There is a lot of hidden information in the fact that religious services in the Zambujal neighborhood, where Odair Moniz lived, the Cape Verdean who was shot dead by the Portuguese police in Cova da Moura last Monday, are conducted by a missionary and not by a parish priest. . Zambujal, one of the epicenters of the nighttime riots unleashed in the Lisbon metropolitan area in response to the death, is a social housing neighborhood built in the municipality of Amadora after the Carnation Revolution to house people who were living poorly in shanties. In this community, where Cape Verdeans abound, Father Matías feels like he is in Africa, where he spent many years as a Consolata missionary.
He arrived in Zambujal in 2003, after his religious community concluded that certain European neighborhoods had “as many needs” as in other southern countries. Thus, Father José Tavares Matías investigated the surroundings of the Portuguese capital without finishing choosing a destination until the Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon told him: “If you want a difficult place, go to Zambujal.” Father Matías occupied the place vacated by the parish priest, who avoided traveling to the neighborhood, a fact that reveals the stigma that surrounds its inhabitants. The missionary organized a social center that has a room where both sewing courses and Eucharists are taught.
Since the death of Odair Moniz, 43, the neighborhood has a daytime and a nightlife. While during daylight hours people go out to shop and work, when night falls, when container and car fires start, they lock themselves at home. The large police deployment in recent days reduced the violence during the early hours of Thursday, but the neighborhood remains disturbed. The public spaces where dozens of children and young people gathered every afternoon now appear empty. And, due to the fear that the vehicles will end up burned, there are plenty of parking spaces on streets where it was previously an impossible task to find parking.
The gym promoted by the CAZAmbujal association, directed by Cape Verdean Vítor Monteiro with the aim of “transforming the world”, has been closed since Monday. Monteiro was one of the first to stay in Zambujal in the seventies. He was barely three years old when his family was given an apartment in the neighborhood built by the Housing and Urban Rehabilitation Institute. “It was a poorly thought out idea, creating social neighborhoods meant sweeping the problems under the rugs,” he maintains.
At 50 years old, Monteiro is one of the souls of the associative movement that fights to improve the life of a community of about 5,000 residents, where Cape Verdeans, gypsies, poor Portuguese and Asian and Latin immigrants who have arrived in recent years coexist. A multicultural neighborhood that has not received the necessary public investment to promote integration. “The great revolt these days comes from the feeling of discrimination. It has to do with society and not just with the neighborhood, it has to do with the fact that justice ends up not being equal for everyone,” he reflects. “The police have their role, but it has to be the same for everyone,” he adds.
Odair Moniz had recently opened a café in the neighborhood. He dealt drugs and committed several crimes that landed him in jail, but he had settled his accounts with justice. In the neighborhood they point out that he had reintegrated. The night of his death he was returning from a party with friends. Police say he stepped on a solid line and was stopped. Moniz fled, hitting several vehicles and finally getting out of his. The initial police statement states that he brandished a knife, but the officers involved in the incident have denied this, as have other witnesses. There are conflicting versions about whether there was a physical confrontation between them. The truth is that a police officer shot first in the air and then at the body of the Cape Verdean, who died hours later at the San Francisco Javier hospital in Lisbon, and who will be buried this Sunday.
Death heated the atmosphere. It was not the first time that a neighbor died due to excess on the part of the police. Father Matías, who condemns the police action and also the acts of vandalism this week, believes that justice “works one way if you are white and another way if you are black.” Neighbors feel that they live under the suspect syndrome, which relegates them when it comes to getting a job or makes them candidates to suffer abuse from security forces.
Since 1988, Rosa Correia has run the Zambujal leisure activities center on the ground floor of one of the buildings. One of its missions is to combat absenteeism and school dropouts, which have increased after the pandemic. “It is a community with little literacy and the children live in families where the important thing is day to day. Many girls marry young, at 15 or 16 years old, and do not even finish compulsory education (until they are 18),″ she comments. “Young people feel that they don’t have opportunities and are uprooted,” he adds.
After three nights of altercations in different parts of Greater Lisbon, on Thursday the incidents were reduced, in part due to the notable police deployment that also reached strategic places in the capital, cited in the anonymous calls for violence that circulate on networks and that André Ventura, leader of the far-right Chega, read in the Assembly of the Republic.
Ventura has taken advantage of the event to launch exalted speeches. “Thank you. Thank you. It is the word we should give to the policeman who shot this bandit in Cova da Moura. Now the speeches are multiplying about whether he was a good person, that he helped a lot and that he was nice. The only thing: he tried to stab police officers, he was fleeing from them and was going to commit crimes in all likelihood,” he stated despite the fact that the agents themselves have acknowledged that the victim was not carrying any weapon. The former Minister of Justice, Francisca Van Dunme, and a group of citizens have announced that they will file a complaint against Ventura for these statements for offending the victim and advocating the crime.
