believe that people recover in hospitals with more medication. Throwing the person in here and filling him with religious doctrine doesn’t solve the problem, either. The most important things are food, work, and housing. If these three things coexist, then there is a ‘why’ for the person to live. We will rescue their citizenship.” The city of Vita was now a rescue operation. I kept wondering what the immediate economic and political gain of such planned change would be and how this work would affect the lives of its residents in the long term.
Several inhabitants of the recovery area referred to what was going on as “modernizing.” Luis asserted: “We eat as human beings. Before, we had big bowls and ate with our hands. Now we have trays.” A former drug addict, Luis had first come to Vita in 1987, when he was just eighteen. “See these scars? I injected wherever I could find a vein,” he acknowledged, pointing to his arms, legs, and forehead. “Even in my head. See, my throat, I pierced it. I was so mad.” Luis ran away from Vita several times but always returned. His family in the nearby city of Canoas wanted nothing to do with him. “I began when I was twelve years old. I did not respect my mother anymore. I robbed the family, I lost my character, I became garbage. Then they brought me here.”
Luis said that under Zé’s administration there was “too much liberty,” no control at all: “We were allowed to come back even if we were drunk or high. Now it is much more rigorous. This is very good for those of us who are addicted and sick.” In former times, the residents “never saw the donations. The tents were rotten, filled with roaches and rats. Now we see the building going on.”
Outside Vita, Luis was a petty thief. In 1990, he was caught shoplifting and sentenced to two years in the Porto Alegre Central Prison. “I saw the worst. But I was cool and endured it. Once, they stuck a broom in a guy’s ass, up to the mouth. I was quiet and survived.” In 1992, Luis decided to take the HIV test. Three of his friends from the drug circle had already died of AIDS. He was found to be seropositive and was “hit hard by the news.” But he decided to face it. “If I was man enough to do it to myself, I had to be man enough to face it.” In 1993, at Luchesi’s radio station, Luis met his wife, Nair, then fifteen but already the mother of a little girl. Zé das Drogas allowed them to live together in a tent in Vita. Soon they had two more kids, both HIV-positive: “It was natural, and welcome.” Luis observes that many people in the recovery area are HIV-positive, “but they don’t want to admit it.”
Because of his good behavior, Luis has been guaranteed Vita’s support in his efforts to ensure access to medical and welfare aid for himself and his family. Vita, he says, “is my family now.” As I heard from several residents, the para-state institution now providing for them had replaced the biological family and had become a temporary place of work. “I am weak. I like being dependent here. My thinking is always in here. Here, I feel safe. I work, I am learning to make chairs. The social worker will register me to get an AIDS pension. I hope I can stay here the rest of my life.”
During Zé das Drogas’s administration, daily life in the recovery area had been structured around worship and Bible studies. Now the emphasis was on personal hygiene, civic values, eating well, total abstinence from smoking and drinking, work therapy, and group self-reflection. After dinner, a general meeting was held, and a log of daily events was read. According to the captain, “This is the time of justice. To call someone by his name rescues personhood, makes that person feel important, part of something. We mention the working shifts for the next days as well as internal promotions. When there are faults and wrongdoings, we report them and punish them harshly. Three strikes mean that you’re out for good—no return. That’s the platform of our work: they are useful, they are important. They must rescue themselves.” Now there was a deadline: “We expect them to recover in six to eight months. We will help them find a place in the market—it is there that they belong. Then, afterward, it is their life.”
Part of this new regimen involved constantly checking Vita’s residents for drugs and sexual behavior (even though the captain insisted that “alcohol has annulled their sexuality”). The daily logs of the first month under the new administration (mid-February to mid-March 1997) were filled with references to catching people smoking, using cocaine and alcohol. Illicit sexual activities were euphemistically referred to by describing people caught in an “inappropriate position and place.” Social regeneration also meant being part of the broader legal system. Several notes reported that residents had been summoned by the police to address warrants. Other notes were from the newly constituted “Tutelage Councils” (Conselhos Tutelares). These councils were citizens’ associations whose task it was to advocate for human rights within families and communities and to monitor state and medical institutions. They worked in conjunction with the Public Ministry—the citizenry’s legal forum for challenging the state. The logs also reported that three deaths had been registered in the infirmary in twenty-four days.
I asked the captain about his vision for the infirmary and its residents. “It is very difficult,” he replied. “It represents the putrefaction of the street. They don’t exist as a juridical fact. They have AIDS, tuberculosis, all these things that don’t exist in statistics.” He told me that there were some fifteen cases of AIDS in the infirmary alone, nearly 10 percent of that population, and that treatment was available to these patients only on an emergency basis.
“There, you also have the mentally ill, the elderly, the abandoned. They don’t have anything to give anymore. What does one expect from them? Nothing. Simply put, they will be that which they are now. It is a depository of human beings. We cannot bring them back to society. As horrible as it is, here one sees a truth.”
As the captain denounced the intractability of the abandoned, his words subtly suggested that the abandonados themselves were unable to anticipate anything but death and had no purpose but to die: “In their thinking, they have more in terms of dying than living. What does a normal person want? To move up in life, to reach another plateau. . . . What can they expect for themselves? Nothing.” As the captain critiqued the condition of Vita as “a thermometer of the political unimportance of human life” to the outside world, he participated in the process of letting die inside Vita with his “realistic” conception of the abandoned: “Their future is dead; they will stay behind.”
The social worker had a more optimistic take on the situation, though I wondered whether and how her view would be put into practice. “An old man was fasting for three days, protesting his abandonment by the family,” she sighed. “There are days when I leave this place crazy.” Horror stories abounded, like that of Vó Brenda, a seventy-five-year-old wheelchair-bound “grandma.” Rats had eaten her toes. “Our shack was too old,” she told me, after Dalva introduced us. “The rats came under the blankets and gnawed my feet.” She insisted that her alcoholic husband was a good man. “We spent fifty years happily together.” But he never took her to the hospital. “He had to work, he had no time,” the woman sadly explained. When the husband died, Vó Brenda’s son, unable or unwilling to care for her, left her at Vita.
“They all have a history, a name,” Dalva said. She was beginning to catalog all the cases, trying to identify the nameless people in local registries and hospitals and, whenever possible, attempting to contact their families. Many times, she explained, “families use hospitalization in Porto Alegre as an opportunity to abandon.” Dalva was referring to about forty mentally ill patients in the infirmary who were not receiving psychiatric care. “They shouldn’t be here.” The majority of infirmary cases involved people who “once had a dignified life.”
They all have “the same pattern,” she argued, and, as the captain did, she emphasized the active involvement of these individuals in the process of their own abandonment. “They are the ones who were always drunk or took drugs, couldn’t work anymore, and then came the time when the family didn’t give them another chance and closed the doors. . . . They moved from one place and job to the next, began to age, to
