I’m a Catholic, a Priest, and a Portuguese citizen. I write this as a Portuguese citizen and as an Azorean in my own right. I have always been interested in politics, understanding it as the sublime art of leading a nation to the Common Good, a preciousness little understood in our time.
My last chronicle was about a 27-year-old boy, already destroyed by drugs and a bad life, who, as a child, had a drunken father who always beat him and a mother who prostituted herself on the streets, stole papos-secos (Portuguese tools) from the doors of houses in the morning, because he didn’t have anything to eat; and exchanged his dirty clothes for the clothes on the neighbors’ string, because he didn’t have anything to wear. This is, unfortunately, a picture of many Azoreans.
Endemic poverty is the greatest tragedy of the Azores. And it has always been at the top of the significant political choices, independent of political party. The Azores occupy all the national podiums in terms of poverty and its derivatives, whether it’s early school leaving, drug abuse, precarious employment, low schooling, low purchasing capacity, etc. We have been living through a drama for many years, a drama accompanied by the fatality that a third of the population is close to critical levels of poverty, precariousness, and social exclusion. Ponta Delgada, the largest city in the region, an already considerable urban center, is home to a disproportionate number of homeless people, beggars, drug addicts, and marginalized and excluded people who obviously seek out the city to have more access to a handout or to steal better.
What’s more, poverty in the Azores is essentially endemic, human, and psychological: it is born of inferior education, deeply broken family environments, violence, and the inability to lead an everyday life. Tons of money has already been spent on social housing estates, support infrastructures, subsidies such as the RSI, and countless public and private initiatives to reduce this social calamity. There have been few results.
We all agree that education must be the best solution to this significant issue. This is the most crucial tool, undoubtedly not enough, but essential to solve the drama drowning our Autonomous Region. I’ve already had to say that an educational project that wants to considerably reduce endemic poverty in the Azores must be a long-term project, a substantially long one, whose first serious results will only appear after fifteen or twenty years, something that is not very appealing to a government that lasts no more than four years. That’s a big problem. An education that takes children, from a very early age, out of the hellholes in which they are uneducated, abused, and destroyed and gives them a tiny chance of being men and women who are a little less trapped in unhappy, depressing, and destructive poverty.
My jaws dropped! In the last session of the Regional Legislative Assembly of the Azores, a party with a parliamentary seat, Chega, proposed an amendment to give priority for free access to nurseries to children with working parents. Yes, working parents have more rights than unemployed ones, not least because parents on the Social Integration Income who don’t work have time to educate their children at home… It would be hard to fit more stupidity into any human being’s skull. While we should be preparing to aim the batteries of the fight against endemic poverty through an educational project that reaches that poverty, someone has the astrolabic idea of prioritizing the first education, free of charge, to those who have work, leaving, once again, the most fragile, excluded and with no horizons other than poverty and crime, once again to oblivion. This is precisely how to promote equality, human rights, and democracy and eradicate the most terrible evil in the Azores, poverty. But who tells these people that a crèche (daycare center) isn’t there to relax or excuse parents but to promote children and that vulnerable children are the priority?
I expected something like this from this strange party. For Chega, and this is nothing new, the excluded are a kind of sub-humans who only destroy our well-being, suck our money, and live off us, doing nothing, stealing and robbing and giving the Azores the bad name it has. They are, if you like, a species to be slaughtered. The disappointment came when the assembly members who endorse this government, without much controversy, such an inhumane, unfortunate, and horrible amendment for the Azores. I pay tribute to the three members of the parties supporting the government who left the room. They should all have done so. The approval of this amendment is a great shame for our Regional Assembly. Suffice it to say that a Spanish newspaper, “La Voz de Galicia,” published a full-page headline: “Azores want children of the unemployed to be the last to have access to nurseries” and read: “The far-right formation Chega advocates that parents who don’t work can stay at home to look after their children.” A joke, a joke, if it weren’t deplorable.
I don’t write this out of pity for the poor little people or out of a desire to support the “criminals.” I write it with the full awareness that the greatest tragedy in the Azores, poverty, can only begin to be tackled seriously with a long-term educational project, prioritizing broken families, especially children, so that we can have a fairer, more humane, and more equal society for all. This proposed amendment does precisely the opposite, and so we go on with our politicking, granting favors to dubious political forces so that they can support us in other battles. All this has been a brutal disappointment, a punch in the gut, a betrayal.
What does this Chega proposal want? What even my cat could see: the result is an even more watertight society, divided between the “good” and the “bad,” where those who already have the chance to grow are supported, and those who don’t are increasingly left to their own devices. And the gap will widen.
To the government forces, I say: Have the courage to recognize the colossal mistake – which goes against all the government’s choices – and take it back. And please, do it quickly!

Fr. José Júlio Rocha is a Catholic Preist in the Diocese of Angra and the Azores.

In the opinion section of the Diário Insular newspaper – translated by Diniz Borges

NOVIDADES will feature occasional opinion pieces from various leading thinkers and writers from the Azores to give the diaspora and those interested in the current Azores a sense of the major opinions on some of the archipelago’s issues.