Brazil: Venezuelan migrants find refuge in forest shantytown
Sao Paulo, Brazil – Nallelys Gonzalez decided she had to leave Venezuela in 2018. With the country facing economic and social collapse, the hospital where she worked ran out of medicine and food became increasingly scarce.
“The money we made was not enough to buy food,” she told Al Jazeera. “If we bought rice, we couldn’t buy chicken.”
From her home city of Barcelona, a coastal metropolis about 300 km east of Venezuela’s capital Caracas, she took a series of buses to Roraima, Brazil’s northernmost state, ground zero for Venezuelans seeking asylum in the country. She arrived with just $10.
After five months in Roraima, during which Gonzalez briefly slept on the street, lived in a United Nations refugee shelter and worked as a caregiver, the Brazilian government offered her family relocation thousands of miles south to Sao Paulo, the economic superpower of South America.
The move was part of a government-led relocation program that has resettled more than 100,000 Venezuelans since its launch five years ago.
While Gonzalez and her family initially found work and housing in Sao Paulo, everything changed with the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, Gonzalez lives, with her husband and two adult children, in an illegal squatter settlement known as “Veneza City,” home to about 30 other Venezuelan families.
Their makeshift wooden huts are assembled in one of the last remaining areas of Atlantic Forest in Sapopemba, a sprawling neighborhood in the east of the city.
Rising cost of living
Sao Paulo’s protracted housing crisis, exacerbated by the pandemic and the rising cost of living, has pushed more and more families into precarious settlements, such as Veneza City, in recent years.
Some of the slums, including this one, have drawn the ire of local environmentalists because they are built in an officially protected area of the Atlantic Forest with a high level of biodiversity.
To make room for property, squatters have to deforest trees and sometimes demolish ancient trees. Experts say that due to high rents and economic hardship, there will always be a cohort of willing residents, while the town hall lacks sufficient resources to address the magnitude of the problem.
Illegal forest occupations have also been used to generate profits and launder money for criminal groups, including Brazil’s most powerful drug cartel, the First Capital Command (PCC), experts say.
“It’s a very lucrative real estate business for organized crime,” environmental activist Gilberto Natalini, a former Sao Paulo city councilor, told Al Jazeera, citing more than 160 cases of “irregular occupations” in protected areas of Sao Paulo.
The phenomenon differs from organized housing movements that typically occupy private properties such as buildings or lots, often abandoned or owe back taxes, to push for more affordable housing.
A case Natalini tracked down in the eastern district of the city, Itaquera, involved a gang “consisting of [corrupt] inspectors, fraudsters and PCC criminals” who “specialized in land grabbing”, including by forging the deeds of public land. “There wouldn’t be this convenience without public power, without the participation of corruption,” Natalini said.
Next to Veneza City, in the same protected forest area, is another illegal occupation that locals believe is related to organized crime. A civil inquiry launched by Sao Paulo prosecutors pointed to the previous use of “chainsaws” and “fire” to clear the area.
“The people who do this [illegal occupations] know that public power, that the state is slow,” Sao Paulo city councilor Toninho Vespoli told Al Jazeera. “Organized crime takes the place of the state because the state is absent.”
Antonio Fernando Pinheiro Pedro, the executive secretary for climate change at Sao Paulo City Hall, told Al Jazeera that “criminal real estate speculation” is the most serious problem facing the city’s protected environmental areas today.
“There are professions that are installed with urban infrastructure … there is capital investment,” he said.
In Sao Paulo’s protected areas, more than 30 specialized enforcement operations have been carried out over the past year to deal with these types of appeals, he added.
‘License to deforest’
Environmentalists fear the problem will deepen in the coming months, after Brazil’s Congress recently voted in favor of legislation critics say would weaken protections for the Atlantic Forest, one of the world’s most endangered biomes.
Passed by the lower chamber in March, the legislation — which would relax forest clearance — still needs Senate approval to become law.
“It is a permit to deforest; it is one of the worst setbacks,” said Malu Ribeiro, director of public policy at SOS Atlantic Forest, a Brazilian NGO.
Ribeiro told Al Jazeera that the new law, if passed, would primarily benefit large-scale agribusinesses and real estate companies in the 17 states that house the Atlantic Forest, while organized crime groups involved in irregular occupations could also benefit. of the weakening of the protections.
In the squatter settlements, however, many are simply trying to survive.
Amid signs of recent deforestation and land clearing, and as construction continued, Brazilian community leader Debora Maria dos Santos of Veneza City showed Al Jazeera where the city’s environmental authorities had recently vandalized a communal kitchen.
“They can’t destroy the houses if there are people inside,” she said.
Marioxy Palma was drinking coffee in one of the makeshift wooden structures.
She fled Venezuela with three of her children in 2020 and spent months traveling by bus and hitchhiking through Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. She sends most of her monthly welfare, which amounts to 600 Brazilian real ($120), to relatives back home.
While Palma’s pregnant teenage daughter served fried arepas, her mother told Al Jazeera she had no regrets about the trip: “It’s much better here than in Venezuela.”