Three million Brazilians have neither birth certificates nor identity cards, which notably prevents them from having access to public health or education systems. Magistrates and social workers are trying to get them out of this situation. The website The Country Brazil met them. Reporting.
Adriana is 22 years old, but she was not born. Not officially anyway.
This young Carioca [habitante de Rio de Janeiro] dark-skinned, with the lean silhouette of a dancer and well-defined eyebrows, has never had a birth certificate.
No identity card, work card, CPF (tax identification number), no official document. She summarizes, in an almost inaudible voice:
I have no existence in this world.”
Adriana never knew her biological mother and was raised by Mônica, who became her father’s companion when the little one was 5 years old.
After the man abandoned the family, it was the mother-in-law who realized that the little one had never been declared to the civil registry: it was a real odyssey that began, and that still going on, to obtain papers which would give Adriana, this very living being, of flesh and bones, an existence as a Brazilian citizen.
“Her life is suspended, she cannot study or have a declared job, she cannot do anything”, explains Mônica, 46 years old today and revolted by the situation.
A subject at the last baccalaureate
Adriana is one of approximately 3 million Brazilians without any official identity document (birth certificate, for example), according to estimates by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
In this society devastated by social inequalities which translate very concretely into hunger and misery, this inability to prove one’s existence on paper – this denied dignity – is not a theme that is often raised in public debate. However, it turns out that on November 21, 2021, the subject was proposed as an essay to candidates for the National Secondary Education Examination (Enem) [l’équivalent du bac en France].
Without an identity card or CPF number, it is impossible for a Brazilian to enroll in a school, to benefit from state social assistance or to access consultations and care from the public health system.
Adriana owes her education until the end of high school only to the determination of Mônica, who convinced a private school “but not too expensive” from the suburbs of Rio:
And I was lucky she was a healthy child, she never needed to go to the doctor – otherwise I don’t know what we would have done.”
In 2021, the young girl had to ask a social worker to be able to be vaccinated against Covid-19. “We had gone to several health centers, none of them accepted to vaccinate her without an identity document.”
An itinerant justice service
We find the two women on the patio of the Court of Justice for Children, Youth and the Elderly in Rio de Janeiro, in front of the blue and white court bus parked there.
A mobile justice service where six legal aid officials, four social workers and three magistrates welcome dozens of people from 9 am to 3 pm seeking to obtain a document officially attesting to their existence.
Adriana and Mônica, who wants to adopt the girl and give her her name, arrived at six in the morning. This is the fourth time they have come, and they leave once again disappointed.
As they have no document relating to Adriana’s biological parents, the courts have requested a search of the father’s civil status to regularize his situation.
“All this sometimes makes you want to give up, reconnait Monica, but we have to make sure Adriana’s rights are guaranteed.” “I admit to being quite lost, it’s very discouraging”, loose Adriana, her head permanently lowered, who hardly expresses herself except in monosyllables.
She does not look her interlocutors in the eye. Shame is a recurrent feeling among these undocumented people, confirms judge Raquel Chrispino, who has worked for fifteen years with this public and coordinates the Eradication of
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Joana Oliveira
Source
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