Militarizing subjectivities means imploding all possible bonds of solidarity, because we are in a war of all against all.
On August 25, 2025, the Amadora City Council candidate Suzana Garcia said that she already has a program drawn up with the Ministry of Infrastructure for the “eradication of Cova da Moura”. In addition to “I'm really going to eradicate all that”, Urban hygiene, which she described as “one of the worst cancers in the city”, is also one of the priorities of the candidate, supported by the PSD, CDS, PPM, RIR and MPT.
The following day, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Housing denied the PSD candidate, denying the existence of any agreement regarding the “eradication” of Cova da Moura.
However, Miguel Pinto Luz, the minister who denied Susana Garcia, was present at the candidate's election campaign on September 1st. It was supposed to be a visit to Cova da Moura, but it didn't leave the parking lot, located outside the neighborhood, next to the sports center.
Then, even before Susana Garcia became a candidate, the fascist Chega party spread several billboards throughout Amadora, presenting the image of its mayoral candidate, Rui Paulo Sousa, alongside André Ventura.
Most of these billboards is located at the entrances to neighbourhoods inhabited mostly by racialized, impoverished and economically vulnerable people, bearing the following inscription: “let's clean up Amadora“.
Rui Paulo Sousa then expressed the same opinion, with the following statement on his Facebook page: “We're going to clean Amadora of banditry and gratuitous violence and give the municipality back to the good people of Amadora!”.
In view of all this, we propose to make a few comments here.
First of all, it has to be said that there are no “barracas” in the Alto da Cova da Moura neighborhood. This in itself shows that the language being used is trying to fool the minds of thousands of busy people, in the battle for survival and that of their children who are unaware of Cova da Moura.
It must also be said, from what we know at the time [September 1], that there was never any conversation between Suzana Garcia and the residents of Cova da Moura, which reveals the habit of racist paternalism of those who feel entitled to decide the future of thousands of people, without them having a single say in their lives.
Both Suzana Garcia, such as Rui Paulo Sousa took great bites out of the colonial discourses of past centuries, combining nationalist romanticism with teleological visions of history, prognosticators of the realization of the nation's destinies and the race, They were tasked with the supposedly sacrificial work of saving and expiating the evils of the “indigenous”.
Expressions such as “cleaning up Amadora” or “eradicating Cova da Moura” reveal with remarkable clarity how zoological language is generally present in the discourse of the right and the extreme right, in relation to immigrants, racialized people and the poor, as part of what Frantz Fanon called the “colonial vocabulary”.
These are hygienist speeches that associate Cova da Moura, the impoverished and racialized neighbourhoods with pathogenic bodies. All that was needed was to openly recommend spraying antiparasitics and other chemicals to extirpate the vectors of disease.
Secondly, although it may seem strange (and it really shouldn't be), implying “clean up Amadora” and/or “I'm really going to eradicate all that” indicates that the effects of the ongoing genocide in Palestine are already being felt in Portugal, when we look at the semantic load of the aforementioned expressions and lexicons.
As for us, these expressions echo with “clean up Gaza”, pronounced by the fascist and narcissist Donald Trump, or “Gaza must be terraced”, said the fascist Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich and other Nazi-Zionists in Israel who are continuing their genocide at this very moment, in livestream, on the Palestinian people.
It is important to emphasize that Susana Garcia made a video entitled “Let's eradicate Cova da Moura” where he appears driving a bulldozer, in a sequence of images of the houses of Cova da Moura, saying: “I'm here to destroy the clandestine [...] whatever the cost”.
This video took us back to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, carried out by the macabre state of Israel, with the complicity of the Portuguese government.
In Gaza, for those who don't know or pretend not to know, bulldozers have been transformed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) into an instrument of mass destruction. In particular, the D9s, supplied by the US company Caterpilar, have been armored and equipped with machine guns and rifles. There were even job offers to bulldozer drivers for the demolition of Gaza, for between 800 and 1000 euros a day.
Nazi-Zionist Rabbi Avrahma Zarbiv of the Israel Defense Forces' Givati Brigade, for example, became a celebrity when he admitted in an interview for Israeli television who, as the driver of a D9, demolishes 50 buildings a week in Gaza, including hospitals, schools, private homes, humanitarian aid centers and other Palestinian infrastructure.
These were the reasons that led the organization The Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) calling for his immediate arrest for serious violations of the 1949 Geneva Convention and the 1998 Rome Statute.
In addition, the current genocide in Palestine is (for the history of the present and the memory of future generations) the first genocide in history. livestream. In other words, you can see it live and anywhere in the world on television, in newspapers, on cell phones, which shows that the world is undergoing an experiment: the industrialization of slaughter, the spectacularization of bloodthirsty violence, widespread genocide live and whose indignation, with few exceptions, leaves a lot to be desired.
In an interview with Sumud Podcast, Palestinian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Samah Jabr said the following: "What is happening in Palestine and the fact that it is being televised, the fact that international law and human rights cannot stop this carnage, is shaking the belief of many people around the world in humanity. This is traumatizing beyond the borders of occupied Palestine. Not only in the violence, the silence, the shock, the international complicity - I wouldn't say of the international community, but the complicity essentially of the West, the complicity of the United States, the British and the silence of many European and African countries. The fact that the instruments that were created to prevent human atrocities and genocide don't apply to the Palestinians and have become dysfunctional, this is shaking the belief system of many vulnerable groups around the world".
Samah Jabr warns us that the naturalization of absolute violence, the depersonalization of the Palestinian people, whose levels of illegality and indifference would be unacceptable in any other situation, will have harmful effects in the long run.
And we can say that we have already felt it in these parts in things that only fascists used to whisper quietly in their groups, in internet comment boxes, but which today are said as if they were normal, even with the right to an interview on prime-time television.
In third place, These two campaigns are part of the neoliberal project according to which it is necessary to carry out a crusade of one kind or another. us, which invokes the spectre of race (with all its delusions and fantasies that come with it), against them, This leads to fear, mistrust and, consequently, “the militarization of subjectivities”.
The main objective of the militarization of subjectivity is to “to naturalize paranoia as a general mode of socialization. In other words, to construct subjectivities based on narratives of the most improbable plots, of continuous struggles against always unexpected enemies, of preserving borders, of the risks of contagion and contact. This in turn calls for a rigid, fixed personality model, such as a ‘typology’".
It is a tactic that reinforces the individualism inculcated in society, stimulating the principle of save who you can, everyone does for themselves, everyone knows for themselves, of which the cultural industries have accustomed us.
Militarizing subjectivities also means imploding all possible bonds of solidarity, because we are in a war of all against all, which can even be given names like “entrepreneurship”.
This is because we are facing a crisis of capital that would require a profound transformation of the conditions that generate these multiple systemic crises - political, ecological, economic, social and even of ideas.
In fact, as Vladimir Safatle wrote about fascism, the management of problems “consists of saying between the lines: there is no way to manage the crises of the capitalist system from within the capitalist system itself. However, since there is no other possible alternative, all that remains is to save a part of society and let the rest perish, to expel the rest from our borders, to leave them in absolute misery, to subject them to maximum spoliation through the the exponential increase in police violence and the precariousness of their lives".
This identity politics seeks to inculcate and/or mobilize the racist and classist imaginary that dates back to colonial times, oiled by the current neoliberal machinery.
And, in effect, inventing or/and reactualizing the figure of an internal enemy, in this case Cova a Moura, historically criminalized, to be used as a scapegoat, to which the paternity of social problems is attributed.
In other words, it camouflages the real reasons for the frustrations of Amadora's working people, who are increasingly impoverished, suffocated by the staggering increase in rents and essential foodstuffs, blaming other poor people.
Fourthly, “eradicating Cova da Moura”, as Suzana Garcia puts it, is an operation that hides its true purpose and interests: to fulfill the long-held desire of real estate agents who have coveted the land in Cova da Moura for decades.
The land in Cova a Moura is valuable because of its location - close to the city center - with fast access to the freeways to the south and north of the country, nearby transport (buses, trains and metro with the Reboleira station), airport, beaches, not to mention its beautiful view.
Since touristification, the colonization of space by capital, has turned Lisbon into a hotel city, expelling those who can't afford it to the outskirts of the outskirts, Cova da Moura has become even more attractive to the middle classes and real estate companies.
And in the eyes of Susana Garcia and her political avatars, the residents of Cova da Moura will be mere objects and spectators of the “eradication”. She's dead wrong.
To close, we take this opportunity to remind you that Suzana Garcia will have to show you where there are tents in Cova da Moura. This distortion of reality only proves that she doesn't even know the place she talks about and wants to govern.
