00:00In Brazil, the Recife Municipal Guard violently attacked leaders from three of Latin America's largest housing movement
00:07as they demanded the right to participate in an assembly that the city had claimed was open to the public.
00:14Here's a correspondent by Amir from the scene.
00:18I'm standing at Recife's Municipal Conference of the Cities,
00:23where a group of social movements has just taken over the event,
00:27complaining that the mayor's office tried to keep them out of it.
00:31The Conference of the Cities system is a system of municipal, state, and then a national conference,
00:39which gives a level of control over urban policy nationwide to a system of democratically elected volunteer delegates.
00:49By law, 50% of these delegates have to come from poor people's social movements.
00:53What the social movements like the MLB, the MTST, affiliated with National Low-Income Housing Union,
01:01and the MNLM are arguing here in Recife is that Mayor Juan Campos' office pulled a series of dirty tricks,
01:10labeling some NGOs that have city contracts as social movements,
01:15so they could get space to elect their own delegates in the conference,
01:18and limiting the amount of candidates from the social movements that could run for the office of delegate
01:23to just two or three per movement.
01:26So for now, they've burst in.
01:29The police tried to keep them out.
01:31I personally witnessed police officers beating protesters.
01:37I saw an elderly woman getting beaten by the city government's municipal guards
01:42who failed to block the people from coming in.
01:44And now they've simply rushed the stage, taken over the event,
01:48and they're sitting here and refusing to leave until the mayor cancels the conference
01:53and reschedules a new conference with more people's participation.
