Dom Phillips reports from inside Brazil’s most recent protests in Rio and talks to a ‘Black Bloc’ style protester, whose clashes with police have increasingly dominated coverage of the demonstrations and may even be scaring other protesters away. All photos Dom Phillips

By Dom Phillips

There were seven protests planned in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday – Brazilian Independence Day, which had been billed nationwide as a day of mass protest. Not one pulled more than, at most, a couple of thousand people. Sociologists and academics have been saying this week that the violence has scared off the big crowds seen in June, and that protest groups have splintered. What happened in Rio, especially given the heavy police repression that followed a huge demonstration June 20 here, would seem to bear that out.

I wasn’t on Presidente Vargas Avenue in the morning when a small group invaded the Independence Day military parade and police set of tear gas. TV Globo replayed scenes of the invasion repeatedly, along with images of people they described as ‘anarchists’ burning Brazilian and American flags at the Zumbi Monument in Central Rio.

On Saturday afternoon I was in Cinelândia, central Rio, where the steps of the city council chamber have become an impromptu protest camp over the last weeks, and passing office workers step gingerly around protestors’ tents.

A few hundred protestors were milling around, but the only sign of the demonstration due to begin at 2pm was a handful of animal rights activists, one of whom was dressed as a pink rabbit. The next big event was 5pm near Guanabara Palace, seat of state governor Sérgio Cabral’s palace.

I reached the demonstration where a couple of thousand people were gathered at the exact moment the police started firing tear gas and stun grenades. There was a panic as hundreds of people started running back down the Rua das Laranjeiras towards the Lago do Machado square.

The air was thick with gas. I’ve been tear gassed by Rio police half a dozen times at demonstrations in public places, and this was the strongest I have felt it. People reacted as they usually do: they get angry, they cry (that’s why it’s called tear gas, it stings and makes the eyes water), they scream that the police are cowards.

And some of them, usually young men, usually wearing masks, start breaking things. This time it was the glass window of a bank foyer, where the cash machines are, a bus stop, a street light. As the crowds reached Lago do Machado, some of the masked young men began mingling with the traffic, stopping cars, lighting a fire in the street.

A crowd of onlookers stood on the steps of a nearby church – some hurried off nervously, others filmed on their cell-phones. Some of the protesters began trashing the glass frames on a bus shelter that cover up advertising billboards. For ten minutes or so, as the police made their way down, there was a little pocket of anarchy on that street corner.

It did not last. Rarely do protesters actually engage in combat with police – instead they throw stones from a distance, and light fires from rubbish. The police concentrate on shows of strength – in this case, a squad of them drove around on motorbikes, others rode black police jeeps, wearing their Robocop riot gear: helmets, shields, protective rubber pads and breastplates.

The ‘anarchists’ have their uniform too: masks, black T-shirts wrapped over their heads, hooded tops, black jeans, heavy metal and punk T-shirts. Everybody calls them Black Bloc and say they are inspired by the international protest tactics of the same name.

One black-clad youth holding a crash helmet asked me if I thought trashing banks and bus-stops was valid. “It is not vandalism,” he told me. He did not want to give his name. I got out my tape recorder.

“The financial institutions abuse the rights they have to charge us. The biggest enemy of Brazilians is the banks,” he said. “Every decision the government takes is looking at banks’ profits.” Then he ducked off as riot police in helmets began firing more tear gas in our direction.

Later in Cinelândia, surrounded by cameras, another group of ‘anarchist’ youth dressed in black shouted amongst themselves as they tried to decide what to do. A hundred or so headed off towards Lapa – a popular nightlife area, stopping by a skip to pick up staves of wood as they went, which they waved triumphantly in the air while chanting. A squad of riot police hurried after them.

The scene became increasingly surreal when a woman waving a flag took it on herself to lead the riot police procession, as if it was a carnival parade, while shouting, apropos of nothing: “Save Pope Francis!” Everybody did their best to ignore her: she did not fit into the script that both sides were acting out, in a protest novela that seems to have lost the plot.

Have increasing levels of violence put Brazilians off protests? This is the question being asked this week in the Brazilian media, in posts like this from UOL, in which Michel Zaidan Filho, sociologist and professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco, said: “Now there has been a radicalization, and many people did not go because of the criminality of the protests. The majority don’t want to face police, bombs.”

Back in March, in the alternate universe of pre-protest Brazil, I posted this – “What is ‘middle class'” – on this blog, on the 40 million people who have entered the ‘new middle class’ recently and how very different they are from the ‘old’ middle class and international definitions of the term. Partially as a result, the BBC asked me to take part in a round table debate on Brazil’s middle classes, its discontents, and the role they’ve played in the demonstrations that have swept the country since June.

Since I am on vacation, I thought posting this link would be an easy way to supply content for those people who who bizarrely care what I think about these things. Oh, and the debate also features former Finance Minister Mailson da Nobrega, Alexandre Schwartsman, and Lucia Nader, executive director of the Conectas human rights organization.

Here it is: In the Balance: Brazil’s Middle Class

Below are some small points I want to make about the protests more generally, somewhat as a correction to some of the other international coverage.

First, there is no such thing as “the protesters.” Since the demonstrations blew up in mid-June they have undergone a large number of permutations. People have dropped out, come back in, become disgusted with new elements; the focus has moved between cities, then returned, and marches have varied vastly in size and tactics and have stood for a very large number of different political causes, some contradicting the other ones. One day I will try to sketch this all out.

Nevertheless, up to 89% of the Brazilian population supports the protests in general, which means that if I was a Brazilian kid and wanted to push a cause or make my voice known, I’d feel I had all the weight of history behind me to do so. And despite the odd turns this kind of a chaotic process can take – see this LA Times feature I did on a bizarre “Anonymous’ Youtube video that got some strange demands onto the legislative agenda – the whole explosion seems to really be affecting, largely positively, the way the Brazilian political class (and even the media) are acting recently.

To sum up what ‘the protesters’ have demanded is very difficult, but one should likely stop after ‘poor public services,’ ‘corruption,’ (a very, very, broad term) and ‘police abuses.’ Throwing in ‘high taxes’ or ‘inflation’ or ‘the cost of living’ involves a bit of creative arithmetic.

Secondly – we’ve often fallen victim to a logical fallacy or two covering these protests. Just because they happened doesn’t mean they were waiting to happen, or that they had to happen based on political/economic circumstances. And just noting that Brazilians have a lot to complain about does not explain why the protests did happen. Everyone has something to complain about. The reality in Brazil is much more interesting and the role of the police especially has to be investigated.

Third – tomorrow we will see the first large protest organized by the Movimento Passe Livre (Free Fare Movement) since June. It’s directed against private ownership of public transportation and profiteering on the backs of commuters, but also calls attention to a big scandal involving a supposed cartel operating São Paulo’s train system in tandem with the governments of the right-leaning PSDB party. It will be very interesting to see how big it gets.

The situation in Brazil has changed radically since I wrote this a week ago. Most obviously, the protests are much bigger, perhaps around 200 times bigger. Importantly, many of the 5,000 people I was on the street with last Thursday no longer have much do with what we’re seeing on the streets, and the original Movimento Passe Livre will not organize any more protests in the near future, saying they were alarmed by the direction some of the demonstrators have taken recently (See Claire Rigby’s piece, below). And two people are dead.

I believe it’s easier than before to explain where the protests came from, and more difficult to predict what they will mean. I want to shoot off some scattered thoughts, but they may presuppose a tiny bit of knowledge. So first, some background for those that need it.

Here are the five stories I’ve done for the LA Times in the last week. The most important is the first one, the big feature I did yesterday attempting to explain what is behind all of this.

Brazil protests tap into frustration of have-nots (June 20)
Protests continue as thousands rally in São Paulo (June 18)
Authorities in Brazil reduce bus fares in response to protests (June 18)
Tens of thousands protest conditions in Brazil (June 17)
Protests against São Paulo fare hike turn violent (June 13)

After these were written, over a million people took to the streets last night across the country. Though in many cases these were supposed to be victory celebrations after fares were reduced in São Paulo and Rio, clashes ensued, one protester was killed by a car, and on the other side of Brazil a middle-aged street cleaner died after she inhaled tear gas.

The cause –

Last week I said that this explosion was more the consequence of economic growth in the last decade than of a recent slide in growth or even inflation. Yes, 40 million people rose out of poverty into a new middle class, and people feel empowered now to make the demands for what they were implicitly promised, an advanced middle-class society with services to match. And yes, they justifiably have a lot to complain about, especially when it comes to the things the protests originally centered on. Public transportation is abhorrent and overpriced, public schools and hospitals are tragic, and the police often treat Brazilians like dangerous criminals rather than citizens. This reality contrasts all too clearly with the image the shiny World Cup stadiums want to sell the world.

But I think this week gave us another, complementary, way to interpret what has unfolded. The obviously brutal police reaction on June 13, combined with the spotlight the Confederations Cup and massive media support provided, gave a generation, for the first time, a stage on which they could voice their complaints. And not only could they voice their grievances with the state, they could do it in an atmosphere of (justified, probably) self-righteousness, euphoria, and historical importance. The obviously unjustified police crackdown last Thursday (and then at soccer games Saturday and Sunday) gave the sheen of legitimacy to every issue Brazilians had to bring to to the table, since they were also asserting the right to protest itself.

The main issues from the start were ones that, in my opinion, deserved the near-unanimous support of the Brazilian people – better transportation, education, healthcare, and police. But the direction things have taken recently has shown that this special kind of protest moment throws up lots of contradictions as well. If everyone is together demanding everything, including things that may contradict the other things, that’s not exactly politics. Last night’s clashes hinted at why things may fall apart, or at least take separate paths.

It was incredibly bizarre to see the mostly new protesters shouting down many of the people who had spearheaded the movement just last week, because they were representing the same groups they always had. It was almost as if, after 20 years without a mass-based protest movement, no one realized that if they didn’t like a march organized around one specific issue (transportation fees, in this case) they were free to organize their own around another issue at another time and another place. They didn’t need to invade someone else’s protest and try to change it.

That was the situation in São Paulo, at least. Keeping track of the rest of the cities across Brazil has been so difficult that it’s impossible to summarize here.

I don’t think the vandalism or violence really need explaining. If you have over a million people on the streets because they are angry about something, it only takes a tiny, tiny, minority for something to get out of hand. All reports still indicate the overwhelming majority of protesters are peaceful. Where I come from, all it takes is a basketball victory to start a riot.

Next step

So what’s the next issue for those that want to stay on the street? Some coming together on Saturday think it’s opposition to PEC 37, a very complicated constitutional amendment which puts criminal investigations in the hands of the police, while the power to accuse remains with the Public Ministry, which will not investigate directly but oversee investigations. Without boring you, I can say that after a fair amount of research I still don’t know if I support it or not, but I certainly can’t understand why it would be the next flag under which to unite the ‘people’ rather than something so obvious as healthcare, education, or the police. No one holding a ‘PEC 37’ sign in São Paulo last night could explain why to my satisfaction, either.

Then there is this quite shockingly juvenile video being passed around (the music!), which comes with the added bonus that I may now be hacked because I said so. The other of the video’s ‘five causes,’ which were all well-represented on the street last night, make sense to some extent, I guess, and focus largely on corruption prosecution, but it seems bizarre to me that a movement would have its goals defined by a masked man on a Youtube channel.

In São Paulo, people have been protesting Marco Feliciano for a while now. That may get a boost. Then there are the movements that have already been around forever, protesting the World Cup preparations and pushing for more concrete goals like better social investments.

It seems we have a generation that has re-discovered its right to complain to a government which should represent them, a dormant energy and a desire to make a difference. Yes, some of these kids look new to the politics game, and the learning curve may be steep.

But as to what will happen in the short and mid-term, I haven’t the slightest clue. Hopefully the energy can be sustained but poured into more focused, and perhaps segregated, causes in the case of inevitable disagreements. But we’re already seeing in-fighting and defections in the movement as it stands. And now we have a body count.

Politics

This is the billion-dollar question this afternoon. If you are Dilma, what do you do? Do you assume these movements may lose legitimacy and fracture, and hold back from giving into a group that doesn’t have specific demands anyways?

Or, perhaps the tougher question: If Dilma wanted to give the protesters exactly what they want, what would that even mean? What could she give? What could she do right now? After all of this, if it really is supported by the population, the country is likely to demand something to show for it. We’ll see when she speaks tonight at 9pm.

Note 1 – The media

The left, the Movimento Passe Livre, and even this MTV star, are saying that after initially calling for a police crackdown, the conservative media in Brazil (that’s basically all of it) are now trying to turn the protests into an empty anti-politics movement, which to them makes it anti-PT, useless, or worse. Though it sounds radical, I wouldn’t entirely discount this hypothesis.

Note 2 – Me

I may keep updating this as the situation unfolds. I may also change my mind on every single thing I’ve written here.

Follow @Vinncent

Dom Phillips has returned to Rio de Janeiro, and sent in this video of protests there last night. He says the group there was more diverse, less dominated by the upper middle class than the protests in São Paulo – in Rio it was “the povão – periferia, favela, middle class, everyone.”

He writes: A crowd of at least 300,000 march through central Rio de Janeiro on Thursday to protest a wide range of grievances, including political corruption, failing health and education services, and spending on the World Cup. Trouble broke out when the crowd reached Rio Town Hall – there are various versions as to why – and police then fired tear gas indiscriminately into the huge crowd. As youths threw bricks and missiles, police responded with rubber bullets and more gas, then systematically moved through central Rio, firing tear gas as they went, sending panicked crowds running before them. At times small groups stopped to throw stones or light fires of rubbish on the street, but the sound of exploding gas canister and the clouds of gas they released soon sent them running again. The overwhelming mood was one of fear, disorder and aggression. Isolated violent incidents persisted for hours afterwards.

Since Claire Rigby grippingly described the nightmare scenes on the street in São Paulo a week ago, things have changed. Last night’s demo had a festive atmosphere, a multiplicity of often confusing demands – and a small group attacking the left-wing parties that had formed the core of the smaller protests last week.

By Claire Rigby

Last night in São Paulo, at the sixth in a series of mass protests that have gripped the city, was weird. On Avenida Paulista, under the glaring streetlights, it was a strange crowd perambulating up and down the boulevard, and the atmosphere felt like the afterglow of an immense festival, or a victorious football match. As riots were kicking off in cities across Brazil, and over a million people took to the streets, on Paulista there were families, people walking their dogs, thousands of the very young (teenagers), and a majority, at least during the time I was present, from about 7.30-9.30pm, with every appearance of being on their first ever march.

But it wasn’t really a march. It was like a Sunday walk in the park. What was odd about it, under the avenida‘s over-bright streetlights, which dazzle as much as they illuminate, was the ubiquity of placards and chants against President Dilma Rousseff, against the former president, Lula, and even the chant du jour, ‘Vem, vem, vem pra rua contra o governo’ – ‘Come out onto the streets against the government.’ Last week, the same chant, to the same rousing rhythm, was: ‘Vem, vem, vem pra rua contra o aumento’ – ‘Onto the streets against the price rise’, referring to the 20¢ increase in public transport fares, the movement’s original demand, which was met on Monday when the fare was returned to R$3.

Obviously, there’s nothing strange about protesters voicing opposition to the government. Inevitably, there’s plenty wrong with this one, with Brazil, and with ‘so many things they won’t even fit on my placard’, as I saw written more than once in the cacophony of handheld, hand-scrawled placards.

But in the context of a mass movement beginning to articulate demands that start from cheap or free public transport, and which progress, many are hoping, to demands for decent education and healthcare, identifying Dilma and Lula as the main targets, as I saw happening the length and breadth of Paulista, seemed naive, to say the very least.

Childish ways

‘Impeach Dilma!’ said a number of placards, amongst many dozens I saw criticising or insulting the president and her party, the PT (Workers’ Party). ‘Anyone not jumping loves Dilma!’ cried a mass of jumping youngsters – teenagers, really. ‘Are they saying, “Anyone not jumping loves Dilma”?’ I asked a guy standing next to me. ‘Yes,’ he smiled. ‘What on earth for?’ I asked. ‘It seems silly.’ ‘He looked at me. ‘It is isn’t it? Muito menineiro‘ – a lot of childishness.

Further down the avenida, it didn’t seem so childish. I saw some people posing ostentatiously outside Starbucks with a huge, professionally printed banner reading  ‘Lula, the cancer of Brazil’ (Lula survived cancer a couple of years ago) – posing like a tableau vivant, arranged just so, waiting to have their photo taken by passersby and, presumably, shared. Taking the measure of the crowd as I walked the avenida, I saw people from all walks of life, including a large complement of ‘playboys‘ or ‘coxinhas‘, as rich kids are known here, and a lot of placards declaring their bearers to be against corruption (who isn’t?), and for the impeachment of the president.

Even the hand-writtenness of the placards began to seem a little odd after a while. I’ve never seen a march with so many, and by the same token, I’ve never seen a march with no party-political placards at all. I’m generalizing a little – I saw a small group of people with black-and-red anarchist pennants, whose safety I feared for, having heard of attacks and beatings earlier in the evening, during a march by the PT.

There have been various incidents over the last week of mass protests on the streets of São Paulo, of PT members and activists identifying with other parties being hounded out of demos, threatened and abused for supposedly trying to ‘co-opt’ the movement. It’s a spurious claim that cooler heads and those with a little more experience and understanding of politics, perhaps, have tried to refute, calling for calm and pointing out that those activists were out on the street well before it even occurred to the new wave of protesters to take up their placards. Indeed, until a short time ago, the most common reaction to protest here in São Paulo, and something that has palpably changed in the last two weeks, was instant annoyance and irritation at the interruption to other citizens’ sacred ability to ‘come and go’ – read, to keep the city’s infernal traffic flowing, as if that were a reality even on a good day in São Paulo.

What I saw last night, at least while I was present, was an absence of visible PT presence: I learned later of the extent of the attacks that had been carried out earlier in the evening on a march by PT and other party members. I also saw, amongst the strolling first-timers, the excited teenagers and the seasoned protesters mixing in, watching and wondering, traces of a movement being co-opted, or threatened with it, by a handful of people with their own agendas – people taking advantage of the ‘Brazilian spring’ in to air political views with which none of those out protesting on the nights of the 6th, 7th, 11th and 13th June, would agree with in the slightest. Those were the four nights of smaller demos, which culminated in a particularly immense and savage response by police on Thursday 13th June, following crackdowns on a smaller number of protestors on previous nights.

That excessively violent crackdown – I wrote about it here on From Brazil – was followed by an immense march on Monday 17th that generalised the movement, bringing out tens of thousands in repudiation of the repression, and in support of … something. An elusive, delicate something that is being articulated all over Facebook, and in bars, cafes and workplaces in São Paulo and Brazilwide, in a Tower of Babel of debates and discussions.

Delicate moment

That nascent agenda, still being formed, has radicalized huge swathes of Brazilians, bringing political reflection and discussion into the open in an electrifying way. But its very delicacy and embryonic nature have also opened the way for nebulous discourses ‘against corruption’, ‘for peace’ and indeed, less nebulously, for the impeachment of the president. I even saw a huge banner last night reading, ‘No more taxes’. On a similar note, Vincent Bevins, the editor of this blog, has been questioning vigorously over the last couple of days the reasoning, for the movement, of being drawn into opposition and focusing energy on a Congressional Bill, PEC-37, which changes the way official investigations into fraud and corruption, amongst other things, can be carried out. In advance of last night’s protest, it was being widely touted as the reason for the march, though in the event, there were no more anti-PEC placards that I could see than there were anti-anything-else placards.

There’s an excellent account here (in Portuguese) of the atmosphere last night on Avenida Paulista, including an incident in which the writer, Camila de Lira, saw a boy in a red cardigan being verbally abused. While the wearing of the Brazilian flag last night, and scores of people with their faces painted with green-and-yellow stripes, as if at a football match, seemed more than acceptable, there are numerous reports of people wearing red shirts and T-shirts last night being harassed, verbally abused and even attacked. The boy in red was shouting back, and saying, of the attacks on the PT march earlier, ‘How could you dare to attack the elderly, people who fought against the dictatorship?’

He was referring to the march starting from 5pm yesterday, in which member of the PT but also the Communist Party and other left groups and parties, many in their 70s and 80s, had been booed, shouted at, threatened and even attacked (see the video below, in which a man repeatedly spits insults into the faces of left-wing marchers). On Paulista, according to this report in Folha, members of a range of left political parties were abused by a group of ‘nationalists’ with knives, who threatened to ‘meter a faca’ – stab them. Flags belonging to the PT (the ruling Workers’ Party) and the PSTU (United Socialist Workers’ Party) were taken from marchers and burned on Paulista (see an alarming short film of that, here), and marchers attacked. ‘They are destroying years of struggle,’ said one. ‘We’re not trying to take control of anything – we’re taking part.’ Writing on Facebook, where much of the most electrifying debate, blogging, discussion has been going on, the journalist Camilo Rocha said, ‘Remember: there’s no such thing as a democracy without political parties – that’s dictatorship.’

 [youtube l02g_Gn-eAM nolink]
Video above by Vincent Bevins. Notably, the sad-faced man on the far right being jeered by the motorcycle Guy Fawkes is not from the PT, but rather MMPT, the Movement for Housing For All, which organizes occupations of abandoned buildings downtown and was very visible in last week’s protests.

A statement last night by the originators of the protests, Movimento Passe Livre (Movement for Free Public Transport), reads, ‘The MPL is a non-party-political social movement, but we’re not against political parties. We condemn the acts of violence that have taken place against those organisations at the demonstration today, in the same way as we condemn police violence. From the very first protests, these organisations have been part of the mobilisation. What’s “opportunism” is trying to exclude them from the struggle we have constructed together.’

A report in Estado de S.Paulo today says the MPL has decided not to call any more protests in São Paulo due to the participation of groups incompatible with its ideals, ‘such as neofascists’. According to Rafael Siqueira, one of what seems like dozens of voices who speak for the MPL, the plan is to suspend calls for demonstrations while they consider how best to proceed regarding their demands around public transport and urbanism, and also how to deal with the question of activists with objectives contrary to the movement’s ideals.

I saw a girl with a bright pink placard last night saying ‘Brazil! – Don’t let me down’. ‘The giant has awoken’, said dozens of other banners and placards. The question of what success, and what failure, will look like, and what kind of giant o povo – the people – are planning to be, is still up in the air.

Dom Phillips and Otavio Cury were at the protests here in São Paulo last night (June 17), taking in the scenes and exploring the diverse reasons people took to the streets.  In Portuguese, with subtitles in English.

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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Claire Rigby describes the nightmare scenes she lived through in last night’s protest, as well as a society grappling with the idea of protest itself. Above, Folha’s own Giuliana Vallone, shot in the face with a rubber bullet.

By Claire Rigby

I took my press card to the demonstration in São Paulo last night, seeing a row of people handcuffed on the TV as I left, and hearing news of mass arrests before the demonstration had even begun. I thought if I got into trouble, it might just help. I needn’t have taken it: it wouldn’t have helped.

As I left the house, a reporter from the magazine Carta Capital had already been arrested arbitrarily along with dozens of other people. By the end of the night, the fourth in a series of escalating protests over an increase in public transport fares here in Brazil, around 200 people had been arrested and dozens of people injured by police, who shot repeatedly and indiscriminately into the peacefully protesting crowd with smoke bombs, tear gas and rubber bullets, chasing protesters through the streets for miles, and striking fear and loathing into those who witnessed their actions. Among the injured were 7 journalists from this newspaper, Folha de S.Paulo, two of whom were shot in the face with rubber bullets. And me. I was shot in the hand with a canister of either smoke or teargas at Praça Roosevelt, minutes after joining the demonstration. (My eye-witness account of police brutality and bullying of protestors is below.)

In the wake of a week of fierce debate in São Paulo, in workplaces, homes, cafés, bars and on Facebook, following Tuesday night’s demonstrations, which ended in disorder and clashes with police on Avenida Paulista, the story that quickly unfolded last night was one of reckless, unprovoked police violence against peaceful demonstrators. It has caused widespread revolt, further polarising the already vehement debate taking place here on the rightness or wrongness of taking to the streets, who is entitled to do it, on whose behalf protesters act, and what they are entitled to do when they get there.

Images and testimonies of police beating and firing on demonstrators; of people kneeling in the street, hands up in supplication, then being fired on at close range; and of bloodstained and bruised protestors and passersby (a Tumblr page has been set up to register injuries), tell the story of a night of mayhem – not at the hands of the protestors, but at the hands of the military police. Giuliana Vallone, a Folha reporter, was shot in the face with a rubber bullet, as was another reporter, Fábio Braga. A hairdresser, Valdenice de Brito, who witnessed Vallone being shot on Rua Augusta said, “She told me that I should get out of there because of the tumult, and just as she said it, a police officer looked at her and cowardly shot her.”

“People should be protesting against corruption or out demonstrating against violent crime – these are all troublemakers/vandals/students/iPhone-owners/unionists. It’s only a 20¢ rise,” is a fairly representative sample of the “against” refrains I’ve heard over and over this week regarding the fare hike protests, generally voiced loudest by those who can measure their salaries in multiple minimum wages – a common way of comparing levels of income here. But the disproportionately high cost of public transport even before the price rise (from R$3 to R$3.20), felt most keenly by the millions of workers who live in São Paulo’s vast periphery, is a source of shame and frustration even for well-off Paulistanos when they choose to consider it.

Journeys to work of two to three hours are commonplace, in packed and outdated buses; and for workers earning the minimum wage (R$755 in São Paulo, against R$678 elsewhere) or close to it, the cost of getting to work and back can account for more than a quarter of their income.

Yet the protests, organized by a non-affiliated single-issue group, Passe Livre São Paulo, have been about far more than the price of a bus fare, even if, as the debate continues to rage and as hundreds and thousands of articles and posts are published and devoured on blogs, sites and social media, the arguments and indeed, the movement, are still being articulated. The extremely high cost of living in SP is a frequent and growing complaint, coupled with anger at the quality of public transport and public services. Multiply that by frustration with the system’s endemic corruption, exasperation with the political class, and perhaps deep down, a recognition that the immense gap in income between the poor and the well-off in Brazil creates scandalous, unsustainable levels of inequality.

An apparently in-built reluctance to protest here in Brazil is also being called into question: Can people take to the streets, and even win concessions? Do you have to be a minimum-wage worker, forced to spend 4-6 hours a day on buses and paying through the nose for it, to be outraged by that?

By late last night, the city’s mayor, Fernando Haddad, was talking about a “possible excessive use of force” by the police, and promising an investigation. Along with thousands of others, I witnessed and experienced it first hand and was shocked by the nature of the sudden, indiscriminate and prolonged attacks on the crowd by the military police (see my testimony, below). “Historically unprepared to deal with dissent and opposition and untrained to meet the demands of a democratic society,” as my colleague Andrew Downie wrote last night, MPs are also accused of carrying out executions and acting in the form of death squads. I wrote about that here on From Brazil in January. Many have called for the disbandment of the service, created during the dictatorship.

The protests, mirrored in cities all over Brazil, including large demonstrations in Rio and Porto Alegre amongst others, have grown rapidly, and in SP, another, even bigger protest is expected on Monday night. It feels like a tipping-point moment that has subverted a frequent observation amongst foreigners living here: the glaring absence of protests and demonstrations, and the discrepancy between the scale of Brazil’s social inequality, and class antagonism. Accustomed to cordial interaction and minimal conflict – stemming, many Brazilians will tell you, from a long dictatorship and before that, master–slave social relations that never really went away – protest isn’t the done thing here. More common is an uncomfortable shrug, and a “Fazer o que?”, a “Muita calma nessa hora”, or even a “Vai dar tudo certo.” (What can you do? Everybody calm down. It’ll all work out in the end.) And at the other end of the same spectrum, “Troublemakers. Provocateurs. Vandals. They got what was coming to them.”

An epidemic of Facebook shares of images and texts from Taksim Square, Istanbul were satirised by a reader, writing in the Letters page of Folha de S.Paulo yesterday, who compared the newspaper headline’s characterising of the previous protests as “vandalism”, while classifying the Taksim square movement as “resistance”. Indeed, both Folha and its rival, Estado de S.Paulo, ran leaders supporting firm action on the part of the police in advance of the demonstration, and have often caricatured the mainly peaceful demonstrations as “vandalism”, whereas only a tiny minority carry out acts of vandalism, as I saw last night.

Distasteful as it might be to some, and frightening as it might be to witness, there’s a price to be paid for living in a free, peaceful society. For some, it’s the minor inconvenience caused by mass street protests on their way home from work. For others, or for the same people at different times, it involves taking to the streets in acts of civil disobedience, risking repression and possibly arrest, arbitrary or otherwise. But for still others, it means giving the police free rein to stamp out protest and the possibility of protest with a dose of state terror, and perhaps even a dash of wistful nostalgia for the good old days of the dictatorship.

As Rogério Leão Zagallo, a prosecutor and professor of law at SP’s prestigious Mackenzie University, put it last Thursday night, posting on his personal Facebook while he was stuck in traffic for two hours due to the protests, “Please, somebody inform the [military police] shock troops that this region comes under my jurisdiction, and that if they kill these sons of bitches I will bury the inquiry. … Oh, for the days when this kind of problem could be resolved with a round of rubber bullets in the back.” Zagallo got that wish, or part of it, but is reported to have been relieved of his duties at Mackenzie.

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AT THE PROTEST LAST NIGHT – MY ACCOUNT

Arriving at Praça Roosevelt in downtown São Paulo at 7.20pm last night, I joined the back end of a large, peaceful march that had started at the Teatro Municipal, and was now spanning most of the wide Rua da Consolação, moving up the road in the direction of Avenida Paulista. As I walked into the crowd, I could see teargas or smoke bombs rising at the head of the march, uphill, and I heard gas cannisters being fired with bangs that sounded like small bombs. On the steps overlooking the street from the square, two girls in black, with their faces covered, were spray painting the steps – “R$3.20 NÃO.” Just then, some 200 demonstrators who were standing on those steps at the bottom of the square, observing the march, moved into the street, joining the thousands-strong crowd, part of which had begun to turn and move back towards Avenida Ipiranga, in the direction from which it had come.

Moments later, I heard a series of explosions, very close, and the running began. I looked back over the heads of the people nearest me, and saw plumes of gas rising from canisters as they hit the road, 10 metres away. I could smell and taste the teargas and saw people covering their nose and mouths as they ran. I covered mine too. To cries of “Calma,” and “Don’t run, be careful,” the packed crowd was forced up into the square (Praça Roosevelt), into a bottleneck escape route complicated by pedestrian walkways that snake back and forth. Hands reached down, pulling people up over the rails. Gas, close behind and more canisters being fired. People trying not to panic, helping each other, but running, trying not to push.

I ran up a flight of steps to one side of the walkways, and up into the main part of the square. Making my way to the railing to one side of the running crowd, past groups of friends grasping at each other’s hands, trying to stay together as they ran, I found a vantage point and stopped to look back and try and understand the scene behind me: cannisters of gas still being fired in showers of sparks, plumes of gas rising, and people still running. I noticed a line of police officers, in helmets and riot gear, just below the railing and about 20 metres away from me. As I leaned over the railing, trying to see up Rua da Consolação, I felt a sudden hard impact smash against my hand, against a large silver ring I was wearing, and saw a small shower of sparks explode above me. I looked down and saw a black smear across my knuckles, and realised I had been clipped in the hand by a cannister of gas, leaving my knuckle bruised, black and red, and swollen. I feel almost certain I must have been fired upon on purpose, exposed, leaning over, absorbed in looking this way and that.

Up until this point, to my knowledge, the demonstration had been entirely peaceful.

I made my way across the square and onto Rua Augusta, where more gas was being fired, forcing groups of people this way and that, and splitting the crowd into smaller and smaller parts. Some people who had inhaled teargas called for vinegar to pour onto scarves and inhale, in an attempt to counter the effects. Someone in an apartment building overhead dropped a large bag of water onto the heads of a group of people standing near me. The police fired again and again, teargas floating towards us, and charged with motorbikes to push people down Martinho Prado and into the back streets between Augusta and 9 de Julho. For the next hour, I walked along street after street with the demonstrators, on my own but staying close to a group of first 100, then 50, then 25, then 20, as we were repeatedly charged from behind and scattered.

Time after time and apparently no matter how small the group, the police chased us, charging up on us and keeping us running, first with a column of about 7 powerful motorbikes, riding up onto the pavement and weaving between cars, forcing people to scatter. Bars and businesses we passed were rolling down their blinds quickly. At Praça Quatorze-Bis, an ugly traffic intersection below the 9 de Julho flyover, I started walking up towards the neighbourhood of Bixiga, still in a group of around 25 demonstrators, when a convoy of about five 4×4 police vehicles zoomed up behind us with an almighty vrooom, pulling up alongside us suddenly. Helmeted police leapt out, wading towards us and shoving people, pushing one boy up against the wall, corralling the group. I managed to slip between two officers and away as one snatched something from the boy’s hand, pushing him backwards and indicating he had to turn out his pockets. Further up the hill, now down to about 10-15 stragglers, they kept on coming, and as we turned into Rua Itapeva, they jumped out of the cars again and started firing cannisters of gas or smoke (the latter known as “bombas de efeito moral”- I’m translating that as shock and awe bombs, or morale-draining bombs).

Exhausted and coughing from the running and the smoke, I looked for a doorway or alley to take shelter in, but SP doors and alleys are well protected, sealed off with railings and blinds. I saw an open gate and ran inside, hiding behind a bush and watching the police march past, uphill, followed by the cars.

Making my way home up Rua Pamplona and over Avenida Paulista, I saw more police charges, saw groups of protestors regrouping and chanting the chant of the evening, “Sem violência!” (no violence), and saw and heard more gas and smoke bombs. I was caught up in a charge one more time as I walked down Rua Pamplona. The tweets I sent during the course of the night are here.