SÃO PAULO — Fatima Mendes tightens her grip on her dogs’ leashes as she crosses a street in the hemisphere’s largest city. The narrow sidewalks here are clotted with people draped in blankets, many lying down. Drug users pick through trash bins in search of items they might sell for a few reals — enough to secure the next fix. They carry away a wheezing boombox, worn tennis shoes, busted combs.
Now Crackland is on the move again. The latest in a decades-long series of police crackdowns this year is pushing the squatters beyond their long-standing boundaries and into adjoining neighborhoods. The chaos jars amid the architecture of downtown São Paulo. Crackland sits next to the Sala São Paulo, the extravagant theater that serves as headquarters for the city’s symphony orchestra, blocks from the Pérola Byington women’s hospital, and close to the Pinacoteca, one of the country’s most important museums of modern art. It’s not only a public health nightmare but also a real estate headache.Until recent months, traffickers had full control of the region.
At Cristolandia, 16 men and two women agree to attend a service in exchange for food, a bath, and new clothes. Aldino de Magalhães runs a restaurant that has been in his family for generations. But sales have plunged 50 percent since the day in May when, without warning, addicted people moved into his block. “It was worse than the pandemic,” he says.
It’s almost as if criminalizing these things doesn’t work
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