the basic rule is that only federal police can clear occupied buildings, and videos and photos show very clearly that this building was evacuated by military police (who pepper sprayed everyone, including journalists on the sidewalk and little kids in the building...which is also not legal)

 3.  cops arrested 7 people supporting the movement, and took them pretty much at random.  one of them - who's a public school teacher and a graduate student in rio's most prestigious social science program - was charged with kidnapping for preventing a security guard from entering the building.  which seriously doesn't make any fucking sense.  they also charged protestors, who entered through an open door, with breaking and entering, though photos show that it was the riot cops who did physical damage to the building.

people in brasil talk a lot about the difference between a lei que pega (a law that "takes") and a lei que não pega (a law that doesn't).  my activist friends tend to categorize most of the 1988 constitution - a really beautiful rebuke to the military dictatorship that explicitly guarantees all sorts of equal rights - as a lei que não pega.  again, i don't really understand the legal complexities of what went down on mem de sá last week, but it's clear that there were a lot of really basic and flagrant violations of what's supposed to happen in situations like this.  there is still a reliance on old style policing hereabouts, which means just showing up and beating the shit out of everyone.

statistically, the folks occupying buildings in big cities are not nearly as much of a force as the people buying cars or refrigerators for the first time, or moving into the "middle class," or finishing up high school.  but if dissent continues to be crushed like it was in the bad old days, i don't know how far that upward mobility extends.  if material progress is exploding but political progress isn't really moving, can the "south american dream" really be heading in a very different direction from the american dream?