The Lion's Heart and Crocodile's Tears

The pamphlet dedicated to the Talude Neighborhood is long gone. The media story is told in a single stroke: a group of virtuous people were outraged, tore their clothes, signed open letters, and lashed out at the mayor on duty because the Loures City Council decided to demolish fifty shacks, leaving the same number of families homeless. The political and social problem is slightly more complex and, therefore, unintelligible to the do-gooders at the keyboard: the forests of zinc, brass, and wood are once again expanding throughout the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto, and no Ricardo Leão alone can contain their growth or provide decent housing for thousands upon thousands of people.

Like other neighborhoods with unsanitary conditions or mired in irreparable social dramas in less than two or three generations, Talude was only discovered by the Ritas of Cássia of their homeland when they dedicated opening lines to their dinnertime news programs. Until a week ago, its residents populated an exotic ecosystem that the kingdom's moral judges only dare to enter wearing masks, their skin covered in insect repellent, safari vests , binoculars, and, just in case, a Glock. They call these grotesque habitats , just a short distance from the IC19 highway, the CRIL highway, or the 25 de Abril Bridge, "peripheries."

For those who believe the world begins at Terreiro do Paço and ends at Parque das Nações or Telheiras—or, with some benevolence, in the studios of Paço de Arcos or Queluz de Baixo—and who, therefore, have never noticed the dozens of Taludes that surround them, good poverty is abstract, distant, imagined poverty, perfect for anti-capitalism, anti-tourism, anti-digital nomads, anti-gentrification, anti-local power, or anti-government rhetoric. Concrete, everyday, harsh, and poignant poverty, however, is alien to them. Except when it can be used for public display of virtue.

In recent days, these professionals of ready-to-serve humanism, ignoring that public administration presupposes difficult choices in contexts where an optimal or even a good scenario almost never exists, have reduced the issue of illegal housing in Portugal to a barbaric act by Ricardo Leão, the kingdom's chief demolisher, the municipal Mephistopheles contaminated by Chega's hate agenda. Strictly speaking, if we remove André Ventura's party from this fauna of experts, their argument is left with the same one that will remain in the Talude lands: nothing.

Nothing moves me for or against Ricardo Leão (whose work I barely know). I even admit that the Loures City Council could have handled the rehousing of families who have long been subjected to undignified living conditions and, likely, as the mayor himself has denounced, exposed to all kinds of exploitation differently. However, let's not buy into the litany of those independent groups—of which only some editorial staff fail to recognize the hidden hammer and sickle or star—that, by magic, housing could be guaranteed for everyone in Loures, the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, the country, and the world if only there were a lack of political will.

It should be emphasized that the problem of slums was only mitigated in democratic Portugal thanks to the ambition of Cavaco Silva's government and the audacity and cooperation of numerous mayors of varying political persuasions, such as Jorge Sampaio, first, and João Soares, later, when the Special Rehousing Program (PER) was approved in 1993. When it was launched, there were over 100,000 people living in shacks in the country, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics. Over the course of 30 years, investment in public housing in Lisbon alone exceeded 600 million euros.

Indifferent to the numbers and nuances of complex situations, a handful of pure socialists, immaculate in their principles and professors of empathy, with the complicity of the very same media that laments that "the Portuguese ( sic )" are "forced to move to the south bank" of the Tagus — that forgotten third world where only malaria is more lethal than lead — rushed to lecture on Ricardo Leão's (nonexistent) heart and shed crocodile tears in public over the dilapidation of the PS's historical heritage, now handed over to the far-right's revengeful agenda.

They ignore the fact that there are 26,000 people waiting for social housing in the country, according to calculations by Expresso , and that the middle class itself is now counting every penny to pay rent at the end of the month, even in the pestilent suburbs. In 2018, before the pressure of the wave of migration the country has witnessed, the Institute of Housing and Urban Rehabilitation (IHRU) estimated that responding to the housing needs identified by municipalities would require a total investment of around 1.7 billion euros. Today, they will surely be more and will require a significant portion of funds from the Recovery and Resilience Plan, the panacea for all our ills.

Fortunately, there's a vast record of the vocal interventions of these guardians of leftist morality when—and ignoring other eccentricities that received a standing ovation—in 2021, Pedro Nuno Santos's obsession and António Costa's opportunism led the country to pour €3.2 billion into "saving" a bankrupt airline. How many tin cans does a TAP airline cost, after all? How many constructions and demolitions of Taludes could we have avoided if the poor were truly a priority and adequate housing a true national goal?

Until then, always relying on the ironclad principles of these worthy benefactors, the people of Talude can continue sleeping rough. Better yet: when they look up at the sky, instead of stars, they'll see the Portuguese flag on the wings of planes they'll never fly.

Note: Today I conclude my collaboration with Sapo. I've always tried to write what I believe in so as not to have to pretend to believe in what I write. To Joana Petiz, who granted me the honor of this more or less weekly space, my thanks. To the readers, the raison d'être of any editorial project, my heartfelt gratitude. We'll see you soon.