THE HOMELESS ORGANIZE

...If they can maintain unity, there will be no question of co-optation by established power groups, but rather of accords negotiated from strength...

...They have waged pitched battles against police, soldiers and hired thugs, held sit-ins and demonstrations against city officials and real estate speculators, fought internal struggles against self-appointed political bosses...

...In Mexico, where the governing party can still co-opt or intimidate grass-roots organizers, the "urban peoples' movement" has grown so large and confident that it challenges government policy in Mexico City and across the country...

...As a result, these groups linked up with each other to form powerful city-wide and even nation-wide grass-roots movements, which neither governments nor political parties can afford to ignore...

...Women, though the clear majority, were barred from decision-making power...

...T HIS REPORT LOOKS AT THE EMERGING strength of these movements in three sharply contrasting contexts...

...Elaine Burns, a long-time resident of Mexico City who works with Mujer a Mujer, an organization that fosters links between U.S...

...Latin America's experience in homeless organizing may not be applicable here...

...Jan Rocha, Slo Paulo correspondent for the Guardian (London), shows that the movement has greatly outgrown its origins...

...NE REMARKABLE ASPECT OF THESE STOries from Peru, Mexico and Brazil is the rediscovery of power by the most oppressed of the oppressed -women in squatter settlements who must confront both the patriarchal traditions of their husbands and fathers and the cruel indifference of the cities' power brokers...

...Daniel Rodriguez Velizquez, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a frequent contributor to the Mexican newspaper El Dia, shows how isolated local struggles have become a nationwide movement...

...But, as Elaine Burns points out, if nothing else it challenges us to redefine what we consider possible...

...In Lima, where the state is too weak either to satisfy or effectively repress the demands of the poor, Peruvian journalist Carolina Carlessi writes of homeless Indian migrants from mountain villages who have created self-governing cities within the city...

...Their own economic development projects, food and services distribution networks and security patrols fill the vacuum...

...The housing movement in the United States faces very different conditions, of course...

...Through winning and defending their homes, the organized poor have built real democracy from the ground up-not the hallowed rituals of pinstriped politicians, but mass participation on the basis of equality...

...In Brazil, the Catholic Church's base communities were important in stimulating and coordinating a grassroots movement, especially during the long years of military dictatorship...

...Squatters have always been pragmatic in their dealings with authority, and they have gained a realistic sense of their own potential...

...It weakened governments' capacity to co-opt or repress, spurred squatters' militancy, and honed the sophistication and effectiveness of their organizations...

...In each of the three countries, neighborhood activists have concluded that only national political change can resolve their problems...

...The majority of homeless activists are women, and women's struggle has been at the core of the transition from local activism to politics on a grander scale...

...Urban activists helped found the Workers Party (PT) and through it have taken over the Sao Paulo city hall...

...Carlessi is an editor at Lilith Ediciones and the author of numerous articles on the women's movement in Peru...

...For decades squatters' organizations were isolated from one another, their struggles exclusively local...

...and Mexican women, examines one particularly well-organized neighborhood, San Miguel Teotongo, and finds that women's struggle for grass-roots democracy has been nothing less than revolutionary...

...As the drama of each country's crisis draws the movements into "politics," they face a dilemma: Will working with the government or the various opposition parties compromise their autonomy, and thus their ability to work for fundamental change...

...And, as with all single-issue struggles, leaders and organizations were commonly bought off and brought into the system...

...Every state has clubs, guns and courts...

...They were hierarchical and closed, like the communities which spawned them...

...the United States excels at more sophisticated repression: shelters that foster dependence, schools that batter self-esteem, a reigning ideology by which poverty is the fault of the poor...

...More often than not, they won the right to remain...

...Although the state here may not be able, or willing, to satisfy the need for housing and services, it has far greater resources for suppressing people's own improvised solutions...

...But the great depression of the 1980s left more than debt, destruction and decay in its wake...