Brazil’s largest drug market disperses amidst squalor

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Cracolandia, Brazil’s largest open-air drug market, has moved after 30 years. After several police operations, the traffickers moved to other parts of São Paulo, dragging dozens of drug addicts with them, today scattered amidst the most abject poverty.

The Princesa Isabel Square, in the historic center of the São Paulo capital, has become an encampment of plastic tents and pieces of cloth, which had already received, during the covid-19 pandemic, homeless families and now part of the population of Cracolandia.

Life inside this square is as intense as it is dramatic. People lie on mattresses, make bonfires, rummage through garbage, and take drugs.

In the surrounding area, State Police officers observe while officials from the Mayor’s Office prowl around looking for information.

At one end, crack dealing is visible to the naked eye. Suspects sell the drug to victims consuming it with a blank stare in broad daylight. At the other end, the ranks of the hungry are swelling with people who have been left with nothing by the pandemic and now depend on donations to put something in their mouths.

THE END OF CRACKLAND?

A few streets away from the square was the region popularly known as Cracolandia, which has operated as Brazil’s largest open-air drug market since the 1990s.

On average, it received about 500 people a day, according to official estimates, although social organizations put the figure as high as 800, a number that doubled at night.

It occupied a group of colonial-style houses used as clandestine lodgings for drug trafficking and consumption until last weekend.

Now this area is diaphanous, deserted. The entrance and windows of the buildings, defaced with graffiti artists’ signatures and messages, are covered with gray paving stones.

“Between Friday night and last Saturday, the ‘flow’ (of people) decided to leave on their own. In part, we were surprised,” an agent of the Metropolitan Civil Guard (GCM) of São Paulo, who prefers to remain anonymous and has been working in the region for almost 20 years, told Efe.

According to authorities, the decision came from the hardcore organized crime in the region, pressured by the latest operations, which resulted in the arrest of “92 traffickers” and the seizure of a “large quantity of drugs”.

About 250 drug addicts now survive in Plaza Princesa Isabel; the rest have settled in other nearby public spots.

“The order we have is not to let them come back here,” notes the GCM officer.

The decision seems final, unlike other times when there were also similar exoduses resulting from brutal police actions.

CHALLENGES: HOUSING, EMPLOYMENT, AND CARE

Although for Raphael Escobar, from “Craco Resiste”, a movement that defends the human rights of the people of Cracolandia, the problem is far from being solved; it has only “changed direction”.

He points out that the emptying has not been “from one day to the next” and is also due to the deactivation of some social services in the Mayor’s Office.

“Cracolandia is formed by a group of people that still exist,” stresses Escobar, who believes that to solve the problem, a plan combining “housing, employment, and psychological care” would be necessary.

However, another GCM agent told Efe that they are already studying measures to deal with the stream of drug addicts that has settled in Princesa Isabel.

In fact, the governor of Sao Paulo, João Doria, candidate for the October presidential elections, said Tuesday that he has already directed the police commanders to remove the camp from the square and inhibit traffic.

A statement that raises a “red alert”, in the opinion of sociologist Nathália Oliveira, from the Brazilian Platform for Drug Policy (PBPD) and who affirms that the unoccupation of public spaces without negotiation “tends to generate very violent conflicts”.

She also advocates for regulated consumption areas, as in other countries, that provide “care and dignity”, which was not the case in Cracolandia.

Meanwhile, neighbors in the area avoid commenting on the issue. A doorman of one of the buildings in the square assures Efe that he has become accustomed to the “hustle and bustle” of the new tenants.

“We respect them and they respect us,” he says, ending the conversation.

With information from EFE