The San Pablo looks different from the other elections. It’s amazing how many people sleep on the streets. There are precarious mattresses on the sidewalks, even in the more affluent sectors. And this Sunday it was voted with that scenario that worsens the poorest in the neighborhood.
Less than ten meters from a place where Lula da Silva was running held a press conference in Rua Fidalga, in a middle-class area with a lot of gastronomic offer, in a shack like a hole between buildings, there are two young people sleeping.
One is in an igloo-type tent where his head barely sticks out. The other half wakes up with a gesture lost on a mattress of foam covered in gray colors with spots and tears, trying to look towards the sidewalk where this envoy was walking.
Near the district of Higienópolis, on voting day, a boy under 30, with nice clothes, middle-class appearance, well-cut hair, tries to get up without success.
He is on a blanket next to a tree on which he managed to sit on his side. Something is wrong with your balance. He lifts one leg while the other remains lying down, seeks the help of an arm but It has no space to support it. He manages to raise his head in the effort, with only one eye open and his mouth tight, as if seeking help.
He tries several times, stretching his spine, moving the other arm, but he gives up, lets himself fall and curled up with his legs on his chest, collapses on the covers. He is on drugs and the sun hits him hard on his sweaty body.
Tents from the airport
In San Pablo, on the road from the airport, as if thrown from above, faded colored curtains are scattered in disorder in the cramped spaces under the freeways, at one end of a square, on the sidewalks where little happens. people. I’m like the sugared almonds of the favelasin some cases forming small precarious fields.
There live people who have lost everything or have never had anything. Many families with small children and the elderly who move their toothless mouth by chewing the air. It is not just a Sao Paulo phenomenon. It is seen in other major cities in the country. They are part of it a universe of the poor that has not stopped growing.
Those presences that do not vote are, however, extremely symbolic on the day of these decisive elections in the Brazilian ballot. There is too much reality there beyond the speeches and political promises.
People generally pass in front of these unfortunates without looking at them, accustomed to this dystopia that until a few years ago did not exist in one of the most powerful countries in the world and undoubtedly the one with the greatest economic situation in the region.
Brazil faces poverty that affects 22.3% of the population, but its biggest challenge is poverty that affects 33 million people with problems accessing food.
This Sunday was a sunny day in San Pablo. On the balconies of the buildings only a few Brazilian flags indicated that the neighbor will vote for President Jair Bolsonaro. These announcements compete with the most identifying flags of Lula da Silva, hanging on the windows, with the face of the former president and the five-pointed star of your party on red background.
Those pretentious revolutionary models of the past are still sold in some stalls because there are no new whites which replaced the vermelho, with other gestures of the former president and the phrases on peace that preside over the campaign.
In the schools where the electronic machines used in Brazil to vote are found, there are lines of people wearing the yellow Bolsonaro t-shirts, or the still red ones of Lulismo. I know tolerate perfectly and some even walk together. In Brazil we see that there is polarization but not a crack, a profound difference for the analysis of sociologists.
“You don’t vote much here,” a Chilean married to an Argentine woman who lives in Santa Catarina, in the south of the country, on the beaches far from Florianópolis, where many families who have left our country have settled, tells this correspondent. country. “It is that the ballot boxes are far away and the people with the heat that makes you get stuck on the beaches”, explain sympathetically.
In big cities it is different. “I don’t want to stop voting, it is necessary,” he tells an AP colleague, 35-year-old psychologist Marcelo Silveria Curi who voted for Lula in a São Paulo school. “I hope we can change what is there, there has been a lot of setback, economic and social,” he concludes.
ST. PAUL. SPECIAL DELIVERY
Source: Clarin
