At Petlove, on Tutoia street in the sumptuous Paraíso district, in São Paulo, flanked by the emblematic Paulista avenue, pets enjoy VIP treatment.
There are premier gourmet dog foods with chicken breast, broccoli and sweet potato. Trueno brand lamb and rice contains GMOs, artificial colors and preservatives. There are sugar-free foods for diabetic dogs and others for pets as allergic as their masters. Vests are sold for walks on cold days, houses with Georgian windows and sofa-shaped beds.
In the Petlove pharmacy, a wide range of products to treat mosquito, bedbug or flea bites is displayed on the long shelf. For more serious conditions, there is a clinic on the first floor. "Our strongest point is the health plan," explains the saleswoman.
Above, a neighbor from Paraíso, Mariana, in her 60s, is anxiously waiting for her dog to come out of the vet, where it is undergoing surgery for a possibly cancerous tumor: “It's a great health plan. For the entire package I pay 300 reais (about 60 euros) per month, all included. It's not much because Jimmy gets sick often."
Jimmy, a mixed-breed dog with one eye missing, was given to Mariana three years ago by the charity Beloved and Adopted. “They buy the dogs from people who live on the street and those who are on crack (a hyper-addictive derivative of cocaine)”, explains Mariana. "Because when they're high they don't treat the dogs well, you know, they forget to feed them."
Beloved and Adopted is a highly requested service since the pandemic, which has skyrocketed the number of homeless people while the desire to have a companion animal, or two or three, has increased. “People want company,” says the Petlove saleswoman. “Before there were more stray dogs than people; now there are more people on the street than dogs”.
In a tunnel at the exit of the Paraíso district, large groups of homeless people prepare for the night. Some have set up tents on the roadside where small children stick their heads out. There are already 48,000 who live on the streets of the megalopolis of São Paulo, twelve times more than in 2013. It is a historical maximum, equivalent to 25% of all the homeless in Brazil.
They sleep under thick gray wool blankets, which sell for 18 reais (about four euros) in discount stores. It is cold at night during this Brazilian autumn, cooled by the La Niña weather phenomenon.
Some homeless are cracudos, addicts, more dispersed through the old city center after repeated attempts to dismantle the camp known as Cracolandia, near the renovated train station. “They play a game of cat and mouse with the police; a concentration is dispersed; another appears 100 or 200 meters further on”, explains a researcher to Carta Capital magazine.
But most of the people who live on the streets are poor with no more money than a plate of food after years of increases in the price of basic foods. There are entire families with babies who don't even have enough money to pay rent in the favelas. Of course, they are mostly dark complexioned. And sure enough, some have dogs asleep at their feet.
Whether for dogs or for human beings, São Paulo – a megalopolis of twelve million inhabitants – tells a tale of two cities that not even Dickens would have dared to imagine. To find out why, let's leave the Petlove, the luxury bakeries and the Buddah spas of Paraíso, exiting Paulista Avenue, in front of the headquarters of the Federation of Industrial Entrepreneurs, where Lula is giving a speech at this very moment about the “ neo-industrialization” of his economic strategy, although no one quite knows what he means.
We went up the wide boulevard in São Paulo in front of the offices of Banco Santander and its rival Itaú, and the large corporations of the oligarchic elite known as Faria Lima. In this section of the avenue, in 2014 and 2015, the large demonstrations against Lula and Dilma Rousseff paraded, in the preamble to the assault on power by Jair Bolsonaro.
On the left is the art museum, MASP, where portraits of skeletal migrants from the Brazilian northeast painted in the 1940s by modernist painter Candido Portinari compete for dramatic effect with dozens of homeless people scattered at the museum entrance.
On the other side of Paraíso, we pass in front of the General Assembly, where the privatization and social control measures of Governor Tarcísio de Freitas, favorite to reveal Bolsonaro at the head of the new Brazilian hard right, are being debated.
We cross the districts of Jardins and Ibirapuera, of mansions with exuberant tropical gardens, four-meter concrete walls, dense spirals of barbed wire and guards armed with machine guns. The driver of a black limousine with tinted windows opens the window: “I'm João Doria's driver!”, he announces, referring to the former mayor and former governor of São Paulo, editor of C aviar Lifestyle magazine, who tried unsuccessfully to clean up Cracolandia with a battalion of military police.
Finally, the coveted Morumbi district appears, a group of 30- or 40-story condominiums, some with swimming pools on each balcony and behind them, the so-called malls, where Armani competes with Carmen Steffens, the vulgarly ostentatious Brazilian brand. Behind, the beach tennis club, the Elite Morumbi flower shop and another Petlove franchise.
In Morumbi we will cross the border to the other São Paulo, an amazing change of universe staged on the steep Doctor Laerte Setúbal street. In the last stretch, the Clublife Collina condominium announces itself with a display of luxury services: sauna, lounge, Cooper's track, children's disco, pizza oven and, of course, the pet place for pets. Ten more steps and we are in the Paraisópolis favela, the largest in São Paulo. Here some 100,000 people are crowded together in a labyrinth of shacks, shacks and other substandard housing, many half-built. It is better, without a doubt, than on the street. But Paraisópolis captures in its alleyways overflowing with garbage and knots of electricity cables -it is illegally connected to the network- another facet of the housing megacrisis in one of the most unequal cities on the planet.
A few meters from the Clublife Collina de Morumbi, Quitéria Andrade da Silva, 53, is sitting on a pile of electronic debris, mobile phones, radios, computers, washing machines... She and her partner, Cícero, 59, a migrant from Maranhao, in the far northeast, are recyclers. They scour the immense city in search of industrial waste to break it up and sell the metals, steel, copper, aluminum, zinc and others. His monthly income amounts to a minimum wage: 1,200 reais, less than 300 euros. “The people from the condominiums want us to get out of here, but Paraisópolis was there before them,” says Cícero. Why is it called Paraisopolis? "I ask myself the same question," he replies.
Beatriz Rocha, 24, is gutting an old hi-fi with an old pliers. “I like this job, even though I would like to study mechanical engineering,” she says. The youngest of the recyclers, a boy of about six years old, walks up the street with his father to look for something of value in the trash at Clublife Collina and the other condominiums up the road.
Those ten meters of Doctor Laerte Setúbal street allow you to see, feel and smell the true meaning of the Gini coefficients that economists use to measure income inequality. In the municipality of São Paulo, the coefficient is 0.6354 compared to 0.489 in Brazil as a whole. “São Paulo exceeds the inequality of any country in the world,” explains Marcelo Neri, from the Getulio Vargas Foundation, in Rio de Janeiro.
During the pandemic, Paraisópolis, populated mainly by workers in the informal economy, such as Cícero and Quitéria, suffered a crisis that already qualifies as humanitarian. Pockets of hunger and malnutrition appeared in various parts of the favela. An innovative urban garden project, which produced 2,700 tons of vegetables during 2020 and 2021, helped avert a catastrophe. But hunger persists, aggravated by delays in the Bolsa Família program – 600 reais per poor family plus 150 per child – implemented by the new government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
With no income, many former favela residents end up on the streets, where they become targets of the current mayor of São Paulo, Ricardo Nunes, who is seeking Bolsonaro's support for his re-election plan in the 2024 municipal elections. food distribution on the street and in the favelas, a program of the Movement of Homeless Workers, MTST. "The street is not an address and the shack is not a home," explained the mayor.
For his part, Governor Freitas seems to have adopted the Bolsonaro formula in security policies. In January, 36 people died at the hands of police in São Paulo's favelas, an increase of 44% compared to the same month last year. Police violence had fallen steadily for two years before his government.
It's not all bad news. The federal government, in Brasilia, has just announced the construction of two million public houses in Brazil, tens of thousands in São Paulo, in the next four years. In addition, Lula intends to rehabilitate abandoned public buildings in the center of the city so that the homeless "can live in the center of the cities." But for now, the humanitarian crisis in the streets and favelas remains critical.
Cícero and Quitéria have a dog named Bud, a black Labrador, who wags his tail and walks among the group of neighbors gathered on Doctor Laerte Setúbal street. Of course, Bud doesn't have a health plan like Jimmy, the beloved adopted dog in Paradise. We don't love him either. Although the hard work of a recycler is already beginning to take its toll on the health of the workers, the money is not enough. “I have spinal problems, inflammation of the tendon and osteoarthritis”, says Quitéria. "I don't notice it when I'm working, but there are days I can't sleep because of the pain." Without health insurance, he depends on the public service, always precarious and now even more so, after the Bolsonaro years. “Virgin Mary, you have to wait a year before they see you!” He says. At Petlove de Paraíso, of course, the appointment is immediate.
