Due to the crash’s violence, it took a week to transport Campos’s remains back to Recife, Pernambuco, the state he governed for eight years. His funeral was televised as an all-day Sunday spectacle. His pitiful performance in Tuesday’s interview was all but forgotten, his malformed thoughts elevated to slogans. “We can’t give Brazil up!” is shared and exploited as a catchphrase, while Recife’s people take the streets to sing “Eduardo/warrior/of the Brazilian people!” during the funeral.

Perhaps the exploitation of a famous politician’s death by the army of individuals who salivate for a piece of his memory is natural. Campos has been described as a “promising leadership,” a “negotiator,” a “statesman” who “transcended party lines.” All of these are lies. And that’s why it’s even more necessary to set the record straight on what Campos was and represented. He was an old school politician, inserted in the old system by the old elite, who protected our old crony capitalism; a personalistic politician firmly entrenched in the old habits of the Brazilian northeast’s elites.

Powerful institutions tend to perpetuate themselves and fluster attempts by outsiders to enact change. But Eduardo Campos wasn’t an outsider. He lived his life comfortably positioned inside in the power ranks, where he was placed by his grandfather, former Pernambuco governor Miguel Arraes. Campos wasn’t trying to subvert structures, but to put them to his service.

The state government employs “at least a dozen” of his or his wife’s relatives. Having supported the allied base of the federal government for many years, Campos successfully campaigned for the appointment of his mother to the Federal Court of Accounts and placed two of his relatives in the state Court of Accounts, a branch of government responsible for overseeing his own actions. Recife’s mayor is one of his trusted men, an unknown before the election, but leveraged by Campos’s name. Eduardo Campos justified the omnipresence of his relatives in the state as a result of their “abilities.” A prodigious family indeed.

Eduardo Campos has been described by the international press as “amicable” to markets and the Sao Paulo stock exchange reacted poorly to his death. That’s unsurprising: Tax exemptions and direct subsidies signs are displayed in front of virtually every industrial plant in Pernambuco. The Pernambuco Military Police, under the direct control of Eduardo Campos, repeatedly acted to protect the interests of the construction companies from the Novo Recife project — consisting of the privatization of very well located land in the Pernambuco capital to benefit contractors — beating up protesters and, later on, stating they wanted to talk. Marina Silva, his vice-presidential candidate, then hypocritically said she was against police violence and that several people in the movement against Novo Recife were members of her party.

On other occasions, Campos had no problem in giving building companies the land they demanded, such as when they wanted to build Riomar Mall over a swamp area, displacing hundreds of people from their stilt houses. These people had similar fates to the thousands of families who were expropriated and forcefully evicted for the construction of the Arena Pernambuco for the World Cup. It’s not by chance that construction companies, formerly lukewarm toward Campos’s party, made generous donations this year to the Socialist Party of Brazil. And it’s not by chance that large banks, industries and agribusiness companies lamented the loss of such a trustworthy ally.

His mellifluous narrative of favoring the poor hid a policy of control, suppression and infiltration of social movements. Campos’s political choices were always obfuscated by the convenient lie of “efficiency” in public management. In a recent interview, he said that abortion should not be legalized, reaffirmed his support for the war on drugs, recycled the tired idea that crack cocaine is a vicious drug that enslaves people, and stated he wanted to put “drug dealers” behind bars.

The more than 100,000 people who cry on streets because Eduardo Campos is dead remember only his most cynical side: The “modern” politician, who wanted to rid the country of “cronyism” and “favoring,” someone who was willing to “build alliances,” promote “sustainable growth,” “think about the poor,” and to defend “more humane politics.”

Someone like that really would have a lot of problems in the political system. Eduardo Campos didn’t have many.

He died, but his ideals live on — unfortunately.

On June 3, #OcupeEstelita had their victory (partial, up to this point) formalized by the municipality, whicht begrudgingly suspended the authorization of demolition of the warehouses.

Decades abandoned, the Estelita warehouses are relics from the old sugar cane economy of the state of Pernambuco, and used to belong to the now defunct Federal Railway Network. The land where the warehouses are located was auctioned off in very sweet terms to a consortium of developers who planned, along with the municipal authorities, the New Recife project.

New Recife consists in the building of 12 skyscrapers of over 40 stories in the area, one of the best located in town. Moreover, the project also consists in the capture of the debate by the government. By the mayor’s and the developer’s plutocratic logic, which has been able to find adherents, there’s the camp in favor of progress, new apartments and urban development, and there’s the team who favors the past, backwardness, the continued abandonment of an area potentially very valuable like the José Estelita Docks.

It’s obviously a bogus dichotomy and has been challenged by the Direitos Urbanos activists, who debate urban solutions for the city. As a forum for discussion and activism, Direitos Urbanos gathers many different positions on how to occupy and plan the city. Unfortunately, not only are they diverse, but they’re also vague and a little bit too slanted towards a middle class urban outlook. They emphasize not the legitimacy of use and property of urban land, but a specific view on how these spaces should be put to use: mixed communities, plazas, squares, trees, bicycle lanes instead of car roads, etc.

There’s nothing wrong with mixed urban spaces, which should be favored rather than disincentivized by legislation (as they are nowadays), but the fundamental problem of the use of urban land remains, even with a aesthetic rejection of the developers’ claim to Estelita’s warehouses. The fundamental discussion should be: Who should be able to use the land?

We can sort out the details about how later. First, we should talk about how to take the state out of public land. Clearly, a privatization that puts a huge and extremely well located plot of land in the hands of a consortium of developers is unjust.

And the government doesn’t have any legitimacy to sell them off and exclude the rest of the population of the possibility to homestead the area. Unfortunately, the details of such a process of taking the land out of the control of the government can be messy.

So, I’d like to advance a modest proposal.

In Brazil, it is calculated that between 200 and 250 thousand families have been evicted from their houses because of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Many have gotten laughable compensations for their property while others haven’t received rent assistance at all, or it has been insufficient to pay for any decent place to live.

I propose a solution: Developers can build all the skyscrapers they want in the area, but the apartments should be occupied by people who were violently evicted from their homes by the government.

It seems fair: If the government conducts an excluding process of privatization, it’s only natural it should favor those who were previously excluded. Land for the people.

If the victims of the World Cup benefit from it, we can think about urban impact later. What do you think, Urban Rights people?