Participação social de lideranças comunitárias em um contexto de desigualdade social e no enfrentamento da pandemia da COVID-19: um enfoque psicossocial

Abstract

Resumo Pesquisa realizada no âmbito de um amplo projeto de pesquisa-participante em contextos de vulnerabilidade da Baixada Santista/SP, que objetiva compreender elementos psicossociais da participação social e do envolvimento das lideranças comunitárias de uma comunidade periférica local, apontando suas potencialidades e fragilidades. Atualiza as reflexões baseando-se nas ações de enfrentamento à pandemia da COVID-19 que tem acirrado as consequências da desigualdade social. Sistematiza as informações por meio do software Atlas.ti e analisa com base na perspectiva da Epistemologia Qualitativa e da Hermenêutica de Profundidade (HP) de Thompson. Resultados indicam que, de modo geral, a participação social se efetiva por meio de organizações sociais. Por um lado, a fragmentação das forças locais e esgarçamento de laços sociais dificultam o fortalecimento da participação social, por outro, os processos de conscientização estão presentes na busca do bem comum.

Full text

Saúde Soc. São Paulo, v.30, n.2, e210008, 2021 1
DOI 10.1590/S0104-12902021210008
Dossier
Social participation of community leaders in a
context of social inequality and in the coping of
the COVID-19 pandemic: a psychosocial approach1
Participação social de lideranças comunitárias em um
contexto de desigualdade social e no enfrentamento da
pandemia da COVID-19: um enfoque psicossocial
Correspondence
Hailton Yagiu
Rua Silva Jardim, 136, térreo. Santos, SP, Brazil. Zip Code 11015-020.
Hailton Yagiua
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3860-2061
E-mail: hyagiu@gmail.com
Carlos Roberto Castro-Silvaa
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8880-1042
E-mail: carobert3@hotmail.com
Antonio Euzebios Filhob
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5276-3697
E-mail: antonioeuzebios@gmail.com
Sueli Terezinha Ferrero Martinc
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5874-063X
E-mail: suelitfmartin@gmail.com
aUniversidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP), Health and
Society Institute - Campus Baixada Santista, Department of
Public Policies and Health. Santos, SP. Brazil.
bUniversidade de São Paulo (USP), Institute of Psychology,
Department of Social and Occupational Psychology. São Paulo,
SP. Brazil.
cUniversidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho (Unesp).
Faculdade de Medicina de Botucatu, Department of Neurology,
Psychology and Psychiatry. Botucatu, São Paulo, Brazil.
1 This study is a development of the researches “Care ethics and rights construction: psychosocial reception in family health practices
within social exclusion situations” (sponsored by the São Paulo Research Foundation (Fapesp), nº 2016 / 23973-2), “Social inequality and
subjectivity: life trajectories and struggles for better living conditions and health in vulnerable territory of Baixada Santista” (supported
by the National Council for Scientic and Technological Development (CNPq), nº 407836 / 2016-0), which were approved by the Research
Ethics Committee of the Universidade Federal de São Paulo, opinions 2,198,202 and 2,047,444, and “Care ethics and psychosocial processes
of social participation in family health practices within social exclusion situations” (Bolsa Produtividade CNPq nº 308730 / 2019-4).
Abstract
Our study was conducted within the scope of a
broad research-participant project in vulnerable
contexts of Baixada Santista, in the coastal
region of the state of São Paulo, Brazil, which
aims at understanding the psychosocial elements
of social participation and the involvement of
community leaders in a local peripheral village,
by pointing their strengths and weaknesses.
Our article updates the reflections based on
the actions to confront the COVID-19 pandemic,
which has aggravated the consequences of social
inequality. It also systematizes information
using Atlas.ti software and analyzes them based
on the perspective of Qualitative Epistemology
and Thompson’s Depth Hermeneutics (DP).
The results indicate that social participation
happens by social organizations. On one side,
the fragmentation of local forces and the
strengthening of social bonds make it difficult to
strengthen social participation; on the other side,
awareness processes are present in the search for
a common good.
Keywords: Social Inequality; Social Vulnerability;
Social Participation; Leadership; COVID-19.

Saúde Soc. São Paulo, v.30, n.2, e210008, 2021 2
Resumo
Pesquisa realizada no âmbito de um amplo
projeto de pesquisa-participante em contextos
de vulnerabilidade da Baixada Santista/SP, que
objetiva compreender elementos psicossociais
da participação social e do envolvimento das
lideranças comunitárias de uma comunidade
periférica local, apontando suas potencialidades
e fragilidades. Atualiza as reexões baseando-
se nas ações de enfrentamento à pandemia da
COVID-19 que tem acirrado as consequências da
desigualdade social. Sistematiza as informações
por meio do software Atlas.ti e analisa com base
na perspectiva da Epistemologia Qualitativa
e da Hermenêutica de Profundidade (HP) de
Thompson. Resultados indicam que, de modo
geral, a participação social se efetiva por meio de
organizações sociais. Por um lado, a fragmentação
das forças locais e esgarçamento de laços sociais
dicultam o fortalecimento da participação social,
por outro, os processos de conscientização estão
presentes na busca do bem comum.
Palavras-chave: Desigualdade Social; Vulnerabilidade;
Participação Social; Liderança; COVID-19.
Introduction
The dominant ideology has ignored the scenario
of poverty and the social inequalities produced
by capitalism by propagating the bourgeois
individualistic way of life as a parameter of the
notion of success or failure, measured by the rule
of meritocracy. However, the reality shows that
the gap between the rich and the poor has become
increasingly evident in neoliberalism – especially in
Brazil, one of the champions of income inequality
(WSR, 2020), at a time when social conditions
deteriorate with the precariousness of social rights
and disrespect for human rights.
Patriarchy and patrimonialism (Mergen; Zanetti;
Reschilian, 2018), the enslavement of Africans
(Gohn, 2019) and their exploitation for almost four
centuries contributed to keeping the issue of social
inequalities (Moura, 2019), including the fact that,
even after the abolition of slavery, this group of
people could not enter the labor market due to the
lack of state policies that included them as citizens.
In Brazil, participatory processes are marked by
a contradiction. If the 1988 Constitution allowed the
strengthening of democracy by the emergence of
social movements, there is still a great challenge as
for the delegitimization of these through traditional
hegemonic sectors of society.
However, the social struggles touch the wounds
of social inequalities that update and advance public
policies. Thus, social participation becomes an
important object of scientic reection.
In our article, we propose a discussion on
the aspects of social participation and political
involvement of community leaders of a peripheral
community of the Baixada Santista, coastal area of
the state of São Paulo, by observing psychosocial
elements that concern the role of socialization
processes in the potentiation of collective actions.
In this perspective, we will point out some of
the weaknesses and potentialities expressed in the
forms of community organization and socialization,
by observing the participatory processes that mark
the history of struggles and practices of the current
leaders, and then illustrate how the potentialities
contributed to face the arrival of the COVID-19
pandemic, since it has intensied social inequalities

Saúde Soc. São Paulo, v.30, n.2, e210008, 2021 3
2 YAGIU, H.; CASTRO-SILVA, C. R. Social participation and empowerment in vulnerable communities: scoping review. Revista Psicologia
Política. To be published. 2020.
in vulnerable communities due to the impossibility
of observing some important aspects for the control
of the pandemic (Rodrigues et al., 2020), due to the
lack of hygiene conditions, and the difculty of social
isolation due to housing conditions and the necessary
displacement for work and living activities.
We understand that social participation is dened
as an action that occurs in the institutional sphere and
in social movements in a parallel or simultaneous way;
develops, according to its formation and character,
the social and historical context, logics of internal
deliberation and representation and before society
and/or the State; one of its dimensions is psychosocial,
and this is the focus of the concept of awareness
proposed by Martín-Baró (1997), supported by Paulo
Freire (1979), which we will resume later.
Awareness, for this author, is a process
characterized by different degrees of participation
and political involvement, which concern the various
ways of generating approximation and/or distancing
between personal and collective identities that are
produced in the relations of political subjects with a
group, movement, collectivity or entity (Martin-Baró,
2017; Vieira; Ximenes, 2008). The leaders’ gures
emerge from these relationships, being either more
or less democratic, fostering different degrees of
social participation, strengthening a certain way of
reporting collective history.
The contradictions of what the Constitution
founded under the aegis of Social Welfare and
its operationalization become more explicit
in the peripheries of capitalism, especially in
countries whose origins come from colonization
and patriarchalism and that have institutionalized
political violence as a method of confronting
movements of resistance and defense of social rights.
2
Recent literature review on social and political
participation in Brazil (Delenogare; Araújo, 2018)
observed that most studies seek to understand
its development based on historical-cultural and
political inuences; different shapes, spaces and
actors; of the effects produced in collective needs,
emphasizing as limitations the lack of space in
government agendas, the restricted institutional
actions and lack of engagement of the subjects
and pointing to the need to expand the relationship
between society and managers, creation of forms
of promotion of social participation and ways that
subjects appropriate them.
According to Aguiar (2000), one of the factors
that favored the weakening of social participation
movements was the legacy of Portuguese colonization,
in which its leaders administered the country
favoring their own interests, thus circumventing
the separation between the public and the private.
These perspectives point to the need to examine
and deepen the understanding of participatory
processes based on the quality of bonds and
intersubjective relationships.
The possibility that we nd in the theorizations of
socio-historical psychology regarding the valorization
of the concept of affectivity approximates us to
concrete experiences, makes the coexistence and
life histories of subjects and groups indicators
of a potential to change reality. This allows the
understanding of the production of subjectivity
dialectically articulated with the experiences in its
social environment and emphasizes the political
aspect of social participation (Sawaia, 2014).
According to Sawaia (2003), socio-historical
psychology understands the construction of social
bonds as a phenomenon that cannot be separated
from the political relations established in a society
that is structured around poverty and violence, in
which power relations and asymmetry appear as a
social pattern – even producing affections, promoting
approximations and dissents at the ethical and
political level.
The choice of socio-historical psychology also
involves a political conception, because it has
questioned and fought the colonization of social
psychology by North American and European
theories since its emergence in the country, showing
that we can understand the singularities of our
reality based on theoretical frameworks formulated
in the Latin American context.

Saúde Soc. São Paulo, v.30, n.2, e210008, 2021 4
Methods
Studies
3
conducted in vulnerable territories
of Baixada Santista focused on the relationship
between the health unit and the community,
thus contributing to an expanded conception of
health. Its social determinations have become
an important reference for understanding the
complexity of health-disease processes and care in
these territories.
This methodological perspective guides our
activities since 2009 and the questions that
motivated the research arose from the diversied
insertion of researchers in teaching, extension and
research developed in line with the Pedagogical
Political Project of the Unive rsidade Federal de São
Paulo, Campus Baixada Santista (Unifesp/BS), in
the search for meanings and shared meanings about
the understanding of health, care and participatory
processes in territories of social vulnerability
(Anhas; Rosa; Castro-Silva, 2018).
These projects allowed the emergence of others,
including the master’s thesis of one of the authors,
from which it was possible to update the information
on the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in
this territory.
Since it is a study of social relations, representations
and perceptions of subjects and our source is
constituted by a database, we determinated the
qualitative approach as the most appropriate method
for understanding the object of study, because it
allows systematizing the knowledge of how human
beings live, feel and think. The documentary model
was also adopted due to the use of primary sources and
the quality of information that this method allows to
be extracted from the documents, thus contributing
to the understanding of the object studied.
Theoretically and methodologically, this
investigation is supported by socio-historical
psychology based on Marxism, with historical
materialism and dialectical logic as philosophy and
method, understanding the human being as a social
and historical being and society as a product of the
relationship between them (Bock, 2011).
Construction of qualitative information: location,
participants and collection of information
The community where the study was conducted
is located between the Casqueiro River and the
Anchieta Highway, is the second largest favela in
a municipality of Baixada Santista and is built
on mangroves, which shows the complexity of its
urbanization, considering the preservation of the
environment and living conditions. Regarding the
state’s presence in the territory, it has only one
mixed-model Health Unit composed of three family
health teams. There is also a day care center, a church
and community-based organizations.
Most of the houses are made up of stilts built close to
each other and residents live with poor basic sanitation,
lack of leisure and socialization options, violence of
drug trafcking crime and a high rate of juvenile
pregnancy (Anhas; Castro-Silva, 2017). The most recent
references of the São Paulo Social Vulnerability Index
place it in the very high vulnerability group – subnormal
clusters (IPVS, 2018).
According to data from the Brazilian Institute of
Geography and Statistics (IBGE, 2010), its estimated
population is 128,748 inhabitants, and of these,
57.9.1% are brown and 8% black; its main economic
activity is the petrochemical industries installed in
the 1950s, which place it, according to the survey by
the Municipal Information Observatory (Bremaeker,
2019), among the richest municipalities in the
country with an annual budget revenue of more
than R$ 1 billion (Carro, 2020). However, according
to Anhas (2019), 54.02% of its population lives and
resides in precarious or risky conditions.
For this study, we analyzed a database composed
of information collected between June 2017 and
October 2019 in ve workshops, twenty-four eld
diaries, and in-depth interviews with four leaders
(three women and one man). One of them works
3 These are the research projects “Social inequality and subjectivity: life trajectories and struggles for better living and health conditions
in vulnerable territory of Baixada Santista” (National Council for Scientic Development (CNPq) no. 407836/2016-0 ) and “Ethics of
care and construction of rights: psychosocial reception in family health practices in situations of social exclusion” (São Paulo State
Research Support Foundation (Fapesp) no. 2016-23973-2).

Saúde Soc. São Paulo, v.30, n.2, e210008, 2021 5
in a philanthropic institution in the community,
another is retired and supplements her income
with an on-site grocery store, one is retired and the
other works in shing and other occasional works.
All have incomplete basic level of schooling and
age between 30 and 65 years.
The techniques used were: research of ofcial
data and document analysis; thematic workshops;
formation of research groups for in-depth
interviews; participant observation and field
diaries. The formation of research groups
occurred in four stages from the meetings for the
presentation of the project, by the formation of the
research group to the development of research and
discussions of the results.
The interviews and workshops were recorded and
transcribed according to the Informed Consent Form
approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the
Federal University of São Paulo – CEP/Unifesp no.
66235417.3.0000.5505, no. 68720217.8.0000.5505
and CEP no. 2,108,711 and no. 2,198,202.
In a later stage of updating the reections due
to the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic,
semi-structured distance interviews were conducted
with community leaders via cross-platform
messaging applications (WhatsApp, Telegram)
or communication software (Skype, Zoom). The
interviews were recorded according to the Informed
Consent Form approved by the Research Ethics
Committee of the Universidade Federal de São Paulo –
CEP/UNIFESP no. 4,530,562 and stored in digital
les for study and analysis. Audio transcription
was not necessary, since the management software
allows the inclusion of audio les.
Information management and analysis
Information were organized and managed by
the researcher himself using the Atlas.ti software
and analyzed according to Depth Hermeneutics
methodology (Demo, 2012; Thompson, 2000).
In the data analysis, we associate Qualitative
Epistemology (González-Rey, 2011), which comprises
the guiding references of the analyses, as part of a
continuous process of deepening the information, valuing
the implication and the creativity of the researcher and
favoring the emergence of new theorizations.
Results and discussion
We analyzed the narratives of community
leaders in participatory processes that mark the
history of struggles for the improvement of living
conditions, pointing out some potentialities and
weaknesses expressed in the forms of community
organization and socialization, and presented some
issues contextualized by the consequences of the
COVID-19 pandemic.
Weaknesses expressed in the forms of organization
and socialization and in the participatory processes
of community leaders
Social participation is materialized as a collective
force “that grows in power as it is shaped by the
different reliefs and contours, valuing the modes and
moments of the communities in which it is produced”
(Costa; Castro-Silva, 2015, p. 288), whose quality is
associated with the possibility of forming bonds
with the objective of claiming or creating afrmative
forms of overcoming the violation of rights (Costa;
Castro-Silva, 2015: Gohn, 2019; Lavalle, 2011). However,
the lack of connection and mobilization of people
represents one of the great difculties.
Martina’s speech was very exciting. She said
people need to worry, so it’s challenging the issue
of participation. For Martina, people don’t feel like
it’s their city. It’s like city’s not ours. She said that
we need to feel we belong to the city to start ghting
for these environmental and health issues, which
are so important. (Field Diary, March 28, 2018)
Benkos comments on the difculty in organizing
politically in the community. He always refers to
leaders as “those who call themselves leaders.”
These people would agree to sell themselves in
exchange for some position in the ofce of councils,
mayor and deputy mayor. Moreover, “those who call
themselves leaders” spread hatred and envy among
themselves, by spreading rumors, gossip, causing
discord. (Field Diary, April 4, 2018)
In this line, gossip has a prominent role. For Elias and
Scotson (2000), gossip is phenomena whose dynamics

Saúde Soc. São Paulo, v.30, n.2, e210008, 2021 6
explain norms, beliefs and relationships of a community,
whether derogatory or complimentary; they are faces of
the same coin, serving to afrm a dominant opinion,
consolidate or undo relationships, move away or bring
people together, being, therefore, a powerful tool in
communication and instrument of social control. In this
case, gossip plays a rather negative role in the bonds
between the people of the community.
Gossip is a source of discord and many ghts
among the residents of the community. The
internet, via social networks, appears as something
that intensifies the situation. (Field Diary,
November 14, 2017)
One paper cited gossip and the whole [research
group] emphatically confirmed its existence
everywhere and in the community. (Field Diary,
September 14, 2018)
In the process of socialization and community
organization, violence has contributed to the
blurring of the social fabric. Among these, the
organization of drug trafcking has interfered in
the daily dynamics by dictating rules of conduct
and coexistence (Medeiros; Sapori, 2010). In this
territory, the leaders note the inuence of trafcking
in the organization of community dynamics.
At the time of the gangs and during the period
when the Terceiro Comando was at the conducting
the trafficking in the neighborhood, there were
many robberies and the community was much
more violent. It was common, for example, to
see corpses and heads floating in the river,
bodies of people probably murdered by gangs.
That doesn’t happen anymore. Conflicts are
resolved by trafficking [...] although situations
of street fighting and deaths no longer happen,
we recognize that other types of violence were
brought to the neighborhood. (Field Diary,
December 4, 2017)
The minimization of the presence of the State
causing situations of social helplessness (Dimenstein;
Cyril Neto, 2020) favors the installation and growth
of drug trafcking organizations and the consequent
violence, which is a problem difcult to solve in practical
and ideological terms, according to Zaluar (1997).
The aforementioned weaknesses are part of
a context of extreme poverty and lack of basic
sanitation that daily endanger the physical and
mental health of the inhabitants, a condition that
generates a feeling of humiliation and aggravates
suffering, since the place where people live reects
in their own dignity, as described in the book Quarto
de despejo (Jesus, 2007).
Potentialities expressed in the forms of organization
and socialization and in the participatory processes
of community leaders
According to Martin-Baró (2017), the perception
of social injustices triggers a process of awareness,
which, combined with subjective and intersubjective
resources can awaken different forms of
confrontation. Also according to Martin-Baró
(1997), as it gradually decodes the world around, the
subject captures the oppression and dehumanization
mechanisms, thus transforming the consciousness
that perceives the situation as natural and opening
the horizons to new possibilities.
[Barreto] told about his role together with Martina
in the fight of ISAC [Instituto Socioambiental e
Cultural], because the pit
4
also brings damage
to the class of anglers, who have their work
product contaminated and therefore no possibility
of being marketed or consumed. He stressed
the importance of raising awareness among
the population about the risks to which they
are exposed due to the presence of pits for the
disposal of heavy metal waste by companies that
claim to seek progress, but by misinformation and
disrespect. (Field Diary, March 1, 2018)
4 Located in the Piaçaguera river channel, the pit stores 2.6 million cubic meters of sediments that have contaminants banned by the
Stockholm Convention on Organic Pollutants, the pollution levels found exceed four times the highest level ever described in the
literature (Mesquita, 2019).

Saúde Soc. São Paulo, v.30, n.2, e210008, 2021 7
The critical awareness that arises in the face of
the reality that surrounds it provides a new praxis
that, in turn, opens to new forms of consciousness.
According to Martin-Baró (1997), the awareness
process results in strengthening the subjects and
the community, because people realize that the
situations of oppression they live in are shared by
other people in the community.
that’s why I tell the sherman, it’s not by speaking
that we’re going to [...] we’ll only be able to change
something when we have information and then we
work on that information then see which one is
better for everyone. Did you understand? And that’s
not a simple thing, that happen overnight, we have
to see, legislation, law, rule, what is up to us to do,
for this common. (Barreto)
The human being is transformed as he modies
the reality, being a dialectical process that, according
to the author, can only happen with dialogue between
the subjects (Martin-Baró, 1997; Montero, 2010).
Oh, yesterday I was talking to some women here
on our street, we’re forming a commission for us to
go to the trap house to talk to them about the funk
party they’re doing here. (Petra)
then we started to organize ourselves in the Mothers
Club to see how we could claim [...] then the big
obstacle was the railway network, and Father
Antonio helped a lot in this construction [...] he
formed a team, bring people [...] nancially support
a bus to take us to the legislative assembly to press
deputy, to press the Union Heritage Service/SPU,
because there was no ambulance, it wouldn’t enter
in if someone died. (Martina)
The awareness of a situation of deprivation leads
a group of people to organize themselves to claim
their rights or to create solutions, a group that
mobilizes begins to demand better living conditions.
As pointed out by Touraine (2007), since they have
lived male domination in their lives, women may take
more general actions for the recomposition of life.
And I saw that here the children lived in a very high
risk situation, besides poverty, right, the health,
everything: the situation was precarious, much
more than we see now, right? There were children
walking around naked because they lacked clothes
[...] And then as I already knew the Salvation Army
in Santos, I invited them, and Margareth Ingrid was
there. I invited her to come and do this work here in
the community. (Petra)
[A social worker] helped in the organization, as
guidance [...] how could guide ourselves, to organize
ourselves so that we can register, so that we can
actually exist. Because the society had the statute,
but it was not registered due to the lack of money,
[...] we did not know the way to register it, we would
register it but it was not legalized so we kind of existed
clandestinely, we had an internal organization but
it was not legalized. So the rst legal entity was
made by women. We did it. [...] it is the Community
Association [...] which still exists. (Marina)
The active presence of female leaders from
the beginning, based on awareness processes, has
opened possibilities for a new praxis, including by
effectively participating in the organization and
collective mobilization in the current context of the
COVID-19 pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the
intensifying effects of social
inequalities
A large part of the population that had already
suffered from the lack of fundamental rights had
the situation aggravated by the investment cuts
proposed by PEC 241, which justied the containment
of social programs that had been ghting enormous
social inequalities by assuming that the country’s
economic problems are caused by public spending,
directly putting social rights at risk (Fiocruz, 2016).
In this context, the covid-19 pandemic arrived
in Brazil in 2020
5
, whose advance explained the
consequences of social inequality by affecting more
5 On February 26, 2020, the rst case was conrmed in Brazil in the city of São Paulo (Croda; Garcia, 2020).

Saúde Soc. São Paulo, v.30, n.2, e210008, 2021 8
directly the populations with greater difculties of
putting into practice isolation and social distancing
due to the need to ght for survival and the housing
precariousness (Caponi, 2020; Santos, 2020). In this
case, as explained by Nakamura e Silva (2020, p. 156),
the bodies are distinctly vulnerable to infection,
access to health services, illness and, therefore,
death resulting, among other things, from the
absence of public policies that require health
strategies linked to other initiatives to respond
to the various aspects involved in the necessary
confrontation of the pandemic.
On the other hand, we see the “establishment of
networks of solidarity, community initiatives and
responses that, as in other health challenges already
experienced, are fundamental links in the construction
of answers that have required us to have uninterrupted
reflections” (Nakamura; Silva, 2020, p. 157), as
happened in this community, which, despite all the
stress, counted on the solidarity of the residents, which
is a necessary cooperation to face the minimization of
the presence of democratic institutions.
the stress level of people increased, we saw that
people got more impatient, I myself witnessed like
about three assaults against women. (Martina)
unemployment has also increased, the difculty
increased a lot, because this is a very needy
community, the abundance here is very large,
abundant of everything, right, but at the same time
solidarity [...] solidarity has increased a lot. (Martina)
The leaders were also able to organize themselves to
ght the spread of the virus by raising awareness among
residents, by using technological resources offered, and
partnering with companies and organizations to obtain
the necessary items for protection.
we organized an internet group called good people,
formed mostly by young people, because we are
very supportive to each other here, so depending
on the need, what is happening, it’s like an alarm
is triggered, you know, in each one, so everyone
mobilizes. (Martina)
I decided to do this awareness work, we partnered
with some organizations, we received donations
of alcohol gel, mask, liquid soap, we lled bottles
and put in strategic points, we made posters, we
started to do this work so that people would become
aware [...] then we started to partner with other
organizations, we got market baskets, donations
to collaborate with other people that had no food ...
this at the boom of the pandemic. (Martina)
Aggregating social participation and collective
work has allowed leaders to make themselves subjects
of history and assume the role that the neoliberal
capitalist state is failing to fulll. They know that, as
Scaramboni reminds us (2020, p. 14), “the importance
of lives lies in the actions built by the collectivisms,
which insist on living and fostering society projects
that imply not in the extermination of people, but in
the end of inequalities”. They face adversities as they
can, despite the set of affections that the pandemic is
triggering and intensifying, especially the negative
ones, generating psychic suffering, such as fear, anger,
envy, and longing. However, they also trigger hope, “a
constant partner (fear nourishes hope and hope allows
us to live in spite of fear)” (Sawaia, 2020, p. 4).
In this regard, Scaramboni (2020, p. 11)
emphasizes that:
In these deadly paths, staying alive maintaining
the relation with the possibility of living is the rst
challenge. Weaving a production of care and coping
practices to the refusal of death, with information,
masks, water, soap, harm reduction strategies and
what else possible.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought more than
just medical and epidemiological consequences, for
example: the social, political and economic effects,
causing an intensication of existing precariousness
such as poverty, vulnerability by the absence of
fundamental rights, the unhealthiness of housing,
besides the lack of either state interventions or

Saúde Soc. São Paulo, v.30, n.2, e210008, 2021 9
private investments, bringing numerous challenges
for leaders in a moment when the emergency aid
ends in the country.
Final considerations
We found that community leaders have a
history of achievements related to improvements
in living conditions despite the existence of what
are considered weaknesses, such as the current
lack of mobilization existing in the community,
the demotivating perception of corruption and the
disarticulation between the leaders and violence of
the drug trafcking organization.
Despite the existence of potentialities such
as the processes of awareness, organization and
dialogue with the community to achieve some
objectives – such as the creation of the Mothers’
Club and the organization of an institute against
the pit (ISAC) – most actions have not yet resulted
in an implementation of public rights and policies
of health, education, assistance or culture.
The precariousness of living conditions in the
community, accentuated by the presence of the
pandemic, triggers social participation, since this
becomes a concrete need today. The question is: how
to foster social participation beyond voluntarism?
The selective presence of the State in this and other
communities has given rise to new movements of
social participation, actors and leaders. The church and
trafcking emerged, both fullling different functions,
but often acting in a common eld: assistance.
We found that making people appropriate the
territory is one of the great challenges, thus boosting
democratic and participatory processes aimed at
combating the injustices and sufferings of populations
put on the sidelines by an institutionalization, whose
origins date back to colonialism and patriarchy that
mark the origins of our country.
These processes can advance public policies and
lead the State to a path of greater social equity by
denouncing social inequalities, being, therefore, an
important object of scientic research and reection.
Our study has the gap related to the development
of other themes related to the phenomenon of social
participation, such as: overcoming assistance and
voluntarism; gender issues, considering the leading
role of women in this community; the aspects that
lead to leadership in this community and the role
that the State plays in vulnerable communities.
These issues remain as themes of desirable future
investigation with the purpose of contributing to the
necessary confrontation of inequalities.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the reviewers of the journal for careful reading and for
the contribution that improved our text.
Authors’ contribution
Yagiu participated in the information management and analysis,
writing, critical review and approval of the nal version. Castro-
Silva, Euzebios Filho and Martin participated in the writing, critical
review and approval of the nal version.
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