Attacking the poor in Sao Paulo

Jim Jay has an impressively wide reading list; he’s always pointing out interesting articles I’d never have found otherwise.

A recent link from Jim Jay’s impressively wide reading-list: violent slum clearance in an area of Sao Paulo called ‘Capao Redondo’*.

This kind of thing is doubtless happening all the time; there’s a general bubble that I almost always ignore. I only notice it now because I’m midway through Mike Davis’ book ‘planet of slums’. Davis does a particularly good job of taking slum settlement and clearances out of the falsely clear-cut world of legal vs. illegal, and pointing out the nexus of power and money — tolerance of ‘illegal’ slums either because they are inevitable (the people have nowhere else to go) or even because squatters help prepare land which can then be developed privately.

*Not knowing anything about Brazil, I’m flummoxed the details. Wikipedia claims the population of Capåo Redondo as 300,000, but the eviction seems to be only of a far smaller area within that.

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