Sao Paulo (AP) – Marcelo Colaácov recently drove to his bar in the center of Sao Paulo, when he noticed something unusual: hundreds of drug users who have been bonding in the neighborhood for many years. He walked for 10 minutes without finding their traces. They also disappeared their waste, which was cleaned by the city hall staff.
“I felt this strange peace,” said a 42-year-old Sao Paulo resident. “Everyone is gone. But how?”
The Colaácov Bar Museum is located in one of the edges of the Crakolandia or Crackland, leaning in the center of the center of Sao Paulo, where thousands of drug users, often lying on the ground or jaws between their lips, live for decades.
However, by May 12, the scene has changed.
Only police officers were visible where the users of cracks dominated for decades. Shop owners and residents worried about Muggings communicated outside. The pavement that has recently dispersed shoes, one socks, broken pipes and sometimes stools looked without stain. Marked shelters made of cardboard and fabric were gone, and some graffiti on the worsening buildings of Crackland, once in the background of the human drama, can finally be seen.
The transformation where police officers were deployed in the area and frightened the population to other parts of the city are the result of aggressive local government initiatives to change the region.
However, experts are cautious about cleaning the high costs: police brutality, spread of security risk in other areas and treatment and protection negligence on drug users who are not criminals. They say that Crackland residents just scattered and inevitably return.
“We can’t even carry a blanket”
The Associated Press said police aggression has increased earlier this year under the leadership of the government Tarcisi de Freit and the mayor Ricardo Nunes. They say officers use bars more often, preventing them from carrying bags that could be hidden by drugs, closing several local pensions and even threatening to kill them. About a quarter of the neighboring slums, which reportedly reported to drug traffickers are reasonable, were removed.
Nearly two weeks after drug users disappeared from the main Crackland district, hundreds were seen in smaller pockets around Sao Paulo’s old city center. Social media videos show some attempts to return to the former drug site at night, which is now 24/7 police protected by the police. However, all attempts failed.
Many expect to return to the area soon to be occupied for decades – if police brutality Wanes and authorities lose the adhesion of the region, as happened in the past.
“My guitar is in the mud for a criminal wearing blue,” said Rogéri, a tearing man in a dirty shirt and yoga pants that did not give his last name for fear of repentance. “I have nothing against the law. But the law has to understand that we live there. Now we have to wander, that is horrible. We can’t get where we live, we can’t even carry a blanket.”
“It’s about people”
Crackland is what was once a part of the center of the old city of Sao Paulo. The region’s downturn began in the 1960s as the business moved to Paulista Avenue, more central artery, and the industries moved to a cheaper edge. For about two decades, until the mid -1980s, the small budget film companies have moved, earning the region under the pseudonym of the “garbage mouth”. Drug users first arrived about three decades ago.
Brazilian researchers say Crackland appeared in the 1990s due to the confluence of two factors: the proximity of the main transport center, covering buses, subway and trains, and the widest mass killings in the most impoverished areas that forced residents to gather in the Downtown sector.
Over the past 30 years, shop owners and residents have feared they have been robbed. Today, the 10 football fields in the old center of Sao Paulo in the old city center are stained and silent.
Lieutenant Sao Paulo Governor Felicio Ramuth, selected by Government de Freit to clean Crackland, said last week that there was no scattering of the population there was no bruteness of the police.
“There were 50 police raids at the scene at the scene (and 1000 criminals were imprisoned,” he told Daily o Estado de S.Paul on Wednesday. “We have not received any accusation of police brutality.”
Ramuth said that 1,200 drug users who were in the area a few weeks ago are now being treated in clinics, but have not offered any evidence to support his claim. He added that Crackland would keep it without drug users if his current condition remains for the next six months.
Former President Jir Bolsonar Minister de Freit Governor is reported to be considering Louz Lula da Silva in 2026 against President Louis. In the presidential election. His competitors claim that he acquires political capital by interrupting Crackland, which could also make 5 billion Brazilian Reas ($ 900 million.
Critics of the Government Strategy to stop Crackland are crying. Catholic priest Júlis Lancelotti, who has been working for most of the 76 -year -olds with homelessness, said police brutality and drug users’ scattering would not solve the problem.
“It’s not right to force political propaganda to say that Drackland is gone,” Lancelotti said. Crackland is not a physical area that is about people. They are transported to isolated regions, they do not go to the clinics. “
The city of Saurulhos Town Hall, the city of Sao Paulo Metropolist, expressed concern in a recent statement of Lancelotti and other activist accusations, claiming that Crackland residents were “brought and abandoned”. He added that he would investigate the case.
Sao Paulo’s Mayor Nunes denied any misconduct.
“The problem will grow up”
Giordano Magri, a researcher at the University of Sao Paulo, who specializes in the city issues, said the current deal with Crackland aims to eliminate infrastructure for drug users to survive in the area, but will eventually find similar conditions elsewhere.
“Because the governor and the mayor have become authoritarian that the ecosystems are gone. But they cannot do it forever,” said Magri, who added that people departing from Crackland will have more than 70 smaller places throughout the city to move.
Rogéri, a man whose guitar has been broken, is afraid that the situation may intensify in the coming days when hundreds seek to return.
“We are real people. I say with a sour heart. I know, I know,” he said. “But now that they dispel the garbage, the problem will grow.”
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