Media Article
Small victories of the spirit
Taken from the The Irish Times, 4th April 2009
RUADHÁN MAC CORMAIC in São Paulo, Brazil
 |
| Skyline view of Sao Paulo, the largest and most populous city in Brazil and South America. |
Irish missionaries in the slums of the biggest metropolis in South
America operate in a world controlled by gangs and abandoned by
public authorities
‘THIS IS where the inferno begins,” says Helen McCaffrey, but in the
soupy midday heat the scene looks less like the site of a violent
convulsion than a vision of its terrible aftermath. Known locally as
Cracolândia (crack land), the area is oddly quiet for such a teeming
gathering place. All along the street, men and women sit propped up
against boarded shopfronts, staring listlessly onto a street where a
few wheelbarrows stacked tall with copper, cardboard and discarded
plastic bottles have a free run. Others lie strung out on carts and
kerbs, as if a tide had gone out and left them there – every one, it
seems, high on glue or the crack cocaine that kids are trading
openly for about €3 a pebble.
 |
| Sr Helen McCafferty, MSHR, with local helper Andre during their regular visit to 'Cracolandia' in Sao Paulo. |
Rotting rubbish is heaped high along the road and a filthy stench
seems to rise from every stone. Two emaciated girls, their legs
brittle and their eyes numbed, trip euphorically along the street,
arm in arm, back and forth.
Sr Helen, an energetic 71-year-old, strides on, greeting familiar
faces as she moves. “Bom dia! Tudo bem?” Most of the kids she passes
live on the streets. From time to time, she joins them and spends
the few nights sleeping on the roadside, seeking their trust and
hoping to persuade them to take up an offer of help. “I never had a
better night’s sleep,” she says of the first time she slept out.
“You’d be surprised how comfortable a sheet of cardboard can be.”
Estimates of the numbers of children living on the streets of this,
the biggest metropolis in South America, range from 10,000 to almost
twice that. Wellington, a 26-year-old from the north of Brazil,
describes making ends meet through one of the most popular local
forms of private enterprise: gathering other people’s rubbish for
recycling.
“Copper is the most valuable. I get five dollars for a kilo of
copper. When I have money I pay for a pension , but if not I sleep
on the street,” he says. Despite a recent decline in the murder
rate, brutal violence – knifings, rapes, beatings – are commonplace.
About a month ago, a gang known to be involved with organ
traffickers kidnapped two children a few streets away.
If you were to drive from here to the far side of the city, the
first of the gleaming office towers and condominium complexes that
make a bar chart of the skyline would come into view within half an
hour. With 20 million people spread over 3,000 square miles, São
Paulo is the throbbing, overworked heart of Brazilian business, its
banking and commercial centre and the capital of the country’s
richest state. It’s also a place of staggering inequality. Befitting
its status as a regional powerhouse, the greener parts of town boast
a choice of designer chocolate shops and Japanese cuisine to rival
New York’s, served in garden restaurants guarded by men with
earpieces. And thanks to one of the largest populations of
helicopters in any city, those who can afford it need never come
into contact with the millions of ultra-poor who populate the
favelas, or slums, that run along the city’s endless periphery.
 |
| Local children of the favela sing and dance at the Vila Prudente Centro Cultural in Sao Paulo. |
“You never can forget that, because it’s just hitting you in the eye
everywhere you go, everywhere you look, every day of the week,” says
Pat Clarke, a Holy Ghost father who has been living in São Paulo for
30 years and runs a cultural centre in Vila Prudente, a favela of
18,000 people. “The contrasts are pretty agonising to contemplate.”
A tall man with long white locks breaching his baseball cap and a
back-pack slung over his shoulder, Fr Clarke seems to be on
first-name terms with everyone he passes along the narrow
passageways. Like most favelas, Vila Prudente arose out of
wasteland, when the rapid industrialisation of post-war Brazil
brought thousands of migrants to the city from the poorer states of
the northeast. With nowhere to live and no money for rent, they
erected their own homes – flimsy huts made of a jumble of wood, dry
brick, cardboard and cloth.
It was in just such a shack, in 1990, that Fr Clarke opened his
cultural centre, where vulnerable local children with a ready-marked
route into the world of drugs and crime could find a diversion and
retrieve some self-esteem. Today, the centre is an incongruous,
sparkling jewel of five buildings in the heart of the slum. Inside
each one, decorated with colourful tile mosaics made by local
children, its staff give classes in singing, dancing, painting and
sculpture. The children are fed at meal times, and a fully-equipped
creche is open every day.
“I thought, people have desires and needs way beyond the purely
material,” he says of the centre’s inception. “Kids have dreams. You
put a pencil in their hand, or a paintbrush, or a musical
instrument, and they start flourishing.
“When you see how little it takes, really, in terms of affection, in
terms of a sense of caring, a sense of ‘there’s a place for you
here, there’s a value that we put on you,’ then that I think is the
chief ingredient of transformation – giving them a pencil or a
paintbrush. The rest is easy.”
AT THE LAST count there were 122 Irish Catholic missionaries working
in Brazil, many involved in development work and most having spent
the greater part of their adult lives here. In conversation,
sentences can start in English and end in Portuguese, and at 30 or
40 years’ distance, contemporary Ireland might as well be a foreign
country. Few intend ever to return home, and it’s hard at times, for
all the proximity that memories, accents and family ties might
imply, not to detect a sense of alienation from the country they
left.
One priest recalls that when former taoiseach Bertie Ahern visited
São Paulo in 2001, he took the missionaries into a room on their own
and referred to them as “our first ambassadors”, and it stuck in his
mind.
But as emissaries, he suggests, their brief is informed not by a
need to proselytise, but by a determination to impart the most basic
values: kindness, solidarity, justice. At Belém II, one of the
city’s sprawling prisons, there’s not much more to offer. When
Margaret Gaffney and Catherine Doyle, of the Missionary Sisters of
the Rosary, arrive for one of their regular visits, even the men in
the most notorious gang-controlled section greet them like
respectful children. Both are members of a team concerned with human
rights and the just treatment of prisoners, and are planning to
begin a literacy programme here. They spend their time jotting down
notes – a request for a transfer, a plea for a better cell – and
promise to take each one up with the authorities.
Belém II is typical of São Paulo’s run-down, overcrowded prison
system. Built to house 800 inmates, it currently has almost 2,000
and its water system is crumbling under the pressure. In one dark,
unbearably hot cell that doubles as a chapel, there are 12 stone
beds, but another 15 people sleep on the floor and three hammocks
have been hung across the room to squeeze in a few more. There’s one
toilet, two filthy showers and no ventilation. “We’re here like
animals,” says one man in the exercise yard.
Back in the administration wing, a senior prison officer has the
look of a man resigned to his lot. “Brazil is a country that doesn’t
invest deeply in this area,” he says. “The numbers increased a lot,
but the financial situation hasn’t improved.” Violent attacks still
occur here, he says, but it used to be a lot worse. “They used to
kill each other.” São Paulo’s prisons are an important arm of the
command structure of the criminal gangs that operate as parallel
powers in some parts of the city. They’re also closely bound up with
the legend of that power.
ON THE AFTERNOON of Friday, May 12th, 2006, a date familiar to all
paulistanos, the city came under attack from within. All at once,
gang members dressed in ordinary clothes fanned out across the city
carrying pistols, automatic rifles and firebombs. They struck fast,
not looting or stealing but burning buses, banks, petrol stations
and public buildings. They killed policemen on sight. The sequence
appeared at first like a series of random, unplanned acts, but it
quickly became apparent that it was in fact a single, impeccably
co-ordinated assault on the city. And it brought São Paulo to a halt
for three days – people stayed at home, schools lay empty and shops
closed. Simultaneously, 73 prisons – including Belém – rose in
rebellion. The action was carried out by a then little-known group
called Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), the First Command of the
Capital, the largest of the major gang networks in São Paulo.
Although directed from the prisons, where most of its leaders were
serving time, the gang made no demands, which meant it was its
prerogative alone to bring the attack to an end, just as it had been
to start it.
The purpose was simple: to show strength.
 |
| Fr James Crowe, Kiltegan Father, with a group of local men in Jardim Angela in Sao Paulo. |
The PCC attack took place at a time when, partly due to the gang’s
own growth, São Paulo’s murder rate was declining (smaller groups
were subsumed by the PCC, resulting in fewer inter-gang killings).
Just 10 years earlier, in 1996, the UN had declared Jardim Ângela,
one of the city’s large favelas, to be the most dangerous place in
the world. “It was pretty miserable,” says the gregarious Clare man
Jim Crowe, of the Kiltegan Fathers, who has been working in Jardim
Ângela for three decades. “There wasn’t a day you would go out
without meeting two or three bodies on the road.” At the nearby São
Luís cemetery, up to 35 funerals a day were taking place, mostly for
what locals darkly referred to as “lead poisoning”. People spoke of
an undeclared war.
“In 1996, when that declaration was made by the UN, we said ‘it’s
not enough to stay praying about it, this isn’t going to solve the
problem’. So we got a bit of a movement going.”
That movement began on November 2nd, 1996, when 5,000 people –
mothers, sisters and brothers of the dead – turned up for an evening
march through the cemetery. In the organisers’ analysis, the
spiralling violence was due not only to the growth in the drugs
trade but to the abandonment of the area by public authorities.
There was a lack of schools and clinics, and the police had pulled
out long ago. The marches continued, and resulted, among other
things, in the creation of Brazil’s first community police force,
which is still in place today. The murder rate has fallen from about
120 per 100,000 in 1996 to 25 last year. “It was a success,” Fr
Crowe says, “but like everything, it’s not all sunshine.” To
emphasise his point, we hear later that day of the death of a
13-year-old girl, who had fallen for a 38-year-old drug dealer.
After telling him she wanted to end the relationship, she was raped,
had her throat slit and her body was thrown in the local reservoir.
 |
| Fr Pat Clarke speaks with Fr Hugh de Blacam (Holy Ghost Fathers) in Vila Prudente favela in Sao Paulo. |
TO LIVE AND work as long as they have in the favelas, many of the
Irish missionaries have depended on the tacit approval of the gangs
that control their neighbourhoods and keep a vigilant eye on who
comes in and out. Fr Clarke’s cultural centre has never been touched
by thieves or vandals, presumably because it’s under the protection
of the gang leaders. Doesn’t such dependence pose moral dilemmas?
“It’s ambiguous, our relationship, but it allows you to do what you
think will contribute to changing a kid’s perspective on what he
wants to do with his life,” he replies. “You don’t have the luxury,
certainly, of moralising . . . because I suppose you act more on a
practical basis. But these people, they don’t realise how subversive
this is, this art. It seems harmless, but it’s really subversive.”
São Paulo’s murder rate may have fallen in recent years, but with
the consolidation of the drugs trade by large syndicates, the
business has become more organised and the supply lines more
difficult to disrupt.
Despite some improvements, crime rates remain stubbornly high and
the income gap has been slow to narrow. In parts of the city, HIV
and illiteracy rates are worryingly static. Pat Clarke admits to
feeling sceptical about the wider picture, but as long as he’s here,
he’ll feel no temptation to despair. After all, he says, material
progress will come by way of countless small victories of the
spirit.
“Without what you might call a spiritual dimension to what you’re
doing, people are only going to want material advancement, and then
they’re going to turn into new oppressors. There are more dimensions
to progress than purely material advancement . . . It’s the poverty
of spirit that’s sometimes the calamity.”
Ruadhán Mac Cormaic travelled to São Paulo with Misean Cara, an
Irish missionary development organisation that allocated more than
€800,000 to its members in Brazil last year.