Offensive by the Brazilian Government to mark its presence in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, which has been fighting for days against historic floods that have already left 149 dead and hundreds of thousands of residents outside their homes. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva went to the region on Wednesday, on his third trip to the area in recent weeks, accompanied by several ministers and made several important announcements. Among them is the creation of a specific ministry to coordinate reconstruction and the distribution of aid to the most affected families.
The so-called “Reconstruction Voucher” is inspired by the emergency aid that was launched during the covid-19 pandemic. They will have a value of 5,100 reais (almost 1,000 dollars) and will benefit the 200,000 most affected families. Given the monumental problem facing the region, priority will be given to residents in cities that declared a state of calamity and those whose homes were flooded. The aid will arrive directly to their bank accounts, although the Government did not inform the deadline.
To coordinate the flow of resources expected to arrive in the coming months from Brasilia, the Government decided to create the Extraordinary Secretariat of Support for the Reconstruction of Rio Grande do Sul, a kind of specific ministry to deal with the disaster. Although some expected a more technical profile, a veteran politician and trusted man of Lula, the until now Minister of Social Communication, Paulo Pimenta, a native of the state, will occupy the position.
Rebuilding roads, bridges and even the international airport of Porto Alegre (flooded and closed at least until September) will require time and mountains of money, but this Wednesday the Government decided to focus on the almost 540,000 residents, according to the most recent official count, who still They are outside their homes. When the water recedes, many of them will have nowhere to return. As emergency measures, the Government thought of three ways to make housing available as quickly as possible: buying houses in the affected cities for lower-income families, distributing the houses that were in the hands of public banks and that were going to auction due to non-payments (about 600) and reserving about 14,000 homes that the private sector was already building, of which another 600 are already ready to move into. “We will block those houses, we will buy them and deliver them to the people,” explained the Minister of the Civil House, Rui Costa, who also opens the door to building more public housing from the federal program My House, My Life, one of the flagships of the social policy of the Workers’ Party.
Lula listened attentively as his ministers detailed the measures from an auditorium in São Leopoldo, a city that, like many others, still coexists with entire neighborhoods that can only be traveled by boat. Shortly before, she had given hugs to several neighbors in a temporary shelter. With his usual vehemence, he asked the mayors of the affected cities and his own cabinet for agility to resolve the situation. He cited the case of the floods that the same Brazilian State, on the border with Uruguay and Argentina, suffered in September 2023. Those rains left 54 dead in the Taquari River valley. There were also promises of reconstruction that have not yet seen the light of day, Lula lamented.
“To date, these houses have not been built. What does that involve? It can’t be, if it’s bureaucracy we have to dismantle that bureaucracy. It’s not possible […]. It has to work; If not, we lose credibility and people begin to distrust institutions, democracy,” he warned. He also attacked the misinformation and fake news promoted by Bolsonaro circles on the Internet, called for unity beyond differences and expressed harmony with the governor of Rio Grande do Sul, a political rival, the conservative Eduardo Leite.
Before the measures announced on Wednesday, the Government had already allocated more than 60.7 billion reais (almost $12 billion) for Rio Grande do Sul and had committed to defer collection of the state’s debt for three years. In recent days, the BRICS bank, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean (CAF) also announced resources. In total, they add up to more than 3 billion dollars. They also sent aid from neighboring Argentina and Uruguay to Israel, the United Kingdom and Japan. Most donations from abroad consist of water purifiers and medicines. From the United States, Joe Biden’s Government assured over the weekend that it was working to “offer the necessary assistance to the Brazilian people,” but so far there have been no concrete announcements.
Follow all the information from El PAÍS América in Facebook and xor in our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#Lula #creates #reconstruction #ministry #announces #aid #families #affected #floods