Brazil-watchers have all seen that protests exploded into violence last night, and that the police handled the situation horribly and perhaps even maliciously, over-reacting, letting the situation get out of control, and committing shocking acts of violence.

None of that is actually in dispute anymore. Claire Rigby described the tension and fear last night excellently on this blog. Mayor Haddad now says the night was marked by ‘police violence’ and Brazil Justice Minister went as far to call it ‘extreme police violence.’ Investigations are underway.

What I want to do is try to think about where the protests come from, what they mean, and what they could mean for the future. It can be easy to overestimate the importance of the protest’s ‘leadership’ or the people on the ground, and far too easy to connect the phenomena primarily to the other big headlines in Brazil at the moment – slowing growth, inflation, crime, Dilma, etc.

Very briefly, I think a better explanation is that a small group of committed activists have tapped into an issue most Paulistanos can get behind them on (poor public services, especially public transportation, and now, the police), and that the combination of a new middle class and a new generation of students mean more people feel empowered to make demands on the state. Even before last night’s debacle, a small majority of Paulistanos supported the protests.

The other more obvious lesson is that the São Paulo military police have no idea how to deal with protests. But first, a quick history of a very unexpected clash.

Movimento Passe Livre

The “Free Pass Movement” or “No fare movement” is a relatively radical group, heavy on students, that has long been staging protests demanding that all public transportation be free. In a country like Brazil, this in itself strikes me as Utopian at best, and absolute nonsense at worst. Unless we achieve some kind of anarcho-communist golden future, someone will have to pay for the buses and trains, and it makes sense that those who use them should pay more than those who don’t.

It’s clear by the page’s aesthetics that there are some extreme elements to the group, and this video shows they’ve long liked to get right to direct action tactics, being willing to shut down the metro last year for a cause few had heard of at the time. I’m not making a judgment on this strategy one way or another at the moment, but this is surely a long way from the more generally supported protest movement we have now.

Then, last week, the bus fare here rose from 3 reais to 3.20, and they organized protests specifically against that rise. Their slogan was the not-so-flexible “If the fare doesn’t come down, we’ll shut the city down.” At the time, I personally wasn’t very sympathetic to this.

On Tuesday, those protests got out of hand, the police seemed to have lost total control, property was destroyed and people, including officers, were hurt.

The response from the media and the police was uniform. These people are vandals and need to be taken care of. Both of São Paulo’s main newspapers called for a police crackdown, and police promised one. This was not a good sign, and I was worried.

The issue

But the thing is, there are few things Paulistanos agree on more than the obvious fact that transportation is a nightmare, and has not seen improvements commensurate with the rise in demand and incomes here over the last decade. In a city with many problems, getting back and forth can be one of the biggest.

This was now a specific issue that lots of people could get behind. Twenty centavos is nothing for most, yes, but:

1. It was the symbolic last straw for many 2. Lots of others said they wouldn’t mind price hikes if the services actually improved and 3. For lots of Brazilians, 6.40 a day on bus fare is a lot of money. If you make minimum wage (755 a month) and take two buses a day, that means you’re spending a whopping 26 per cent of your income just on getting around. Brazil has come forward a lot in the last decade, but the little man still always gets screwed. But maybe now he’s more willing to stand up for himself.

Asking for free transport is a bit unrealistic, but asking for better and more accessible public transportation seems a no-brainer. Even though survey respondents said they generally thought the protesters went too far, most supported the protests themselves. It seems the media may have gotten something else wrong. Lots of people really don’t like the police here. In 2012 the PM were credibly accused, many times, of brutal executions in the city’s poor periphery, and plenty were not inclined to see Tuesday’s clashes just as acts of one-sided vandalism.

The protest

At least, there was enough of those combined elements to get 5,000 people together last night. It was a mix of left-wing groups, regular citizens in favor of better transportation, those protesting police violence (and not just from Tuesday) and a small minority of some masked anarchist types that were obviously bent on making trouble, which they did.

5000 is not very many in a city of nearly 20 million. And quite a few of these people would have been protesting no matter what. But until the police started firing, people in nearby buildings or stuck in traffic were just as likely to express solidarity with the crowds as they were to complain.

Of course, I do not discount the notion that a general malaise stemming from the fear of inflation, less optimism about the economy, and perhaps even an uptick in crime have made people more likely to revolt or support a revolt. More directly, people last night complained about investments in the World Cup and Olympics while public services for Brazilians lag.

But as I said on this radio show today, perhaps counter-intuitively, I think this has to do as much with economic growth in the last decade as it does with stagnation in the last year. Sociologists have argued that the new ‘middle class,’ long excluded entirely from economic or political participation, have been becoming consumers over the last decade, and that a realization of consumer rights may lead to demanding their full rights as citizens.

Of course, a lot of these kids were left-wing students, not exactly the working poor. But this is also a new generation. These kids have grown up with no memories of the repressive dictatorship, and for 10 years have been under an openly progressive government that is supposed to be responsive to their demands. Public services should be getting better. So a small group of them wasn’t afraid to go ask for it, and they got lucky, tapping a nerve with the public. And the police probably helped their cause last night. We’ll see Monday what happens, when the next protest takes place.

Post-script 1: Politics and the Press

Just as background: The mayor of São Paulo is newly elected Fernando Haddad, of Dilma’s left-leaning Worker’s Party. He is in charge of the buses. The governor, Geraldo Alckmin, is  from the opposition PSDB, to the right of center, and is in charge of the police, the metro and trains. As I’ve said before, almost all of the major press here leans in Alckmin’s direction. Keep all of this in mind as it unravels.

Post-script 2: Turkey

Last night I tweeted that the crowds had chanted “The love is over, Turkey is right here” as they were tear gassed. This was re-tweeted about a billion more times than I expected, to the point that people in Turkey are now reaching out to me about the situation here. I suppose the parallels are clear: protesters tear gassed who had been dismissed by the media at first as vandals. They seemed be saying: why does our press/government praise them over there, but when we do it here, it’s not allowed?

But I want to make clear that I personally think there are far more differences between the two cases than similarities. The national government here is still extremely popular, and most of the protesters are broadly on Dilma’s side. This is a much more specific protest. But if protesters in Brazil and Turkey want to reach out to each other, that’s up to them.

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This year, the country didn’t deliver on everything international observers thought the country had promised, but Brazil still remains one of the 21st century’s most remarkable success stories. 2013 could be decisive.

For those paying attention to Brazil headlines, 2012 was mostly a bad year. For some, it was enough to re-evaluate the status as an emerging power that the country has euphorically held for years now.

The economy barely grew, and government involvement in the economy has surprised some international investors. The ruling Worker’s Party was dragged through the mud repeatedly as the Supreme Court handed down sentence after sentence for a vote-buying scandal from Lula’s first term. The PCC returned to the scene in São Paulo, and a small-scale war broke out between police and the gang. New laws dismayed environmentalists concerned for the Amazon.

But Brazil still remains one of the most remarkable success stories of the 21st century. This is true for a few simple reasons. 40 million people have risen out of poverty, and inequality has decreased. Despite the slowdown, unemployment is at record lows, and wages have continued to rise. Perhaps most importantly, we saw last week that President Dilma has an eye-popping 78 percent approval rating.

In short, the vast majority of the population support the way the country is being run, people are better off than ever, and society is more just. It’s important to remember that this is the whole point of economic growth and democracy in the first place. The results are there. We shouldn’t confuse means with ends, as is so easy to do when we journalists get caught up in the latest GDP numbers, or scandal.

Even some of the the year’s worst stories have a positive flip-side. As ugly as the corruption trial was, many believe that the tough sentences handed down to high-level politicians could signal an end to political impunity in the country. And despite the tragedy of a spike in violence in São Paulo’s periphery, the state’s murder rate is still much lower than it was a few years ago.

When Brazilians and observers (justifiably) complain about the country at the moment, a little context can be uplifting. What has the world been going through for the last 12 years, especially since 2007? How many countries in the world can you point to with: rising standards of living, reduced inequality, and widespread, long-lasting contentment with leadership? This is certainly not how things feel in my native California, or in Europe. And all of this in an open, liberal democracy? I can’t think of many examples.

But of course, nothing guarantees this will continue, and 2013 could be a decisive year. We can’t expect wages to rise forever without economic growth returning, and so the world will be holding their breath until it does, as expected next year.  But if instead there is more stagnation, or more of what the international community sees as state meddling in the economy, international investors could finally give up and concentrate on countries like Mexico or Colombia. And it’s hard to imagine how the PT would be seen by the people if any of the party’s social gains were reversed.

I personally don’t think either of those doom scenarios will come to pass. We’ll see. But for now, here are some of the bad, the good, and the interesting stories from 2012.

These are summaries – click the links for more in-depth info.

The bad

Corruption –

We watched all year as high-level politician after high-level politician was brought down for the ‘mensalão’ scandal from 2003, and a new hero of the opposition (and anti-corruption movements) was born in the form of Joaquim Barbosa (pictured above).

Violence –

War broke out for the first since 2006 in São Paulo. Again, the major parties were the PCC, the state’s main gang, and the military police. The latter lost over 100 officers to (mostly) targeted executions, while the murder rate in SP jumped.

The economy –

This is the big one. After growing 7.5% in 2010 (and causing us in the international press to rush here), then slowing to 2.7% in 2011, we may not do much better than 1% in 2012. Even more awkward was the moment when Finance Minister Guido Mantega joined the rest of analysts in wildly overestimating third-quarter growth, leading The Economist to call for his dismissal. Needless to say, President Dilma was not pleased to hear this from the British magazine.

But the economy is expected to pick up in 2013, thanks not only in part to the huge cut in interest rates carried out this year, which have finally come down to the levels of a normal country. And in reality, the 7.5% growth year was a statistical blip after -0.3% in crisis-hit 2009. Taken together, the economy had been growing at 3.6% a year, close to the average over the last 20 years, and to what we’re likely to see over the next few years.

But more worrying is that some investors believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that the government has begun to micro-manage the economy and that the possibility of intervention may be unpredictable. Much of this has to do with the decision to lower energy prices. I personally think they’re wrong, or at least that this was a problem of the government’s way of communicating the changes rather than the changes themselves. But some people are on edge, and this is especially important, as a drop in investment is the real culprit for the bad numbers.

And of course, there remains so much that Brazil should and could do to increase productivity and upgrade its growth model.

Infrastructure –

We are still waiting on this one. This is one part of Brazil’s economy that most desperately needs to be resolved, and we’ve still only seen baby steps.

The environment –

My visit to the Amazon this year was not pretty, both because of the persistence of slave labor and the obvious destruction of the rain forest. Things took a turn for the depressing for environmental activists as the government rolled back protections in 2012.

The good

Politics –

Whatever you think of the ruling Worker’s Party (PT), it is undeniable that if you use the standard most often applied to political parties, Lula and Dilma’s have overseen a truly remarkable success story since 2003. Lula left office one of the most popular leaders in the world, and two years into her term, Dilma is already widely supported. 78 per cent approval is a breathtaking figure. And this after everything that happened in 2012.

Despite the mensalão mess, the PT did very well in municipal elections this year, and took back São Paulo, South America’s largest city. If 2014 elections were held today, all polls indicate Dilma would win by a landslide.

And without a doubt, the country plays a much larger role on the world stage than it did in 2002.

The PT, like everyone else, could improve greatly, but widespread support and a rising nation means you are winning, big. This is a tough act to follow.

The real economy –

As I mentioned above, for all the dismal numbers, life on the ground still feels better than ever. Families are still rising out of poverty. The explanation for this is a little complicated, but the reality is there. It can’t last forever like this, of course, but forever hasn’t happened yet.

Justice –

The flip side to the mensalão mess is a justice system which really has teeth for the first time anyone can remember. This has always been the case for the poor, but now politicians can be on the hook, too. This has many hoping they will think twice in the future.

Even some police are being held to account. Some of those that gunned down suspected members of the PCC and, by all accounts, set off this year’s wave of violence, are now in jail.

World Cup preparations –

For years we wondered if Brazil would be ready to host the World Cup. We haven’t sorted out our infrastructure problems, but it looks like at least the stadiums will be ready.

My personal take is the following: The World Cup will go the way Brazil does for most visitors. Something or another will go wrong. They’ll be stuck in traffic, or miss a flight, or end up spending more than they expected on this or that. But those things will be heavily outweighed by the charm of the country and the fun of the event, and most will go home raving about Brazil.

Cost of living –

For us foreigners, it’s been good news that the real has come down significantly this year. Brazil is no longer so maddeningly expensive. For Brazilians, the cost of living hasn’t changed much.

Corinthians –

“The people’s team” from São Paulo took the world club championship, and gave Brazilian football a much-needed boost. This also meant lots of traffic and nonstop fireworks in the city, but overall it was very good for the country, and for South America.

The unexpected and interesting

Lula back on the scene –

I suppose it was more of an anomaly that he was actually gone for a while. But after recovering quickly from cancer, the former president was given a grand welcome back and got to work quickly, helping out in this year’s municipal elections. Crucially, he has so far floated above the mess of the mensalão scandal, and insisting he know nothing of the scheme. We’ll see if he can keep this up in 2013.

Music –

2012 was a much more interesting year musically than 2011, in my opinion. We saw the rise of Brazilian hip hop to the mainstream, “techno brega” from the Amazon in the form of Gaby Amarantos, and funky pop from the likes of Tulipa Ruiz. Here’s our full interview with Emicida, and Criolo’s will be posted next year.

Eike Batista –

He did not have a good year. There was the unfortunate incident with his son, Thor. Then he attracted lots of negative attention, and fell quite dramatically from his position as Brazil’s richest man.

Race –

Hard to categorize this one as good or bad, but the country stared two deep-seated problems in the face this year: relations with indigenous populations, and the government’s approach to black Brazilians.

Tourism –

The sector is doing quite well, but it has nothing to do with the gringos. The sector is almost entirely powered by Brazilians moving around their own country.

The rebirth of the center –

Long more famous for being “Crack land” than anything else, we saw interesting new movements coming up from the street.

Evangelical power –

Much to the dismay of bien-pensant liberals, Brazil’s numerous, and often unsettling, Evangelical Christian churches revealed themselves as an ever more potent political force.

Exhibitionist turn –

We saw Brazil’s sub-celebrity realitytainment industry power into the same bizarre gears we’ve been accustomed to around the world. First, there was the sex, or perhaps rape, transmitted live on Big Brother Brasil. Then we had the young girl who auctioned off her virginity for $800,000.

Petrobras – Graça Foster –

One of South America’s largest companies inherited a true rags-to-riches story as Graça Foster took over. Here’s hoping she can help navigate Petrobras out of its current mess.

Niemeyer –

And finally, we bid a sad farewell to nation-defining visionary architect Oscar Niemeyer, who passed at 104 years old. Here’s an interview I did with him last year, and perhaps next year I’ll post my pictures from his 104^th birthday party.

Here’s hoping 2013 goes better. Happy New Year.

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By last Sunday every city in Brazil had selected a new mayor. This will affect everyone here differently, as they will be governed at the local level by one of the 19 – nineteen! – parties running the country’s city halls. But what happened on a national level?

There are some good background sources, such as our LA Times story, Gabriel Elizondo’s blog, and Fernando Rodrigues’ excellent and extended analysis (in Portuguese) of who won and lost out this electoral season.

But here’s a stab at drawing some broad lessons about shifts in Brazil’s politics.

1. Lula still matters, a lot. The big take-away headline is that the PT (Worker’s Party) took back South America’s most important city after eight years. This was not expected. Fernando Haddad was way behind at the outset of the election, after being hand-picked by Lula. Lula and Dilma’s campaigning paid off in a big way, in what turned out to be a spectacular victory for the PT. The Mensalão looks like it played its part, but did not take down the party like some thought it would.

2. But Lula is not all-powerful. His man lost sorely in a close election in Salvador, the country’s third-largest city, and the PT candidate lost Fortaleza too.

3. More parties, more mess? Brazil’s multi-party system is notoriously complicated, notoriously hard to explain, and notoriously difficult to govern. This has gotten worse. The amount of actively ruling parties has gone from 16 to 19. This means more of the shifting alliances and allegiance-buying that probably in some ways has led to Brazil’s historic problem with corruption.

As this excellent guest post at the FT states:

The proliferation of political parties makes governing the country a particularly difficult and costly task. To pass legislation, presidents, governors and mayors often depend on heterogeneous governing coalitions of political parties whose allegiance has to be bought over and over again with pork and/or patronage jobs.

To get a sense of how messy things are, consider the following. The “Social Democratic Party” is different than the “Social Democratic Party of Brazil”. The former was recently created by the outgoing mayor of São Paulo as he split off from the right-wing “Democrats”, which is very different than the “Democratic Movement Party”, which has no ideological allegiance whatsoever but tends to always move towards power. The “Social Democratic Party” opposed Haddad in the election but might now support him in power. Our new vice-mayor is from the Communist Party of Brazil (different from the Brazilian Communist Party), which supported the new regressive Forestry Code. All of this feels a bit like satire.

[youtube gb_qHP7VaZE]

All of this makes governing the country much more difficult for Dilma. Many intelligent people think that she knows which challenging reforms Brazil needs to undertake, but that she also knows how outrageously difficult it would be to try to get these things through Congress. Easy to see why.

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In many ways, political culture in South America’s two most-watched countries couldn’t be more different. Brazilian voters, like this one walking over campaign flyers yesterday, are less politicized, and choose between candidates who agree on the big questions.

Yesterday, Brazilians and Venezuelans went to the polls. Here, voters broadly voted to maintain the powers that be and gave President Dilma’s Worker’s Party a pleasant surprise by giving Fernando Haddad a shot to be mayor of São Paulo. Northwest of here, Venezuelans re-elected “controversial”* president Hugo Chávez again, setting him up for an astonishing twenty years in power.

The two countries are the most-watched in South America, and from outside, it may appear that since they share a border they have much in common. They do. But after being a correspondent in Caracas and watching elections there, and now covering votes here, it’s obvious that in many ways their political cultures couldn’t be more different.

Click here to see the LA Times summary of the Brazil election, or here for more detail from Folha, or below to continue to me explaining these differences.

Talking to voters yesterday in Penha, on the poor outskirts of São Paulo, I heard many people – many, many people – tell me they didn’t really know why they voted the way they did. Some said: Whatever, they are all the same, liars and cheats. Others said: Whatever, things are going fine, and I don’t know anything about these people, really.

In hyper-politicized, deeply divided Venezuela, hearing someone say something like this would be enough to make your head explode. It just doesn’t happen. Most Venezuelans you come across will have spirited, and most often well-thought out arguments as to why they support or do not support Chávez. You’re likely to disagree with around half of the conclusions, but they are informed opinions. Topics like socialism, capitalism, corruption, politicians, revolution and democracy fill their heads and barroom conversations far more often than they do here in Brazil.

Brazilians, in my experience, are far less political than Venezuelans. This can be explained a few ways, and can be seen as either good or bad.

It may be that Venezuelans have been forced to pay attention due to the transformative and conflictual nature of the Chávez government. It may also be that Brazilians pay less attention than they should. One should also mention that voting is mandatory in Brazil – meaning those who truly don’t care still cast ballots – and that Venezuela is a country with a revolutionary tradition, whereas in Brazil most historical advances were arrived at through compromise and smoothed over by ruling elites. Brazil never had a revolution, civil war, or any real open political conflict.

The second way Brazilian political culture is different than Venezuela’s is probably directly related to the first.

That is, that in Brazil, most of the major political parties broadly agree on what Brazil should be doing. Namely, more or less what they’ve been doing for 15 years. Despite the small differences between Lula’s PT and Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s PSDB that the two parties love to exaggerate, they both agree on the same kind of government. They oversaw, and continue to propoose, a more or less markets-friendly social democracy with a mid-sized state presence. This approach, combined with a boom in Chinese demand for commodities, has lifted 40 million people out of poverty and increased the country’s presence on the world stage, but of course has not solved by a long shot problems of shocking inequality, persistent corruption, and woefully lacking health and education systems.

If you compare the small disagreements within Brazil to the fights going on in Venezuela, they appear even tinier still. In Venezuela, plenty of people really do – despite the incredulence of much of the international press – want radical socialist revolution. And plenty of others there want a total break with everything Chávez has done, and share much more of Washington’s idea of development than Brasília is likely to soon.

Those fundamental questions are open in Venezuela, but in Brazil there is general agreement on a path. So perhaps, why should those here get too involved? No one yesterday in São Paulo seemed too concerned things could change much one way or another. In Venezuela, I’d be willing to wager, everyone was.

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Photo Vincent Bevins 07 – 10 – 2012

*Sarcasm

Sunday is the first round of voting. In cases where there is no majority, the top two candidates go to a second round of voting a month later.

São Paulo – the rise of Evangelical Christian politics

The mayorship of South America’s largest city is extremely important, likened credibly to running a mid-sized country. And as anyone who has visited SP knows, this place is in dire need of good leadership.

We’ve had a big surprise here. The country’s two major parties, the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or Worker’s Party, of Dilma and Lula fame), and the PSDB (the center-right party of the also much-revered Fernando Henrique Cardoso), have been shocked to find themselves trailing far behind Celso Russomano, the TV personality and candidate from the relatively new PRD, a party backed the Brazil’s increasingly powerful evangelical Christian churches.

This has terrified the traditional power structures and you have seen everyone coming together (other than the actual supporters of the man) to try to stop him. This includes the right-wing media, left-wing unions and parties as well as bien pensant middle-class liberal urban types. Most of Russomano’s supporters are the conservative poor, and some call his campaign a genuinely populist movement representing those who have long been neglected, and others call it the dangerous mixing of religion and politics.

But he is almost certainly going to the second round, so the question now is who is going with him. On the right we have José Serra, who was already mayor of São Paulo, but quit to run for president, against Dilma, and lose badly. That has not helped his image with the common man, and pollsters routinely find a large number of voters reject him.

Nevertheless, he’s ahead of Fernando Haddad, a relative newcomer for the PT, who has been pulling out all the stops (these stops are named Lula and Dilma) to get into the second round and give the city a left-of-center option. It could be close.

Here’s the most recent poll

Rio – Riding a wave of success vs. the gadfly critic

Incumbent Eduardo Paes (from catch-all centrist party PMDB) is overseeing a city which is booming, regaining much of its importance for the country, and which will host the Olympics in 2016. He should win easily and probably will. But the one person who may stop him from getting 50% of the vote Suday is Marcelo Freixo, the human rights advocate who famously inspired a character in blockbuster movie Tropa de Elite 2 (If you haven’t seen these two movies, but you are somehow reading this blog, you must).

Freixo is an extremely exciting figure for Rio’s middle-class lefties as well as many people in the favelas. This is an impressive spread, to say the least, and he’s a powerful critic of the way Rio is developing. Here is an interesting piece on him, if you’re interested.

Latest Datafolha poll on Rio

Check back here next week or follow me on twitter to see how this turns out, as well as more info on Brazil’s other major cities.

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[Photo above – Haddad, Russomano, and Serra, plastered on a wall. Felipe Morozini]