Many people were left scratching their heads after reading the latest news about Brazilian police “taking over Rio’s biggest slum“. Since only a handful of arrests were made, and the vast majority of criminals simply dispersed, doesn’t this action simply spread the problem out to different areas?

Readers correctly pointed out that the goal was not so much to diminish crime as to facilitate the making of profits for the well connected:

It was the most ambitious operation yet in an effort to increase security before Rio hosts the final matches of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Officials are counting on those events to signal Brazil’s arrival as a global economic, political and cultural power.

Powerful interests are at work here, and I get the impression that the welfare of the inhabitants of Rocinha is not the primary consideration. If it were, authorities would have taken over the slum long ago instead of waiting for the approach of the above-mentioned sporting events.

In the above article we see a common propaganda tactic: The implication that nations, neighborhoods and slums are defined by space. But it is not the space they occupy that gives them their identity, rather it is the people who inhabit that space. Thus, the proclamation that “police have taken over a slum” means little for the long term. The slum goes wherever slum-people go. The only way to get rid of a slum is to get rid of the slum-people – or to somehow transform them. The establishment left, whether in the U.S. or Brazil, loves to redistribute people and imagine that it has thereby solved problems. In most cases, the problems end up getting even worse. It is better to allow criminals to congregate in small areas so that most of their victims will be other criminals. Spreading them out increases the body count among the innocent.

But many in the establishment left understand the arbitrariness of space. This is why they advocate for open borders. Of course, in doing so, they ignore the importance of things such as race, ethnic group and culture. The establishment left will either ignore, or emphasize, location depending on whatever suits its purposes.