Do you know the science-ficion-movie "Elysium" with Matt Damon and Jodie Foster and how the idea to this movie was born in reality?
The earth? A slum. The rich? Barricaded themselves in a luxury space station. The science fiction thriller "Elysium" tells of the future struggle between rich and poor. "District 9" -director Neill Blomkamp brought one of the smartest and most subversive sci-fi-movies to the cinemas of 2013.
Years ago, when Neill Blomkamp was still making commercials, he found himself in a delicate situation in Mexico City: two police officers kidnapped him and a colleague and drove the two foreigners through the darkest quarters until they had given the corrupt cops enough money. Blomkamp and his colleague were abandoned in a slum, at night, miles away from the center: "We ran through these totally impoverished, crazy areas, where there were rabid dogs, crying babies and people who made fires on the open road," said Blomkamp the US magazine "Entertainment Weekly", "and on the horizon we saw the floodlights on the border with the USA, above it several Black Hawk helicopters - it was like science fiction".
Blomkamp's new film "Elysium" begins with a tracking shot over endless rows of slum huts. It is the real picture of the giant slums of Mexico City that, here, biting irony, represent the Los Angeles of the future: impoverished, dirty, controlled by criminal gangs, the slang, as in parts of the city, is Spanish.
en.wikipedia.org
Being German, the movie was disturbing for me particularly in one point which is still absolutely inconceivable in Germany. The criminals in the movie are more human than the rich because the rich live in their own paradise, a space station with incredible luxury, machines which can heal any disease and they can afford anything in their lives you can imagnine. But they are not only no more interested in the 99 % of other population, their governor, played by Jodie Foster, is also ordering to shoot down any spaceship from Earth which tries to bring ill or poor immigrants to the giant space station "Elysium" of the rich - accepting the death of everyone who could disturb the luxury life of the rich.
Finally, a criminal high tech gang leader and the hero (Matt Damon) of the movie manage to get to the space station, restart the computer system of the space station by paying the price of the hero's death, declare every citizen of the Earth to be also one of the space station, which makes the healing of all diseases on Earth possible. Happy ending for most with the help of criminals.
(Impossible ending for Germans like me and pure science fiction, I thought in 2014!)
But today, I read this article in the German newspaper "Der Spiegel" and I remembered somehow this movie "Elysium". ...
And you?
Corona in South America - The death of a domestic worker that terrified Brazil
By Marian Blasberg, Rio de Janeiro
For 63 years, the domestic worker Cleonice Gonçalves led a life that nobody in Rio de Janeiro was interested in. Gonçalves worked in a chic apartment in the Leblon beach district, where land prices are higher than anywhere else in Brazil.
There she cleaned the toilet bowls and doorknobs, she cooked and ironed. Four days a week, she slept in a small staff room in the apartment of her "Patroa", her employer. At the weekend she drove home to Miguel Pereira, two hours away, where she and her family lived in an unplastered house on a gravel road.
For Gonçalves, who disappeared throughout her life in a faceless mass of cheap labor, who commute to the city from her slums in crowded buses and trains, Brazil only became interested when she died on Tuesday last week. Her death frightened the country.
Gonçalves' boss, the newspapers wrote, had spent the Carnival days in Italy. Upon returning, the elderly lady had been tested on Corona, but she did not consider it necessary to inform Gonçalves or to waive her service during the days of waiting for her test result.
Things went on as usual until Gonçalves went to a doctor on March 13 for painful urination. The man prescribed her an antibiotic. Two days later she had difficulty breathing. Gonçalvez, who was diabetic and had high blood pressure, went to a hospital, but there was no one there who correctly interpreted her condition.
Domestic worker Cleonice Gonçalves died on March 17, the day her patroa received her positive test result. The fact that a woman like her was the first Corona victim in Rio de Janeiro was not only symbolic. It is also an alarm sign.
As in many other countries in the southern hemisphere, the virus also came into circulation in Brazil through a wealthy, mostly white middle and upper class, through people who have the money to travel. It is no coincidence that Rio de Janeiro reported its first cases from the rich canyons of Leblon and Ipanema.
But the big worry is another: what will happen if the virus first attacks the places where all the people who keep life in the city live, domestic workers like Gonçalves, cooks and nannies, the porters, the Sitting at the entrances of the houses, the supermarket cashiers, the waiters in the bars and restaurants, all the informal, flying traders who sell their goods on the sidewalks?
The daily newspaper "O Globo" summarized this fear of a few days in a huge lead photo, which basically needed no further explanation. It showed a section of the Rocinha favela, a limitless tangle of nested houses and huts. A place where tens of thousands of people live together in the smallest of spaces.
To prevent a humanitarian emergency, the national favela association "CUFA" published a catalog with 14 demands a few days ago. Among other things, they are encouraged to provide the residents of the poor districts with free soap for the time of the crisis. The internet should also be free so that people can get information. Support for small business owners is needed, and those who are hit hardest should receive staple packages on a regular basis.
Zezé Preto, the chairman of the "CUFA", doubts that he is open to the government. "They don't care about people like us," he says.
Paulo Guedes, Bolsonaro's neoliberal minister of economics, said a few days ago that the poorest could be given 200 reals a month, 40 euros, but after that no one heard about this proposal. On Friday it was the parliament that increased the amount to the equivalent of 100 euros. Bolsonaro himself is more concerned with other things. Because the panic in his eyes only leads to an unnecessary slump in growth, he's now demanding that governors reopen business in their states.
…
The problem is that Brazil still has too few tests. Protective masks and gloves are missing in the hospitals. In Rio, billion dollar cuts in the public health system have resulted in city hospitals losing 1051 intensive care beds in the past two years alone. The workforces of hundreds of family clinics that offer free initial treatment have been thinned out so much since the economic crisis since 2014 that they now only reach half of the population. In some of these houses, helpers keep the business going because countless doctors have quit after missing salary payments.
These are the places people like Cleonice Gonçalves go to when they're in bad shape. They were already overloaded before Corona.
Today, tents are set up in front of many of these health posts to separate Corona cases from the other patients. Soldiers set up field hospitals in several places in the city, but Raull Santiago, the activist from Complexo do Alemao, is still mentally preparing for the worst. "At best, we have scenes like from Italy," he says.
In the evening after the conversation, a night curfew will take effect in some of the city's favelas. The drug gangs announce this over loudspeakers and WhatsApp:
"We only want the best for our population. If the government is unable to provide security, we, the organized crime will do it."
(Translated via Google translator - so, sorry for possible mistakes!)
Original article:
Brasiliens Mittel- und Oberschicht bringt das Virus von Reisen mit - möchte aber nicht auf die Hausangestellten aus den Favelas verzichten. Die Krankheit könnte sich schnell unter den Ärmsten verbreiten.
www.spiegel.de
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