Brazil I Recife Municipal Guard attacked leaders of housing movements

teleSUR English

TeleSUR correspondent, Brian Mier from Brazil, reports on the violent attacks staged by the Recife Municipal Guard to the leaders from three of Latin America’s largest housing movements as they demanded their right to participate in an “open-to-public” assembly. teleSUR

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00:00In Brazil, the Recife Municipal Guard violently attacked leaders from three of Latin America's largest housing movement

00:07as they demanded the right to participate in an assembly that the city had claimed was open to the public.

00:14Here's a correspondent by Amir from the scene.

00:18I'm standing at Recife's Municipal Conference of the Cities,

00:23where a group of social movements has just taken over the event,

00:27complaining that the mayor's office tried to keep them out of it.

00:31The Conference of the Cities system is a system of municipal, state, and then a national conference,

00:39which gives a level of control over urban policy nationwide to a system of democratically elected volunteer delegates.

00:49By law, 50% of these delegates have to come from poor people's social movements.

00:53What the social movements like the MLB, the MTST, affiliated with National Low-Income Housing Union,

01:01and the MNLM are arguing here in Recife is that Mayor Juan Campos' office pulled a series of dirty tricks,

01:10labeling some NGOs that have city contracts as social movements,

01:15so they could get space to elect their own delegates in the conference,

01:18and limiting the amount of candidates from the social movements that could run for the office of delegate

01:23to just two or three per movement.

01:26So for now, they've burst in.

01:29The police tried to keep them out.

01:31I personally witnessed police officers beating protesters.

01:37I saw an elderly woman getting beaten by the city government's municipal guards

01:42who failed to block the people from coming in.

01:44And now they've simply rushed the stage, taken over the event,

01:48and they're sitting here and refusing to leave until the mayor cancels the conference

01:53and reschedules a new conference with more people's participation.

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