Lisbon's bad week: police brutality reveals Portugal's urban
reality
A viral video of police violence has brought national
attention to the long-ghettoised community in Bairro da Jamaica
Ana Naomi de Sousa in Lisbon
Thu 31 Jan 2019 12.00 GMT Last modified on Thu 31 Jan 2019
12.02 GMT
Lisbon police
officers on patrol on after clashes during a demonstration against racism and
police violence.
From time to time, cars of curious people drive slowly
though Bairro da Jamaica, craning their necks for a peek at the neighbourhood
that’s been in the headlines across Portugal for several days now. None of them
step out of their vehicles.
They’re here to look at the broken glass, the smashed roof
tiles and the evidence of last week’s violence. The tallest of the bairro’s
self-built housing towers is now derelict, fenced off with yellow tape and
awaiting demolition; the others are also scheduled to be torn down, but are
still occupied for now.
“Most of the residents here are just regular people: they go
to school, they work, they pay their bills, they pay taxes, they contribute to
society like everyone else,” says Liliana Jordão, 27, a resident of this
neighbourhood on the southern outskirts of greater Lisbon. “But if Bairro da
Jamaica already had a really bad reputation, this week it’s been like a zoo.”
It began last week with a scrap between two residents, but
it was when the police arrived that the real story kicked off: officers were
captured on video beating, pushing and dragging anyone who came into their
path.
Filmed by local residents, the video quickly went viral on
social media, spreading across the estates and neighbourhoods of the city’s
peripheries, where most of Portugal’s black, Afro-descendent population
resides.
“When I saw the video, the way they treated those women, I
actually wept,” says Jordão. “It could easily have been my mother. And then I
thought to myself, no, enough is enough, I have to do something”.
This is where the
segregation of Portuguese-speaking African immigrants and subsequent
generations began
Antonio Brito Guterres
The following day around 300 people, most of them young,
black residents of Lisbon’s suburbs, held a spontaneous demonstration in the
centre of the city chanting “Stop racist police brutality”. Police responded by
firing rubber bullets towards the protesters, with the confrontations resulting
in four arrests. Tensions rose from there, with police spokespeople and unions
trading accusations of excessive force and institutional racism.
Across the suburbs cars have been set on fire and police
stations targeted, as the original call to protest – “There are many Jamaicas”
– has echoed across the country, reflecting an urban reality that is rarely
discussed in Portugal. .
Shanty towns proliferated in Portugal from the 1960s
onwards, the combined result of poor urban planning, large-scale migration from
the countryside and immigration from the former Portuguese colonies of Angola,
Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau and Sao Tome and Principe. “African
immigrants were pushed into thoroughly precarious conditions, often having to
resort to building their own homes, illegally, and on the outskirts of the
city,” says Antonio Brito Guterres, an urban social worker. “This is where the
segregation of Portuguese-speaking African immigrants and subsequent
generations began, from the rest of the city.”
The structural problems in Bairro da Jamaica, approximately
30 years since it was first established, are typical of neglected self-built
neighbourhoods: illegal electricity supply, improvised sewage and water
arrangements, and inadequate building conditions. “It’s damn cold in the winter
and boiling in the summer”, says resident Cândido Guilherme de Almeida Pedro,
29.
After years of being ignored, at the end of 2017 a plan for
Bairro da Jamaica was finally agreed as part the national resettlement programme,
the PER (Programa Especial de Realojamento). Launched in Portugal in the 1990s
to demolish the shanty towns, the PER approach has been defined by replacing
self-built housing with concrete housing estates. Critics say it has replaced
slums with ghettos. A 2017 report by the UN Special rapporteur on adequate
housing raised concerns about the situation of the African descendent and Roma
gypsy (cigano) communities in Portugal, flagging living conditions “that
directly threaten a dignified life, which is at the centre of the human right
to housing.” They also criticised the detrimental effects – including
homelessness – of demolitions and evictions instigated by the PER.
“A lot of those
neighbourhoods are seen as ‘sensitive zones’ by the security forces”, says
Guterres. “But that doesn’t correlate with crime rates. It’s about racial bias
within the police.”
We don’t want war
with the police. We need to show them, however, that we have rights ... the way
they behave needs to change
Liliana Jordão
Heavy-handed policing in the suburbs is blamed for the
deaths of at least 10 people in the last 15 years – among them 14-year old
Elson Sanches in 2009 – and no police officer has ever been convicted in
connection with them. Then there is the high profile case, currently in court,
in which 17 police agents stand accused by the public prosecutor of a litany of
crimes against a number of young black men and women from the self-built
neighbourhood of Cova da Moura, including aggravated kidnapping, falsifying
testimonies, racial abuse and assault.
Meanwhile, in 2016, a UN report from the Committee on the
Elimination of Racial Discrimination said it remained concerned with racism
experienced in Portugal and repeated recommendations that the country adopted
specific measures aimed at the African descendent population, who “remain
invisible in the most significant positions” in society.
For Almeida Pedro and many others, Monday’s demonstration
was a long time coming.
“It’s damn cold in
the winter and boiling in the summer,” says Cândido Guilherme de Almeida Pedro
of the neighbourhood’s housing.
“The protest is to do
with a lot of things that have been accumulating for a long time. You have lots
of young people who want to be part of society but find themselves totally
marginalised. What happened here in the bairro was really the last straw”, he
says.
“Of course we don’t
want war with the police,” adds Jordão. “We need to show them, however, that we
have rights - as much as we have responsibilities - and the way they behave
needs to change.”
With the new plan to resettle people across the local area,
rather than in a purpose built estate far away, the residents of Bairro da
Jamaica hope they will avoid being ghettoised like other communities before
them. But with the continued perceived impunity of the police and the apparent
unwillingness of Portuguese security forces to even consider the issue of
institutionalised racism, the source of tension between African descent
communities in the peripheries of Lisbon and the police will remain.
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