Politics & Power Quote by Walter Salles

A single hard number does what a paragraph of moralizing can’t: it yanks leprosy out of the museum of “old-world” diseases and drops it into the present tense. Walter Salles isn’t speaking like a clinician; he’s speaking like a storyteller who understands how audiences file suffering away when it feels distant, rare, or already “solved.” “Still” does the heavy lifting here. It’s a rebuke aimed at complacency - at the comfortable assumption that modernity automatically retires certain kinds of human misery.

The specific intent is pragmatic and political: to insist on visibility. By anchoring the claim in “500,000 persons,” Salles borrows the authority of public health language while keeping his focus on people, not statistics. “Afflicted” carries an older moral weight, echoing the stigma that historically clung to leprosy, which is part of the point: even when treatable, a disease can remain socially contagious.

The subtext circles back to Salles’s broader filmography, where movement across landscapes exposes inequalities that are easy to ignore from the center. “In Latin America” isn’t just geography; it’s a quiet indictment of uneven development and international attention cycles. The line also anticipates the media’s tendency to treat disease as a trend: urgent when it spikes, forgotten when it becomes chronic.

Contextually, it reads like an intervention against the romance of travel narratives and the aestheticization of the region. Salles forces the camera to refocus: not on spectacle, but on ongoing, preventable suffering that persists precisely because it can be ignored.