Before dawn last Wednesday morning, roughly 650 police officers armed with guns, batons, and stun grenades advanced on a throng of several hundred homeless crack cocaine addicts congregated in an open-air drug market in the center of São Paulo commonly known as “Cracolândia,” or Crackland.
Existing since the mid-1990s, Cracolândia is akin to “Hamsterdam,” the fictional free zone for drug dealing and consumption in Baltimore created by U.S. crime drama The Wire.
Located in a degraded enclave in the center of Latin America’s biggest city, it is an open area where people can purchase and use crack, cannabis, and cocaine,...
