Rossio’s camp remains “standing and firm”

Cerca of a hundred tents are held up today in Praça D. Pedro IV, in Lisbon, some already empty and others with awakenings of those who spent another night in camp in protest for the right to housing.

Lusa found that they remain on the site protesters in small igloos mounted in part of the so-called Rossio square, under the eyes of the statue of King Pedro IV and the four female figures symbolizing the virtues of the monarch – prudence, justice, fortress and moderation.

João Veloso, one of the spokespersons of the Lisbon Camp, explained that the protest initiative, initiated on Saturday, “stands up” and that the participants continue to want to stay there, but only in the popular assembly of 19:00 will it be realized “what people intend to do, how they will continue and what new demands will be”.

“ So the camp is still standing and holding. What is on the table is a new rental law that prevents access to housing, so that is why we go out on the streets, in order to bar this new lease law or even to revoke ", said João Veloso.

According to the 30-year-old, during the night they spent “about 300/400 people” in the square and now during the day they take turns in their chores, bearing in mind that on working days “it’s harder” to be always present.

“It’s going, going back and being in the camp,” João Veloso explained that, because he is a cameraman, he still manages to combine the presence in the protest, started on Saturday in Lisbon.

João Veloso told us to live in family homes, due to the “low wage” he earns, and admitted that, at this moment, he knows that leaving home will “basically live to pay the bills”, hence making sense the whole fight.

The people who meet in Rossio are “very diverse”, he recognized, considering that they are students, workers, people who are not currently working, and of various ages.

“ I think it's a very diverse reality, people who are part of collectives, others who are not part of any collectives, so there's a little of everything. People with different visions, with different works, different ‘backgrounds’,” said, explaining that, in the background, the goal is equal for everyone.

“What brings me, in fact, [to be here] is what is in everyone’s sight. We have a government that is turning its back on a very serious housing problem. In fact, for me, it is only crystallizing a set of other problems that we have all been feeling, such as increasing the cost of living,” Lusa Diogo said.

This 42-year-old protester can still live in Lisbon, but it may not be long before returning to the periphery, where most of his friends are. His landlady “is an old lady” and the fate of the house is an uncertainty.

According to Diogo, the government should “have a little notion and look at recent history [...], and realize that when the population manifests in this way and decides to leave the comfort of their routine to be able to build a tent in the middle of a square, with all this exhibition, it does not do so lightly”.

Diogo said that the overwhelming majority of friends and professional contacts had to leave Lisbon and acknowledged that the people in their contacts, of their generation, are sharing home. That was not what would be normal, he added, because there was the logic of studying, working, buying a house, getting married and being able to have children.

“ Most people my age can't afford to live alone or with their partner, they have to be sharing houses and living in rooms like students. And then we complain at the same time that birth rates are falling. Who can consider having a child these days?”, he said.

Among the protesters Diogo said the spirit of camaraderie reign, stressing that everyone has life beyond the camp. He warned that he was “offensive, ridiculous and even ignorant to feed the narrative” that those who are there are “people who do not want to work and everything”.

Leonor, 30 years old, also said that moments before he spoke to Lusa, with some friends, a kind of hammock to shadow two tents, was in the protest because he considered that the situation of housing in the country represents “an act of extreme violence against all people who work in Portugal”.

Citizens, he stressed, “depend on their income to survive”, not only in this protest the new rental law, “but in general the housing policy that treats houses and housing as a commodity and not as an essential good and a fundamental right that should be guaranteed”.

“ I am also here because I believe that these moments of building popular power are essential. What is happening, this new Budget [...], public policies and the dismantling of public services by the government are not flaws of this system, they are the working capitalist system and the only way to deal with this violence that is being imposed on us is to build popular power to dismantle this system”, he said.

Next to the statue, full of small posters with fighting messages and where the tombstone was adapted to read “Failed Art.o65 of the Constitution – Right to Housing”, there is an open tent of support with groups of the camp and where information can be collected. There is a first aid station and another information station, a water point, food point, a list of needs and even a Volta point.

During the time when Lusa remained on site there were no police traces nearby.

On Thursday night, from 19:00, about 3,000 people concentrated to manifest themselves by the right to housing in the center of Porto, following a camp that began the previous Saturday, October 10, and which was the subject of a municipal cleaning intervention on Monday, 12. In the early hours of Thursday, police intervention was registered.

In the northern square, according to a representative of the protesters, they remained close to 80 people tonight, in about 50 tents, in an environment of “convivial”, despite “anxiety”, after the notice of the PSP, on Sunday night, that they would be incurring a crime of disobedience after 00:30.