On 19 December, an operation by the Polícia de Segurança Pública (PSP, Portugal’s police power) provoked a wave of shock in Portugal. When a lot of people on Rua do Benformoso in Lisbon have been pressured in opposition to the wall and searched, Photos of the operation went viral on social networks.
A number of dozen males could be seen within the photographs, with their fingers within the air. On the other facet of the road, a row of police vans. To place it politely, all the boys in query have the identical bodily traits. The operation lasted two hours and was a part of a sequence of “safety” interventions by the federal government.
The scene occurred in a widely known Lisbon neighbourhood, Martim-Moniz, or Mouraria, the place many individuals of Indian origin are inclined to reside. The neighbourhood “takes its identify from the world granted to the Moors, following their defeat by the Christian Reconquista in 1147”, writes Courrier Worldwide, quoting the LUSA company. In February 2024 (when the article was printed) “an estimated 15,000 Muslims, largely from the Indian subcontinent, have been dwelling and dealing there, typically in very precarious situations”.
The scene produced a direct and coordinated response from civil society, resulting in demonstration that noticed at the least 15 thousand folks (50,000 in keeping with SIC noticias) marching in Martim Moniz, as Sonia Martínez stories within the Spanish portal El Salto.
The protesters‘ slogan “Não nos encostem à parede” (’Don’t put us in opposition to the wall’) unfold by social networks and through an instagram account. Cultural figures, journalists and intellectuals, in addition to migrant communities and anti-racist associations, took half within the demonstration.
The demonstration was held within the identify of “all of the individuals who dwell and work in Portugal”, so that each one may very well be “handled with dignity”. This particular police operation, the promoters added, “was not an remoted case. Such operations happen recurrently in different suburbs of Lisbon and the nation at giant”.
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Within the identify of “residents’ safety”, Portugal’s prime minister, the conservative Luís Montenegro, welcomed the police operation. As El Salto explains: “for months now, the far proper, with the political social gathering Chega as its most important exponent, has been specializing in Martim Moniz, alarming the general public about migrants dwelling and circulating within the space, producing a sensationalist, xenophobic and racist discourse. In a transparent shift to the far proper, the Montenegro authorities has appropriated this discourse by implementing safety mechanisms to criminalise migrant employees”.
This isn’t the primary time that Chega has organised demonstrations within the neighbourhood in opposition to the “Islamisation of Europe”.
Whereas the Mouraria neighbourhood is certainly often known as an space of drug dealing and different types of trafficking, this isn’t associated to the presence of migrants, explains an area Socialist Get together councillor Miguel Coelho, quoted in Público. Coelho considers the police operation “unacceptable”, attributable to its “framing, the best way by which a social and ethnic group was focused, and its length”.
The Mouraria incident is simply the most recent in an extended line of occasions that spotlight a difficulty that issues all of Europe: police violence, particularly in particular territories, the city “peripheries” the place a mixture of social, territorial and housing inequalities have concentrated and solidified.
Parallel to this, we’re witnessing the gentrification of the historic centres, one thing that Lisbon has skilled extra quickly and violently than many different European cities. “Within the house of a decade, housing costs in Lisbon have risen dramatically, with a 120 % enhance between 2012 and 2022, primarily attributable to low ranges of funding within the sector and the absence of public insurance policies to curb hypothesis. Rental prices have additionally risen considerably, with a 30 % enhance over the previous 5 years. On the similar time, wages have remained virtually static, decreasing the buying energy of the inhabitants,” writes city planning professor Agostino Petrillo in Terzo Giornale, the journal of the Basis for Social Criticism (Fondazione per la critica sociale).
On Mediapart again in April, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution (1974-2024), journalist Mickaël Correia talked with a number of activists on the problem of housing particularly. Correia quotes António Brito Guterres of Vida Justa, a motion that brings collectively greater than 80 organisations and collectives demanding an honest life, particularly for the inhabitants of the poorest neighbourhoods. Guterres, a researcher in city research, explains that “through the Carnation Revolution, Lisbon was a post-colonial metropolis. However the racial segregation attributable to the housing disaster is popping our capital right into a colonial metropolis”.
The protests in Portugal
The 11 January demonstration in Lisbon emerged from a unique protest, which occurred on 26 October and was organised by Vida Justa. The sooner protest was known as following the demise of Odair Moniz, a 43-year-old Cape Verdean father of three and bar supervisor who had lived in Portugal for greater than twenty years. Moniz was fatally wounded on 21 October 2024 throughout a police operation.
This demise echoes others, like Ramy Elgaml or Nahel Merzouk, in different city peripheries, in different international locations. Initially, the police claimed that Moniz had refused to adjust to an identification examine and had attacked the officers with a knife. This model was disproved by video footage and an investigation was opened.
Within the days following Moniz’s demise, the neighbourhood of Amadora, the place he lived, was the scene of clashes between residents and police forces. “Regardless of the uncertainty over the circumstances of the capturing, the chief of the far-right, anti-immigrant Chega social gathering, André Ventura, was fast to remark, urging folks to thank the police for his or her actions. The officer who shot Moniz needs to be ‘adorned, not indicted,’ stated Ventura,” Ashifa Kassam writes within the Guardian.
In 2023, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination expressed concern about “info that indicated that the extreme use of power by police officers continued and was a deep-rooted observe in opposition to folks of African descent”.
Exactly how many individuals have died by the hands of the police in Portugal? In an investigation by the European Knowledge Journalism Community, by which Voxeurop participated, Pedro Miguel Santos of Divergente writes “The stories from 1996 to 2023 report that, throughout this 28 yr interval, the Portuguese safety forces and providers killed 80 folks. The Public Safety Police (the Portuguese civil police power, PSP) killed 49 folks, the Nationwide Republican Guard (the Portuguese gendarmerie, GNR) killed 30 and the Nationwide Immigration and Border Service (SEF) — now dissolved — killed one. The Nineties and 2000s have been the deadliest a long time; 2003 marked the height with six deaths recorded. There isn’t any information regarding deaths attributable to different forces, such because the Portuguese Legal Investigation Police (PJ) or the Maritime Police (PM)”.
Nevertheless, Santos continues, these numbers are inconsistent, as is the methodology used: “The very fact is that the State doesn’t know, unequivocally, what number of of its officers die, nor does it know what number of of its residents it kills. […] Fifty years on from the 25 April Carnation Revolution, such a brazen lack of transparency is insupportable”.
