When I first left the confines of my comfortable São Paulo home at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was met with scenes I thought I had said goodbye to in the 1990s.
Whole families living on the streets; children as young as four asking for change at the traffic lights; men lying on the pavements of upmarket neighbourhoods, passed out from hunger or intoxication or a combination of the two.
This was the reality when I was growing up in Brazil on the heels of the country’s hyperinflation crisis in the 1980s and early 1990s. As I grew older and Brazil became more stable, a growing number of Brazilians left the streets. Poverty fell by record numbers between 1992 and 2013, and markedly so after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva became president in 2003.
