Regional News
Brazilian police and squatters clash over eviction France dispatches ministers to French Guiana after social unrest
RIO DE JANEIRO (Thomson Reuters Foundation) Protesters in the Brazilian city of Campinas set up barricades of wood and tyres yesterday as they battled military police trying to evict hundreds of people from squatter settlements where they had been living since July, local media reported.
Video images posted online showed fires burning in the southern city of 1.1 million people as government officials moved into the area to remove squatters.
Informal settlements set up by Brazilians who say they have nowhere else to live are not uncommon in Latin America’s largest country which is suffering from its worst recession on record and a lack of affordable housing.
Residents said they were taken aback by the scale of the police operation that destroyed their shacks made of scrap wood and corrugated iron.
“I do not have anywhere to go,” Juscelino Ribeiro Carneiro Júnior told Brazilian news outlet G1.
“I’m going to City Hall and I’m going to sleep there,” the unemployed 25-year-old said.
Police said they had no choice but to dismantle the illegal camp as residents had been violating the law.
“We have negotiated with the invaders’ representatives exhaustively,” police colonel Marci Elber told G1 during the eviction. The opening lasts for 1 1/2 hours PARIS (Reuters) - Two French ministers will travel to French Guiana yesterday to seek a solution to protests sweeping the French territory in South America.
Interior Minister Matthias Fekl and Ericka Bareigts, minister for France’s overseas territories, were dispatched to French Guiana by Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, a statement from the prime minister’s office said.
The ministers will hold talks with political, business and social leaders to try to find rapid solutions to local demands, the statement said.
French Guiana has been swept by social unrest in recent days, with protests and a general strike, less than a month before France holds presidential elections.
The movement began with demands for greater security against crime - French Guiana is the French department with the highest murder rate - but also reflects a deeper malaise in the territory which suffers from high unemployment.
The US State Department warned American citizens last Friday to avoid travel to French Guiana due to widespread protests it said had the potential to become violent in the main cities of Kourou and Cayenne and had shut down the international airport.
The State Department advised US visitors to avoid crowds, noting that the protests had shut down roads, schools, businesses and municipal buildings.
Labour protests in the overseas French department bordering Brazil and Suriname have also caused the indefinite postponement of the planned launch of an Ariane 5 rocket carrying communications satellites for Brazil and South Korea.