Maria Thereza Sombra may rely on Rio de Janeiro’s police to keep her safe, but in the grip of financial crisis they rely on the 82-year-old to supply them with toilet paper.
Severe budget shortfalls in Brazil’s recent Olympic host city have left police scrounging for equipment, fuel and even the most basic hygiene items.
Hospitals are equally hard hit, compounding a deepening sense of insecurity in a city plagued by violent crime.
Photo: AP
Sombra said that ordinary citizens need to step in where the state is failing.
“If the police have their hands tied what will happen to us?” Sombra said. “We have to help those who are defending us. Otherwise no one will be able to go out of their homes.”
A retired teacher and president of Rio’s Flamengo neighborhood association, Sombra began helping police in April when the city was already descending into a pre-Olympic financial abyss.
However, what started off as a spontaneous initiative among Rio residents was enshrined this month in an official program: “Together with the Police.”
Security “is the responsibility of the state but it is the duty of all,” the police department said.
Sombra gets a list from Rio’s ninth precinct. Then residents of the 35 condominiums belonging to the Flamengo Association chip in.
On a table in a meeting room, Sombra showed off a pile of toilet paper, cleaning products and stacks of office paper.
However, requests can get more complicated — after the police station itself was robbed, officers requested 12 security cameras.
“For me, the most important thing is that we are doing something, even if it’s small; to show love, respect and solidarity,” she said.
Police, firefighters, hospital staff and other state employees have been in crisis since early this year. In June, Rio de Janeiro State, home to Brazil’s second-biggest city, had to be bailed out by the federal government after declaring a “state of calamity,” and in the run-up to the Olympics first responders mounted high-profile protests to demand payment of late salaries and overtime.
The Olympics provided a brief respite with emergency funding filling the gaps, but since then the situation has regressed.
In a state heavily reliant on oil-industry revenues, the slump in oil prices and a huge corruption scandal at state oil company Petrobras have hit hard. A US$5.4 billion budget shortfall is predicted for this year.
“The Olympics had an effect, but not enough. The crisis was here before in Rio due to a breakdown in tax revenues, the high burden of paying salaries, and above all the oil prices,” said Vilma Pinto, an economics professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation.
To try to get the budget back on the rails, Rio de Janeiro State Governor Luis Fernando Pezao recently unveiled a package of austerity reforms, which have provoked angry street protests — including by off-duty emergency workers.
Pezao has said that this month’s salaries for public employees and pensions will be paid in seven installments and that the usual Christmas bonus is uncertain.
Sombra and her neighbors say that they just have to keep trying to help in their modest way.
“In reality, I’m paying my taxes twice,” Sombra said. “I pay my obligatory taxes and now I’m paying again because of our bad leaders. But it’s not the fault of the police.”
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the