After yesterday's upbeat posting, normal service is resumed in Portugal. Like most of the western world, Portugal is in recession, it even has a name: the 'Crise' (crisis). Suffering from fuel high prices, ever increasing taxation and higher unemployment, people are becoming more desperate.
ATM machines have always been a target, first from shopping centres, and increasingly from local court buildings, where security has been lax. Now there is a new phenomenon: a resurgence of armed robbery. In the past week, we have seen three robberies, two of which have ended in tragedy.
- Last week there was a 7h stand-off between police and two Brazilian immigrants in a branch of Banco Espirito Santo (BES) in Lisbon. This ended with the death of one of the robbers and the wounding of the other. Relatives of the wounded Brazilian cannot understand why he committed the robbery, since he was in the middle of completing his application for Portuguese residency.
- A 13 year-old boy was taken along on a warehouse robbery in Lisbon. When the robbery was foiled by police, the boy was killed in the crossfire. The lawyers of the boy's family are saying that the police overreacted, and could have shot in the air.
- Yesterday, two Brazilians robbed a butcher in Sétubal (pronounced 'Stubal', where José Mourinho comes from). All 8 staff, and four customers, were locked in the basement and by the time the police arrived, the thieves were long gone.
Thieves are also concentrating on robbing elderly Portuguese from small villages. In the north of the country there has been a spate of people knocking on pensioners doors and saying they are from the Segurança Social (the equivalent of social security). They have been saying that people owe them money and taking cash. Mostly this has been in 500€ lots, but last week, one pensioner was robbed of over 5000€.
...and the Crise has had casualties. A bar owner in Silveiro, not far from where we are living, committed suicide at the weekend when he couldn't cope with his debts any longer. Like many bars, takings fell after the changes in the law on Jan 1st. Together with the effects of the Crise, as people just don't go out as often as they did, many businesses have found themselves in trouble. Faced with increasing debts, the owner couldn't take any more pressure and took what he saw as the only option remaining.
Other businesses have suffered because of the Crise, and while one aspect of the government is to look forward, to cheap laptops and electric cars, on the other hand they are adding to the problems of the country. Many people don't pay their Segurança Social payments on time, or at all (in one instance last year, a company closed only to have the employees find they couldn't claim unemployment benefits because the owner hadn't paid their Segurança Social). The owner had taken deductions from the employees' salary, but hadn't paid these, or the contributions he should make, to the Finanças. So now, the tax office, the Finanças, have decided that if people don't make their payments, they'll send agents into their homes to repossess their property.
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