Nowhere to go: Brazil’s COVID ‘refugees’ struggle after eviction

Informal settlements have sprung up across the country amid Brazil’s ongoing COVID-19 crisis and its economic fallout, symbols of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro’s failure to effectively soften the coronavirus pandemic’s blow.

Itaguai, Brazil – Miani Cristina once considered herself lucky. Her employer had kept her on during Brazil’s devastating first wave of COVID-19 infections in 2020. Her monthly income of just over 1,000 reais ($190) and a monthly handout from the government of 41 reais ($8) had kept her and her three children afloat — barely. Then the country’s devastating second COVID-19 wave hit. Cristina lost her job. The informal work her elder 20-year-old and 18-year-old daughters relied upon vanished. Food and gas prices soared. “I lost all of my income and could no longer pay rent,” Cristina, a 46-year-old former general services assistant, told Al Jazeera.