Restaurant operating as illegal lodgings space where people paid €10-€20 per night
Yet another dangerously precarious illegal lodging has been dismantled in Lisbon, this time used by up to 30 immigrants at the same time.
According to Correio da Manhã, various residents in the area (Arroios) reported the existence of “movements of people not known in the area, putting public health and safety at risk” to the local parish council, which in turn alerted Lisbon Municipal Police.
Police moved in, and discovered that the shuttered restaurant held 30 beds, various bicycles and gas bottles “in a space without conditions, and which was not licensed to be a residential area”.
The existence of the beds “indicated the possibility that 30 people were living” in the restaurant, parish council president Madalena Natividade has told CM – although it could just as easily have been a space which immigrants paid for on a nightly basis – in which case those using the beds could have been constantly changing.
This situation has been detected many times in recent years. In some situations, immigrants have been known to pay for ‘shifts’ in a bed.
Ms Natividade told CM that the parish council seeks to defend the safety of all those living in the parish, and “to combat within our competences the existence of illegal situations”.
She also told the paper that she has personally received verbal threats, and had her car damaged as a result of this stance.
Ms Natividade stressed she is against ‘organised mafias’ when it comes to immigration, and believes immigrants should be received with “rigour and humanity”.
CM’s story does not explain where the immigrants routed from the disused restaurant have gone; whether they have been rehoused, or whether they have been left to find their own alternatives. But its reporters have interviewed Lisbon mayor Carlos Moedas who confirmed that incidents like these are commonplace in the capital.
“We have already mounted around 400 operations during this mandate, many of them in bars and restaurants that are not being used for their original function”, he said.
This latest, in Arroios, “is just one more of these operations”.
“We cannot permit this in the city”, he added, referring to the level of exploitation, and human misery.
Moedas used the interview to recall the number of souvenir shops in which immigrants have also been found “sleeping” in back rooms, on floors.
Arroios, he recalled, is the neighbourhood where the council not long ago had to remove “almost 100 tents camped next to Igreja dos Anjos (church of the Angels).
“The government/ AIMA and foreign services have to find solutions”, Mayor Moedas told CM. “It is shameful. I am embarrassed as a citizen to see what the country has come to, without anyone having done anything until now”.
The mayor stressed that his embarrassment has nothing to do with the immigrants themselves: “the country needs immigrants”. It is simply that they cannot continue to be treated in such a way. ND
Source material: Correio da Manhã/ Nowcanal.pt
