Plans to ring two slums in Rio de Janeiro with a 3-metre (10-foot) wall have been condemned by human rights groups and the city’s own mayor. Officials in Brazil’s main city are pushing the idea after a drug-related turf war at the weekend left two policemen and six others dead.
Umm ... no. This isn’t Berlin and neither is it the West Bank. If your country’s government is involved in shooting street children for sport, you don’t get to cage them like animals.
Let’s see Brazil make a bit of social progress before trying such an exclusionary tactic. The gap separating wealthy people from the underclass is far too wide to justify such obvious isolationism. Any unwillingness to adjust such a blatant discrepency should be met with routine breaches of this proposed wall. They’re not terrorist Arabs seeking to demolish civilization as we know it.
These happen to be actual human beings seeking some sort of stable life. |