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This article describes the counter-insurrectional strategies adopted by Portuguese authorities to annihilate some resistance practices emerged during the implementation phase of a government rehousing programme in an informal neighborhood situated in the area of Lisbon, Portugal. The resettlement plan offered the opportunity to the local municipalities of succeeding in eliminating the “illegal” neighborhoods and providing to the relocation of the residents in social houses. Against the implementation, a local resistance was organized by a ‘right to the city’ collective; furthermore, informal and alternative forms of opposition arose in the neighborhood. Nevertheless, the author shows that those forms of resistance failed and local authorities managed to destroy these practices, mainly thanks to four different strategies adopted: family and community fragmentation; control of information; tactical destruction of the neighborhood; use of violence. Through an anthropological analysis of these complex experiences, the author intends to focus on the social conflict for the “right to housing” in contemporary Portugal.