With many Brazilian schoolchildren already enjoying their summer holidays, thousands of pupils in São Paulo have been protesting to save their schools from closure. Their efforts have provided a welcome break from the unseemly behaviour of the country’s adult political leaders in Brasília. 

By Gill Harris
São Paulo

As the Operation Car Wash investigation into the massive bribery scandal at state run oil company Petrobras rumbles on, impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff get underway, and Eduardo Cunha, the corruption-dogged speaker of Brazil’s Lower House, has his home searched by police while dressed in his pyjamas, a rather more edifying political movement has taken place in São Paulo.

In early October pupils across the state discovered their schools were to undergo what was described by Governor Geraldo Alckmin as a “restructuring” of the education system, a move that would have entailed the closure of 93 schools and the transferal of over 300,000 pupils. The state government claimed a new system based on ciclos (which roughly translates as year groups) would benefit students’ learning.

Many critics of the reforms suggested that the government’s proposed changes were economically driven and pedagogically flawed: simply an attempt – and a fairly transparent attempt at that – to cut costs.

Either way, São Paulo’s outraged students were not about to take the closures lying down, and around a month later began to occupy the threatened schools. What had begun as just a few students camping out in classrooms swiftly turned into a regional insurgence against the government’s education policy, a movement that spread across social media via the hashtag: #naofechaminhaescola (“Don’t Close My School”).

On November 12, BBC Brasil reported students were camping out in several schools throughout the state, and by the end of the month almost 200 schools had been occupied.

Despite increasing pressure from the politicians and police, who in some cases treated students with truculence and aggression, the youngsters held firm, and last week Alckmin was forced to suspend his plans for reform.

While maintaining the position that the reorganisation would benefit students, Alckmin recognised the need to involve students more directly in any decision made on the matter. “In 2016 we will begin to engage in debate. We will open up dialogues, school by school,” he said. Amidst the backpedalling, state secretary for education Herman Voorwald resigned.

More cynical critics, however, have suggested that the decision to suspend the changes only came after Alckmin’s popularity took a battering.  Recent figures released by Datafolha showed approval for the governor had dropped to just 28%, the lowest in his time in office.

In spite of the suspension, however, protests against the restructuring in downtown São Paulo have continued, although the number of occupied schools has fallen to 57, according to the state education department.

Students from Fernão Dias Paes State School in Pinheiros, in the west of São Paulo, one of the schools that initiated the protests, told BBC Brasil they considered the battle to be only half won, while another newspaper report described the students’ belief that the suspension is merely a conciliatory strategy. The protesters are demanding an official statement from the government that the reforms will be dropped permanently from the agenda.

17 year-old Ana Luisa has been occupying two different schools for the past two months: one in outlying São Vicente until the evening, and then another in Praça Roosevelt in the centre of the city, where she spends her nights.

“With all the protesting and travelling I’ve barely had time to eat. I’ve lost three kilos,” she told From Brazil in early December, showing the space around her waistband. “But it’s worth it. Things here have reached a critical moment. We students know we’re making history. And we’re not going to stop until we have official proof from the government that they’re listening to us.”

The demonstrations come at a pivotal moment for the culture of public protest in Brazil. While the massive 2013 marches against political corruption, poor public services and the money spent on last year’s World Cup briefly captured the public imagination, their effectiveness was ultimately diluted by the sheer breadth of demonstrators’ complaints, and despite a vague, panicky government response that made promises of investment in public transport and political reform, few concrete benefits have emerged.

That movement has since been replaced with this year’s anti-government, pro-impeachment rallies, largely middle class affairs where protesters have dwindled in number as the spectre of impeachment has moved closer to reality, while this week saw around 50,000 demonstrators gather in São Paulo to protest against the impeachment campaign, which they describe as a coup. Politicians, meanwhile, have annexed the spirit of as ruas (“the streets”) for their own ends.

Against such a backdrop, and compared with the sordid political capering of the likes of Eduardo Cunha in Brasilia, this youth movement, along with other organic demonstrations such the recent public actions in support of women’s rights, feels refreshingly heartfelt and optimistic.

University professor and state deputy Carlos Giannazi has praised what he calls this “Arab Spring” of student politicisation, while Folha de São Paulo columnist Raquel Rolnik, a professor of architecture and urban planning, has called the movement “the most important political event of the year.”

The mother of one young protester, Rose, meanwhile, told the BBC that the protests were restoring her faith in politics: “it’s a lovely sight to see. These teenagers are taking to the streets to demand better quality education; we’ve never seen anything like it before.”

With growing mistrust in those who run their country, these children are taking their education into their own hands. A similar school occupation movement has begun in the mid-western state of Goiás, where organisers say they have been inspired by events in São Paulo, and a website, www.queronaescola.com.br (“What I Want In School”), posts videos of pupils demanding a more wide-ranging curriculum, school trips, and opportunities to discuss issues such as racism and misogyny.

In São Paulo, meanwhile, the debate as to who rules the school continues. “We might just be kids,” Ana Luisa said, “but I think we could do a better job of it than the adults.”

Editor’s note: On Friday (18th) one student group, the Comando das Escolas em Luta (“Fighting Schools Command”) announced it would end the school occupations, and that it was “time to change tactics”. Other students, however, said they had yet to decide if they would call a halt to their occupations. 

Respondents are given three options. They can rate the government “good/great,” “regular,” or “bad/terrible.” Well, there are actually four, as you can say you don’t know. But by now (she was elected in 2010), pretty much everyone has an opinion.

Observe that her “good/great” numbers were quite high until 2013 (when protests broke out), and now they are at a pitiful 10%. But the people essentially saying “meh” has not dropped so much. Those two groups add up to 34%, while a whopping 65% actively disapprove of her government.

So her numbers are terrible, just terrible. But it’s not accurate to say that everyone in the country hates her, either.

Why do ‘pro-government’ protesters battle cops, while pro-impeachment protesters hug them? Which team are these guys on, again? A guide to the current crisis

Vincent Bevins
São Paulo

I just spent a month away from Brazil, which served to remind me of just how inscrutable the struggles currently rocking this country are to foreign observers. They may know that things are not as rosy as they were a few years ago, or that “the government” has messed up or is in trouble. But the contours of the battles are extremely blurry.

For example. Last week, protesters clashed violently with police outside Congress in Brasília during a demonstration against a new legislative project (pictured above). A few days later, on Sunday, a much larger group of protesters, some of whom smiled and posed for selfies with heavily armed cops, cheerfully filled streets around the country,

It is indicative of the topsy-turvy world that crisis-ridden Brazil has entered that the bloody demonstrators battling cops were the ‘pro-government’ protesters, while the cheerful, carnavalesque crowds were calling for the president to be impeachment and her party to be demolished.

That’s because “the government” is not just one government these days, and a number of players (some even less scrupulous than the others) are currently engaged in a fight for its future.

So who are they? What do they want? What are their chances?

The government, part 1 (executive)

President Dilma Rousseff, of the left-leaning Workers’ Party (PT), was re-elected in October and began her second term in January.

The PT has controlled the Presidency since Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva took over in 2003. By any global standard, Lula’s time in power was good for Brazil. Buoyed by high prices for its commodities, the economy surged forward, and moderate social programs helped roughly 40 million people rise from poverty into the “new middle class.” He left office with record levels of support.

Dilma, former left-wing guerrilla and Lula’s hand-picked successor, took over in 2011 and enjoyed widespread support for a while. But the commodity boom ended and the economy slowed down amid mistakes made by Dilma’s government. Then the June 2013 protests happened, and so did the World Cup, which only turned out pretty well in contrast to the mess it was expected to be, and because Brazilians were polite enough to keep their rage about wasteful spending to themselves while the foreign fans were here.

By the 2014 election, Dilma had lost much of the goodwill Lula had bestowed to her. She barely beat out opponent Aécio Neves (PSDB) by frantically appealing to the working poor and middle-class leftists, denying many of the economic problems the country faced and promising what we all knew she couldn’t deliver in the short term.

She won, promptly installed a Finance Minister that her core supporters (and probably she herself) consider ‘neoliberal,’ who embarked on a series of painful adjustments as the dire economic straits Brazil finds itself in became exceedingly obvious. For the first time since 2003, regular people’s lives not only stopped improving, but in some cases, began to get worse. And all the while, since the middle of last year, it slowly emerged that the Federal Police have built a credible case that the state-run oil company, Petrobras, funneled billions of dollars to huge construction companies, who then passed some of the bribes on to political parties.

The government, part 2 (legislative)

If Brazil were a monarchy, that would be it. Rousseff would be “the government.” But Brazil is a loose federal republic with a staggering 28 parties active in its two legislative houses, and 26 state governors who each control their own police forces.

Much of Lula’s success was attributable to his ability to cobble together an unlikely coalition of parties and economic actors and thus keep the party going. This group has included right-wing parties, major figures Lula used to bitterly oppose, one president already impeached for corruption, and big parties who may not believe in much, other than the spoils of power.

Maintaining this kind of a coalition is a lot easier if you have Lula’s charisma and political capital. It’s even easier if you have so much money flowing in that you can make everyone in the country richer at the same time.

Dilma has none of this at the moment, and it’s all falling apart.

Amidst the chaos and political weakness of the first few months of Dilma’s second term, the PT lost control of Congress. The “catch-all, pork loving” PMDB has gained control of the Presidency of both houses and is openly rebelling against Dilma. Eduardo Cunha, an evangelical Christian, has been especially combative. Contributors to this blog have made it pretty clear who these guys are. It is not only that have they taken advantage of Dilma’s weakness. They are also reportedly furious that both of their Congressional leaders, Renan Calheiros and Cunha, have been named in the investigation into the Petrobras corruption scandal.

Recently, they have been pushing a bill that allows for more companies to treat employees as contractors. The PT hates this law, and so do the left-wing and union protesters that marched against it last week in Brasília. That’s who battled cops in Brasília last week, decked out in red. They support “the government” (Dilma) against right-wing threats, but despise Cunha and company.

Many people want Neves and the PSDB in power. Many, but less than before, want Dilma’s PT to hold on and thrive. But few people will tell you they love these guys.

The protesters, 2015 edition (green and yellow)

On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets around the country to denounce Dilma and call for her impeachment. This was less than they mustered a month earlier, but this group and its demands are not going away.

These protesters want Dilma gone, now, and mostly hate the PT passionately. A small minority call outright for military intervention. Anecdotally speaking, these people have not felt represented by the PT government in years, and their anger has exploded further since the October election. Studies suggest they are wealthier and whiter than average Brazilians, and that they are most likely to take their cues from Brazil’s most right-wing major publication.

According to this study, they also hold some strange beliefs. A majority said they think the PT “wants to impose a communist regime in Brazil.” The Economist recently called them a “Tropical tea party.” They are usually law and order voters, which explains why some of them embrace the police that terrify many poor Brazilians and traditional protest groups.

But it is not enough to just wave one’s hands, and say that Brazil has always had a small but powerful right-wing section of the elite, that they never liked the PT anyways and hold views that many English-language readers would find bizarre. That may describe some of the core demonstrators who are actually in the streets. But it’s also important to recognize why they’ve been able to step into the spotlight now, and that many regular people are sympathetic to their broader demands.

Another recent poll made very difficult reading for the PT. Datafolha reported that 63% of respondents support an impeachment process against President Rousseff. And 3/4 of respondents said they supported the recent protests around the country.

This must include many people that voted for her. And it’s not hard to see what explains this swing. Things have gotten worse.

Social movements, unions, and the left (protesters in red)

But it’s not just the rich, white, and conservative that are upset. Many of the core supporters of the PT project had hoped that Dilma would follow up on her left-wing campaign with a shift to the left. She did not. They were doubly mortified to see the country fall into the hands of her former conservative allies in Congress, who have been eager to push an agenda they consider homophobic and a serious threat to labor rights.

In much smaller numbers, they took to the streets yesterday, alongside fast food workers, to protest this new direction. These guys come from the traditional left, and have traditionally clashed with police at times.

And while they bitterly oppose the other group of protesters, accusing them of being golpistas, they are also an outgrowth of real discontent with the status quo. They would argue that to tackle the very real popularity problems the Datafolha survey revealed, the PT should return to its left-wing roots.

It’s also notable that Brazilians, perhaps fed up with the system in general, have been quite eager to support all kinds of protests recently. In 2013, a remarkable 89% supported the protests started by an anarchist-leaning student group after they exploded into wider demands for better public services and an end to corruption.

Who will triumph? (pure speculation)

Marxists and free-market liberals alike sometimes make the mistake of thinking that if things just get bad enough, a solution they like will appear. The radical left looks to 1917, and liberals look to 1989, as evidence of this. But what happens more often is that things just sort of muddle along, in a dispiriting and crappy way, with no easy way out.

While admitting that anything could happen, I’ll venture three possibilities for the next few years. The first is that the political and legal circumstances change, and Dilma is actually impeached. For now, this seems unlikely, but it is possible. In any case, it would only be a victory for the yellow-green protesters in that it would be a blow to the PT. Their preferred representatives would be extremely unlikely to take over. Another possibility is that the PT manages to retake control of the situation, getting the economy back on track and moving into a position in Congress where it can satisfy some of its core supporters. This road looks very difficult from here.

But more likely, in my opinion, is that Dilma will remain weak for the near future, with Minister Levy managing to do enough with the economy to avert disaster, but unable to unleash the country’s full potential, while a rudderless Congress is taken in a new and sometimes strange direction.

Not very exciting, I know. But those are the battle lines for now.

Brazilians are back on the streets protesting, denouncing water shortages, budget cuts, and price rises – but in a more politically divided nation, the mood this time round is very different.

By James Young

Brazil may never have talked as much about protests as it has over the last two years. First, there were the huge street demonstrations that spread like wildfire in June 2013. Everyone knows the story by now – a brutish response from the military police poured petrol onto anti-bus fare hike demonstrations in São Paulo, and soon it felt like the whole country (or at least the young and the middle-class portions of it) was on the streets, with thousands marching in the direction of Confederations Cup matches at the Mineirão or the Maracanã. They were complaining about, well, everything – a vague amalgam of political corruption, FIFA and the World Cup, Marco Feliciano, terrible bus services, terrible hospitals, and terrible schools. Meanwhile the world’s TV cameras, here for the football, gaped – would there be a World Cup? Was Brazil falling apart?

Yes and no were the answers to those questions – in what felt like a very Brazilian moment, not much came of the Tropical Spring at all, the mood of ferment and change dwindling listlessly into shrugs, apathy and getting on with life. Dilma Rousseff’s government hummed and hawed about political reform and promised massive investment in public transport, but there has been little sign of either. What was left of the protests turned ugly, the violence of the black blocs achieving nothing apart from driving ordinary demonstrators indoors, and the World Cup passed (generally) without a hitch – the festive atmosphere, sprightly football and heightened security presence distracting people from that silly business of political protests.

Now, it seems, protesting may be back in vogue, although recent events have little in common with the 2013 demonstrations. Last Thursday around 10,000 people took part in a Homeless Workers Movement (MTST) rally demonstrating against water rationing (pictured above), while a similar number marched in Curitiba the day before in support of striking teachers. Thousands of unhappy truck drivers have blocked highways across the country, bringing Brazil’s already shaky road network to a grinding halt. Perhaps most ominous of all, a nationwide rally calling for the impeachment of president Dilma has been scheduled for this month, with over a million people confirming their presence via social media (though the number that shows up is rarely nearly as high).

These protests, with the exception of the potential impeachment rally, are more localized and more specific in their demands than the 2013 marches. And yet Brazil’s problems remain the same, or worse, now – Marco Feliciano has been replaced by Jair “I wouldn’t rape you because you’re not worth it” Bolsonaro as the pantomime moral villain of Brazil’s capering political classes, there are water shortages in São Paulo and a gaggle of other cities (even if not all will admit it), the economy has tanked, inflation is rising, the scale of the Petrobras corruption scandal grows more mindboggling by the day, and president Dilma seems to have no idea what to do about any of it.

Why, then, did bus fare hikes get people onto the streets in their hundreds of thousands, but water rationing protests remain a more minority affair? There are some obvious reasons, such as the lack of a sparkplug moment similar to when the police shot a number of Folha de São Paulo journalists at one 2013 rally, putting public opinion firmly on the side of the protestors, or the absence now of both convenient rallying points (the Confederations Cup games) and the encouraging gaze of the international media.

But perhaps just as importantly, the mood in Brazil feels different now. For all the anger, aimed both at FIFA and Brazil’s political classes, that surrounded the 2013 protests, there was also a sense of optimism and community, as hundreds of thousands of Brazilians discovered, with some surprise, that they were all angry about the same things and if they all got together and complained about them at the same time, some good may come of it (though ultimately, it didn’t).

That shared anger and enthusiasm may have gone now, the bitterness that surrounded last year’s elections creating a polarized political environment, with the words and actions of supporters on both sides of the PT v PSDB split becoming increasingly rabid. “In 2013 it was the left that was on the streets…this year it’s going to be the right protesting, demanding impeachment of Dilma and a stop to corruption,” said Luiz Eduardo Oliveira, an anti-PT activist attacked by supporters of the party while demonstrating in Rio de Janeiro last week.

Carnaval has come and gone. As 400,000 Argentinians took to the rain-lashed streets of Buenos Aires in the so-called “March of Silence” to protest against the Kirchner government and call for justice in the case of the death of public prosecutor Alberto Nisman, Brazilians danced and frolicked in the sunshine, some wearing satirical masks of political figures. Such frivolity perhaps recalled the phrase “Brazil is not a serious country”, often attributed to Charles de Gaulle, but in fact spoken by the Brazilian diplomat Carlos Alves de Souza Filho.

And yet Brazil has long mixed its traditional themes of music and carnaval with political protest. In 1992, as the Fernando Collor government descended into an abyss of corruption, the caras pintadas (“painted faces”) took to the streets to demand his removal from office.

“In Recife, I heard a dull roar come floating up from the Avenida Conde de Boa Vista and in through the open windows of my apartment. To thrilling rapid-beaten drums, a hundred thousand young people were marching toward the centre of the city, faces painted in Brazilian green, blue and yellow. They were the painted faces and Recife’s contribution to the upsurge…an indescribable gaiety rose into the air…All around Brazil giant bald bespectacled PC (Farias, Collor’s partner in crime) dolls were being paraded down the streets, and dolls of Fernando and Rosane in convict garb. There was music and dancing and rhythmic chanted slogans,” writes Peter Robb in his book on Brazilian history and culture, A Death In Brazil.

Irrespective of whether the subject is impeachment, water shortages, or striking teachers or truck drivers, it remains to be seen whether Brazil will be able to summon the same sense of unity, and political fervour, again.

Sunday was full of surprises, and most of them dispiriting for the groups that thought they’d made gains during last year’s protests. Here’s the five biggest.

By Mauricio Savarese

1 – Marina Silva out of the run-off

From presidential front-runner to the falling star of Brazil’s politics. The former environment minister was a bad player from the start of her campaign. Not all of her demise is her fault, of course. As usually happens with third way candidates, she preached new politics and became an easy target for the left and right. But her defeat doesn’t have to do only with her rivals: she flip-flopped on gay rights, lost many of the staff that were working with her deceased former running mate Eduardo Campos, avoided openly supporting of conservative politicians, played victim too soon, failed in answering criticisms from Dilma Rousseff and Aécio Neves (who are now heading to the run-off), and failed to make Brazilians more confident about what kind of president she would become. In the end, anti-government voters left her when it became clear Aécio Neves might have a better chance of actually taking down Rousseff.

After getting roughly same vote she did in 2010, it’s hard to see her as a presidential contender again. For now, supporting Neves in the run-off is all that is left for her – and if he loses that will show her political leverage is even smaller than many expected.

2 – Increase in abstention after street protests

Street protests last year suggested new political forces would appear. That was not the case, at least at the ballot box. What was more noticeable was a rejection of candidates in general. The number of Brazilians who chose not to show up (voting here is mandatory), or cast votes for no one reached 29% this year, the highest level since 1998. This is only a small uptick, but it would be impossible to say that street protests re-energized the country politically, at least in the electoral sense.

It is hard to see Dilma Rousseff and Aécio Neves as so exciting to all the voters that went to the streets last year. And those voters are not putting forward any policies that could be embraced by the candidates. If you look at the first round results, June 2013 looks like too much ado for nothing, at least in terms of the ballot box.

As one left-leaning friend in São Paulo put it on Facebook:

“What happens in June
Stays in June.”

Or, here’s some alternate theories from Rio Gringa.

3 – Brazil’s conservative Congress

Preachers, the military, policemen…Brazil’s new Congress is has become more conservative. Almost 40% of the Congressmen are rookies, which makes for the biggest shakeup since 1998. The Worker’s Party suffered a major defeat: they lost 18 seats and will have 70 in 2015. PMDB comes right next, with 66 seats — they had 71. The most voted-for candidates in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are extremely conservative politicians Celso Russomano,  Jair Bolsonaro, and Marco Feliciano.  If Dilma Rousseff is elected, that means her reform agenda will be even more difficult to carry out. If Aécio Neves wins, there may be more reforms, but some of them could be very controversial: allowing minors to be tried as adults is one example.

Bolsonaro, above, says that the government supports gay pride marches so that it can tear apart ‘the fabric of society’ and make it easier to control the population. In other charming moments, he has praised Brazil’s military dictatorship.

4 – São Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin wins easily

There is a water crisis in Brazil’s wealthiest state. There are various corruption allegations about a cartel that operated for years in subway here. São Paulo’s military police provided, with their brutality, the spark to set off the biggest street demonstrations that the country has ever seen. Yet governor Geraldo Alckmin, who could be held accountable for all those events, breezed to re-election. He won in all cities of the state but one.

Depoliticized voters, plus a lack of enthusiasm for a Paulista third way, represented by businessman Paulo Skaf, gave the 2018 presidential hopeful a shockingly easy ride. Some analysts expected him to win – his power in the Paulista countryside is unmatched. But so easily? That was shocking.

5 – PT wins in Minas and Bahia

This was a major blow to Aécio Neves in his home state and a surprising victory in the battleground state of Bahia. The best news for Dilma Rousseff was that the gubernatorial races there ended in the first round. Taking Minas Gerais from Neves’ allies means governing Brazil’s second most important state with a close friend of hers, Fernando Pimentel. Rui Costa’s victory in Bahia keeps in PT hands a state that was on the verge of going to the opposition. None of those two results were expected a few months ago. In Costa’s case, it wasn’t expected a few days ago.

Follow Mauricio Savarese on Twitter

The Cup went well enough that we finally got to focus on the soccer for a few weeks. Now, it’s back to the real problems.

Vincent Bevins
Rio de Janeiro

Since early May, and really, since June 2013, we’ve seen the meaning of the World Cup shift radically, many times. Before it all started, the questions were “Is this going to happen?” and, “Will Brazil hate their own World Cup?” We thought it would probably be fine, but many thought otherwise.

Then it started, and the mood in the country was “Wow, this is going pretty well.” By week two, it was time for the World Cup optimists and government supporters to declare victory, as well as to say “I told you so.” But in the last two weeks of the tournament, another shift took place, to a theme which never should have been surprising.

Lo and behold, this was actually a soccer tournament. After the Brazil-Chile game, few were talking about organization, or protests, or the effect on the election (except for die-hard partisans with blogs/Twitter accounts). People have been talking about the games – Brazil snuck by Colombia, and then was massacred by Germany. Costa Rica almost made it past the Netherlands, who were eliminated in an unimpressive semi by Argentina. How did Germany get to be the best? How does Brazil need to change its training to be more like them? These have been the issues. Soccer issues – finally.

To mix sporting metaphors, the World Cup should have been a slam drunk for Brazil. It should have been incredibly easy to prepare 8 venues well in advance of the June start date, and then simply to allow the interaction between foreigners and Brazilians to flourish in the streets and the magic to take place on the pitch. It’s a lovely country, and it’s a lovely tournament. There was no need to complicate things.

But it seems the government promised too much, both to its population and the all-important companies who pay for political campaigns here, and then seek profits from large construction projects. A World Cup, as it turns out, is not that complicated of an event. But Brazil’s government choose to pretend that an entirely new country would be delivered to its common people in time for kickoff. That backfired badly.

As it happened, the World Cup was a success. The fact that we could stop talking about logistical breakdown or mass protests is evidence of that. But it was only a success after exposing some of Brazil’s deep social problems, and damaging Brazil’s reputation a bit, at least for a while.

It will be two years before sports is the main focus again, when the 2016 Olympics start. In the meantime, it’s back to the real issues, a a bruising election and the bruising that Brazil’s military police seem to eager to hand out to anyone who gets in their way. If you haven’t seen it, check out the video of a cop brutally assaulting a Canadian documentary filmmaker at a protest Sunday.

The soccer is over. That was a kick to the face, not to a football. Back to the real problems.

Increasingly, Brazilians are blasé about two things most everyone used to be excited about – the FIFA World Cup and a wave of protests. We’ll see which way the pendulum swings again come June. Above, last year’s protests become the theme of a small ‘bloco’ at this year’s Carnaval.

By Mauricio Savarese

Attitudes went from “This is going to massive,” “Everyone will be fired up” and “It will change Brazil forever” to “Not again…,” “I can’t wait for this to be over” and “There is just too much hype.”

Radicals aside, there are now few Brazilians overly enthusiastic about either of the two mutually antagonistic events taking place in the country this year: the FIFA World Cup and the protests that have rocked the streets since June. Interest faded very slowly; people got sick of infrastructure issues around the World Cup and violence from agitators and police during protests.

Now these notions are measurable. When the massive protest movement kicked off, pollster Datafolha said 81% of Brazilians supported them, against everything-that-is-wrong-here. That support has now dropped to 52%. Even worse for activists: the criticism of their agenda is rising. Now 42% of Brazilians are against any protests at all. Only 15% held this view last summer, during the Confederations Cup.

Another poll could be seen as a sign that the government’s nationalistic campaign for the World Cup had some effects. Pollster MDA says 85% of Brazilians believe there will be protests during football’s creme de la creme, but only 15% considered actually being in them. That could lead one to believe there is widespread support for hosting the tournament. But that isn’t the case, either.

Almost 51% of Brazilians say they wouldn’t support a bid to host the tournament if it were to be made today, MDA says. Datafolha says 52% of locals don’t approve of FIFA’s main event being hosted here. In November 2008, impressive 79% of the people were for it all.

We can guess at motives. Four World Cup stadia (São Paulo, Curitiba, Cuiabá, and Porto Alegre) are still at risk and many reject the high amount of money spent, which they’d like to see go somewhere else,

There is usually bitterness before big sporting events. Brazilians are showing that attitude now, but that doesn’t it support couldn’t skyrocket the moment the Cup starts and Brazil takes on Croatia in Corinthians Arena.

For protesters, the question is whether they can get support from those who are critical of the World Cup organization, but not as excited to parrot their ubiquitous “there will be no Cup” slogan.

For football fans, the best bet seems to be on using well the period between June 12 and July 13, despite the fact that Brazil neither prepared appropriately nor invested as wisely as necessary. They can argue that a proper debate on how things went would be more appropriate in the general elections, in October. They will have 64 matches watched by billions supporting their cause.

But Brazil is a surprising country, and protesters could break that advantage if they get back in touch with the aspirations of the majority. That is not the case now. If they insist with the politics of no that have made people less interested, it may even be difficult even to get Brazilians to the polling stations later this year and deliver some attention to their grievances.

As of now, the only thing massive thing most Brazilians can relate to is sheer boredom.

“Apartheid” is too strong a word to describe Brazil’s serious class and race problems, says Mauricio Savarese. But it comes closer to describing the truth than the often-repeated claim that Brazil is a country without racism. Here, it’s not the state which is prejudiced. Above, youth at a planned ‘rolezinho’ in Rio de Janeiro.

By Mauricio Savarese

A few years ago a professor tried to get a sense of the social background of the students in my class. First question to his 45 pupils: “How many of you have been out of São Paulo?” Everyone raised their hands. “How many are working?” Fewer people raised their hands. That went on for ten minutes. In the end, two questions made one thing very clear: those seats weren’t for everyone. “How many of you went to one of our terrible public schools?” It was just me, and one other student. Everyone else in the room had studied at private schools.

“How many of you are black?” The other student was the only one to raise his hand. Things were different in all the other classes, in 2002, at one of Brazil’s best journalism schools.

There surely is racism in Brazil, and it could not have been any different for the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery. Things have improved, but this is the blackest place outside Africa and yet there are few Afro-Brazilians in politics, high corporate jobs or in the judiciary.

The flashmobs at São Paulo malls, known as “rolezinhos,” made all that prejudice self-evident: these people, young, mostly poor and black, will be discriminated against, even when all they are is heavy consumers trying to have some stupid fun.

All these things are pretty shocking. But they don’t seem to be enough for some. Since they need more convincing, they call it “apartheid.” They probably think there is a Brazilian Nelson Mandela somewhere in waiting. By comparing Brazil to a brutal regime that has taken decades for South Africans to dismantle, they find no difference between a democracy that needs fixing and a racial dictatorship that enforced their views through a wicked legal system. That kind of plagiarism is a new fad in Brazilian politics. Please, forgive us. Most of us can’t relate to suffering that took place overseas.

It is true that Brazil is much closer to “apartheid” than it is the fallacious “there is no racism here” claim. But our Supreme Court is headed by a black man, we do have affirmative action in universities and the outspoken hatred I saw twice in the London tube has no place here. We have a reasonably active national secretariat for racial diversity. We should be prosecuting more people for racist crimes, but the fact that notable racists are looked down upon is a sign that Brazil doesn’t have much to do with the officially racist South Africa that arrested Mandela.

In Brazil, the political and legal systems are fighting racism. But there is surely an issue with opportunities in the private sector and in political parties. There has never been a Brazilian Barack Obama, a black man leading a major ticket. Black CEOs? Only if they start the businesses themselves.

There are two other words that have become bucket adjectives in Brazil. People are allowed to use them freely, without any regard to what they actually mean: “fascist” and “populist.” It is probably better to deal with those when the presidential elections are upon us, come November.

Racism is big enough of an issue in Brazil for us to feel the need to use foreign words to make the concept more clear. Our challenges lie in reinforcing existing mechanisms to promote prosperous diversity. Or perhaps, in creating new ones so that the corporate and the political establishment can embrace Brazil as it is. Manipulating Mandela’s legacy won’t do us any good.

Mauricio Savarese is a Brazilian journalist, originally from Ipiranga, in São Paulo’s zona sul, and is the author of the blog, “A Brazilian operating in this area.” He was formerly a reporter in Brasília for UOL and is active on Twitter. Read his other thoughts on rolezinhos here. 

In deference to what now seems a rule mandating publications to ‘wrap up’ the past year, this is a list of some of the articles, in English, that told the story of Brazil in 2013. For this we turned to Sergio Charlab, a Brazilian journalist who maintains a very active Twitter with updates on pieces written by foreign correspondents, bloggers, and other writers trying to explain Brazil. All text below by Sergio.

By Sergio Charlab

[In chronological order]

1. “Rio, With Eyes Open” by Jodi Kantor. New York Times
2. “Cars made in Brazil are deadly” by Bradley Brooks. Associated Press
3. “Curiosidades Brasileiras” by Olivier Teboul. O outro diário d Olivier [PORTUGUESE] – English translation here
4. “Fear and loathing in São Paulo“, by Claire Rigby. From Brazil-Folha
5. “Explaining Brazil’s vinegar revolt” by Greg Michener and Chris Gaffney. Al Jazeera
6. “Prices fuel outrage in Brazil, home of the $30 cheese pizza” by Simon Romero. New York Times
7. “Jorge Lemann: He is…the World’s Most Interesting Billionare” by Alex Cuadros. Bloomberg
8. “Analysis: Brazil and U.S., like star-crossed lovers, foiled again” by Brian Winter. Reuters
9. “Grounded” – special report by Helen Joyce. The Economist
10. “In Brazil, more buildings are seized by residents in need of housing” by Vincent Bevins. Los Angeles Times
11. “A yellow card, the unfathomable violence, in Brazil” by Jeré Longman and Taylor Barnes. The New York Times
12. “Into Brazil: mountains and waterfalls” by Dom Phillips. Folha/From Brazil
13. “Generation June” by Wright Thompson. ESPN

Take a walk around the center of São Paulo, South America’s largest city, and you’ll see a number of buildings covered in graffiti and revolutionary red flags. They’re abandoned structures occupied by left-wing social movements, and serve as living protests to pressure the government to provide for the millions of Brazilians in need of adequate housing. And while they last, they also provide a place to live for families that are down on their luck.

I recently spent the better part of a month living in one of the occupations, doing research for a story. One can hear a lot of nasty rumors about these buildings, but I mostly had a lovely time amongst a well-organized community of residents that seemed genuinely eager to help each other out. Of course, this may have been partially because the MMPT has a strict policy of excluding troublemakers.

The full story, In Brazil, more buildings are seized by residents in need of housing, is here.

One officer speaks out about death squads and a public backlash against a police system they know is broken. Above, the Folha cover photo which helped to spur on Brazil’s June protests. 

Of all the complex and sometimes contradictory consequences of the demonstrations in Brazil since June, the clearest lesson may have been that the country’s police forces are woefully lacking. Obviously clueless as to how to deal with protesters, widely and credibly accused of  torture and summary executions in poor neighborhoods, and terrifying to behold, it seems the military police are simply not to be trusted. At least, that’s what 70% of Brazilians think, according to a recent poll.

Lieutenant Colonel Adilson Paes de Souza, who worked as a military cop for 28 years, completed a master’s degree in human rights, and is now launching a book, gave an interview this week in which he issued a harsh indictment of the current system. “If on one hand we have a [system that’s] proven to be ineffective, and on the other hand we have proven brutality, something has to change.”

Below are translated excerpts from the interview with Folha.

Folha – What is behind the violent protests against the PM [policia militar] seen recently in São Paulo and Rio?

Adilson Paes de Souza – A large part of society is saying: This model we have in place is not effective. And they’re saying this in a violent way. Society has no one else to turn to. I’m not saying that violence is a legitimate way to respond to [police] violence, but that it may be the only way to be heard and noticed.

How can a good-natured guy leave Military Police training and then become a murderer in a death squad?

I interviewed soldiers involved in death squads. They don’t believe in the system. They ask themselves: why am I going to take this person into prison to the Civil Police if they’ll be immediately released after paying a bribe? “I risk myself, take him in, and he is freed?” They decide to arrest, accuse, sentence, and kill.

How do these police officers deal with murder?

Murdering those on society’s margins is seen as an important part of their job. They’ve come to declare that if they aren’t allowed to kill, they wouldn’t be able to work. That’s the logic of the National Security doctrine, according to which we’re dealing with enemies. And on the battlefield, you have to annihilate the enemy.

How does it come to this?

[Those accused of murder] said that before they were imprisoned they were seen as examples of good police officers. Front line guys. “I was awarded officer of the month. I won a medal,” I heard one say. And, all of a sudden, they’re in jail. They didn’t get it.

Are you saying they were encouraged to be violent?

If they didn’t openly say, “You can kill and I’ll take care of you, I’ll cover you,” then there was some kind of indirect encouragement, there were awards for police violence. But the government doesn’t admit this.

A lot of social organizations defend the demilitarization of the PM. What do you think of this?

It’s a theme that leads to strong reactions. The facts prove that the current security model doesn’t work anymore. Data from the Secretary of Public Security show that only three out of 100 investigations of violent crimes lead to sentencing. On the other hand, the Military Police killed more people in five years than all North American police forces combined. If on one hand we have a [system that’s] proven to be ineffective, and on the other hand we have proven brutality, something has to change.

Minister Gilberto Carvalho says that the “black blocs” have to be understood and studied. What’s your opinion?

They have to be understood, yes. That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be punished. But what brings a group of people to get together and practice this type of action? Might it be that by not providing the basic social rights enshrined in the Constitution, the State has helped these groups to arise?

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.”

Handheld, improvised ‘NINJA’ journalism has changed the way Brazil watches the protests unfold. But recently, the group itself has become the story, as the little-understood collective they sprung from has come under digital scrutiny from all sides. Photo: Mídia NINJA

By Claire Rigby

Last week, Folha de S.Paulo’s Los Angeles correspondent Fernanda Ezabella breezed into town with a new toy: a Google Glass headset. She wore it to cover Wednesday night’s protests, filming the action on the street while Folha’s drone flew overhead, using a smartphone to transmit the protest from the sky. It was the first time Glass had been used in conjunction with a drone to create a live report. But Ezabella’s isn’t the only journalism story making waves in the Brazilian press right now.

If you’ve taken even a passing interest in the protests that gripped Brazil in June, and are still simmering in cities across the country, chances are you’ve seen some of the prolific output of the Mídia NINJA journalism collective. The young video and photography hacktivists, who roam the streets with little more than smartphones, cameras and maybe a laptop, have been chronicling Brazil’s spasms of unrest day after day and night after night, capturing and publishing images of protests, riots and arrests, and streaming hours of footage from assemblies, marches, occupied encampments, meetings and debates on their Facebook page, and on their e-TV channel, #PosTV. Active since well before Brazil’s June protests, they follow in the steps of alt. media collectives like Indymedia, which at its zenith a decade ago massed an international network of activist reporters to cover global protests and social movements, starting with 1999’s Battle of Seattle. Mídia NINJA also uses accessible technology to create low-cost, high-impact material, but unlike Indymedia, its focus so far has been purely on generating images, with a curious lack of written reportage or coverage.

NINJA initially won grudging admiration even from Brazilians unsupportive of the recent wave of protests, not least because of the quality and impact of its photos. But over the last couple of weeks the grungy collective – ‘NINJA’ stands for Narrativas Independentes, Jornalismo e Ação’ (Independent Narratives, Journalism and Action) – has found itself becoming the story, as well as covering it. The subject of TV reports, a stream of articles in the mainstream press, and thousands of words’ worth of social media posts, Mídia NINJA’s success thrust it first into the spotlight, and then into the floodlit glare of national scrutiny, sparked by its self-proclaimed ‘umbilical’ connection with – and indeed, emergence out of – a controversial network of collectives called Foro do Eixo, whose name means ‘outside the [Rio–São Paulo] axis’.

Axis of internet

As interest in Mídia Ninja grew, its de facto leader, the 34-year-old journalist Bruno Torturra, gave a widely seen interview on the TV programme Roda Viva on 5 August alongside Pablo Capilé, the founder and leader of Fora do Eixo. It rocketed the twin collectives into the public eye in an instant – and then brought detractors streaming out of the woodwork, in what became a frenzy of criticism, in print and online, aimed mainly at Fora do Eixo, but tainting Mídia NINJA by association.

Fora do Eixo’s role as a producer of live gigs and festivals in towns and cities across Brazil – and its policy of not paying the majority of the musicians taking part, offering them ‘exposure’ instead – has won it a small army of enemies over the ten years it has been in existence. A string of denouncements of the collective and of Capilé in particular, which began in the days following the TV interview and then snowballed, have covered subjects ranging from its failure to pay bands to accusations of psychological control and slave-like working conditions for its members, who live and work together on Fora do Eixo projects, including Mídia NINJA, in twenty communal houses Brazil-wide.

Highly committed to the work and to collective living, Fora do Eixo housemates are unpaid except for access to a collective cashbox, and share bank accounts, living quarters, and even – in the kind of detail that has piqued Brazil’s interest in the story – communal clothes. There are even allegations that ‘flirty fishing‘ techniques are encouraged to draw new members into the group.

Despite the shared clothes and the collectivist spirit, what the group’s ideology is about, and what draws people into it in the first place, inducing them to give up work and studies to dedicate themselves full-time to its projects, is something of a mystery. But from the kinds of events I’ve seen Fora do Eixo members at, filming whether for #PosTV or as Mídia NINJA, it’s fair to say the group is left-wing, and interested in formenting and participating in social movements. If an article about Fora do Eixo by the journalist and music impresario Alê Youssef, published in Trip magazine in 2011, is to be given credit, the ideology, if there is one, is a kind of Generation Y, post-digital mishmash that sees concepts like class struggle as old hat. Youssef cites Cláudio Prado, a theorist and activist attached to Fora do Eixo, who claims that this is the ‘post-rancour’ generation, ‘unfettered by philosophical questions, but radically exploring digital culture in order to do what needs to be done’.

Published in the days following the Roda Viva interview, two chronically overlong accounts by disgruntled former Fora do Eixo collectivists (here and here) have gone viral on Facebook, detonating long threads that have in turn been shared and commented on by a lynch-happy online mob, apparently intent on tearing the collective, or hoping to watch it tear itself, to pieces. The testimonies and counter-testimonies (here, for example), have been the subject of mainstream media reports almost daily, and Friday even brought an unexpectedly one-sided attack in the form of an article in the Leftist weekly magazine Carta Capital, co-written by a former Fora do Eixo collaborator.

Carta Capital later published an interview with Pablo Capilé on its site, giving him the chance to respond to some of the accusations made by those interviewed in the article. Capilé also wrote detailed answers to a set of 70 questions about Fora do Eixo, put to him by the journalist André Forastieri and covering subjects from the collective’s accounts and its channels of public and private funding, to its relationship with other social movement players, and its practices on the live music circuit.

Eyes right

As for the political Right, the word ‘schadenfreude’ is barely sufficient to describe the reactions of those observing the controversy. This saga, like some of the debates currently taking place in feminism – debates of the no-holds-barred kind, which used to happen internally with a measure of trust and privacy, and now unfold under the scornful gaze of half the internet – has them rolling in the aisles.

In a series of four posts at Veja, a weekly news magazine and website with a tone somewhere between Readers’ Digest and the Daily Mail, the right-wing blogger and former Trotskyist Reinaldo Azevedo dissected Carta Capital’s Fora do Eixo exposé with lascivious glee; while Senator Aloysio Nunes, of the PSDB party, has called for an investigation into federal funds paid to Fora do Eixo for its many projects. The collective has become expert, over the 10 years since its founding in Cuiabá, Pablo Capilé’s home town, at capturing large amounts of Brazil’s ‘Incentive Law’ funding: ‘private sector funds … in which private companies fund ministry-approved cultural projects in lieu of paying a particular tax, whether federal, state, or municipal’.*

Fora do Eixo’s life and times are powerfully compelling, and will no doubt be fuel for many column inches, and many more megabytes of bandwidth, in the weeks and months to come. But Mídia NINJA’s close association with it – indeed, many of the Ninjas appear to be live-in members of Fora do Eixo – has done the fledgling media collective serious damage. And it’s a pity, because against a current backdrop of waves of mass sackings in the Brazilian media and the recent closures of a number of major newspaper supplements and magazine titles, with more feared to come, Mídia NINJA, stewarded by Bruno Torturra, has been posing questions that are of greater importance than those involved in the virtual lynching of Fora do Eixo, and by association Mídia NINJA, may have considered.

The controversy came just as Mídia NINJA was on the verge of launching its new website, and more importantly, of unveiling a set of innovative proposals for new, experimental, collaborative forms of independent news and journalism production, with new funding models to match. As Torturra explained in a 31 July email interview with André Forastieri, these could potentially include initial crowdfunding to set up a newsroom and low-cost monthly subscriptions for its upkeep; donations to pay for specific reports or fund particular areas of coverage – say transport, indigenous rights, or city hall; and a system of microdonations for ‘liking’ a text or image, with a monthly bill that readers would be free to pay in part or not at all, with any proceeds sent directly to the author in question.*

Mídia precária

It was before the June explosion of protests that Bruno Torturra first began proposing new models of collective journalism. He wrote a widely-shared post on his blog, Casca de Besouro, entitled O Ficaralho – a play on the word ‘passaralho’, which means mass sackings, replacing it with something like ‘it’s the ones left behind who are screwed’. Referring to the latest in a tsunami of lay-offs that has struck the media industry in Brazil, as abroad, Torturra wrote, ‘It used to be that the heartbroken were the ones who had lost their jobs, as if they’d been ejected from a party that would be going on without them. Today, the sadness is on the parts of those left behind … Last week, I saw the joy of friends who had all lost their jobs together, cheered by the sense of an open road before them. And I saw the tears and depression of those left in the newsroom, accumulating functions and doing the work of three people, repeating routines that appear to have no purpose but the pursuit of a precarious salary.’

In 2012 alone, more than 1,200 Brazilian journalists lost their jobs and already in 2013, the dreaded ‘passaralho’, whose name sounds like a flock of terrible, job-destroying birds (‘pássaros’), has swept over the offices of the newspapers Estado de S.Paulo, Folha de S. Paulo, Valor Econômico, smaller publications like Brasil Econômico and Caros Amigos, and over the mighty, multi-title magazine behemoth of Editora Abril. (Meanwhile, despite the supposedly moribund state of the media in Brazil, four unthinkably wealthy media moguls are still perched at the top of Forbes Brazil’s 15 richest billionaires list).

Presenting the case for a collective effort to rethink the market, in his ‘Ficaralho’ post, Torturra called on interested journalists to attend a meeting, intended to present a brand new project called ‘NINJA’ – ‘to explore the possibilities of coverage, discussion, repercussion, compensation and the radical freedom of expression that the network offers. Streaming, print, blogs, photos and public debates, without the spectre of profit and business growth as the primordial conditions for the work’.

The tipping point

The meeting was initially called for the 10th, then the 13th of June. But as the night of the 13th approached, the meeting was cancelled – the protests on the street in São Paulo were hitting critical mass, and indeed, they were reaching a tipping point. In fact, it was at almost exactly 8pm that night that all hell broke loose on the streets around Praça Roosevelt and Rua da Consolação, the result of a wildly disproportionate response from SP’s military police, who pelted protestors with tear gas, smoke bombs and rubber bullets. It was the night the Folha reporter Giuliana Vallone was shot in the face with a rubber bullet, and the night that the rage of those watching the coverage of the protests on TV and online, including via Mídia NINJA, reached boiling point. (I wrote about the scenes on the streets that night here on From Brazil: Fear and loathing in São Paulo.)

The planning meeting never took place, though the events of June gave life to an organic, dynamic, needs-must Mídia NINJA that created many of the powerful images in turn driving the ongoing protests. A handful of meetings have since been held and continue to take place, as Mídia NINJA struggles to find its feet. Many amongst those observing the damage to Fora do Eixo and its reputation, including some of those on the Right, are hoping Mídia NINJA will evolve its way out of the mess – older and wiser, and with the independence that comes from participation and discussion beyond Fora do Eixo. And with a fresh approach to news reporting that not only challenges journalists and the market to change, and fast, but also demands that readers, viewers and internet users do the same.

Interviewed on R7 News on Friday, Torturra alluded to the new models of news production and funding, tossing the ball into the reader’s court: ‘As consumers of mass media, readers aren’t being treated as participants, but as consumers of information that’s increasingly presented as product, commodity, “content”. We need to invert the logic of the passive reader and look at the way news is produced – the reader needs to become responsible for the production of information before it is produced. Thanks to the internet, readers are no longer passive spectators of reality – they can expose the media, pressurise it and monitor it. But with that comes a greater responsibility. New communicators’ – and here, he might well be talking about the internet lynch mobs prowling the web – ‘need to become more conscious about what they write and say.’

Follow Claire Rigby on Twitter

Photos and three taken, with permission, from the NINJA Tumblr page

* Currently, Mídia NINJA earns nothing for its coverage and indeed, refuses payment for the images it allows media outlets to publish, including those used in this post. Also, for the purpose of disclosure: I know Bruno Torturra slightly – we have friends in common and have spoken, briefly, about the events of the last few weeks.

* That succinct description of Brazil’s lei de incentivo funding is cited in ‘The Space, the Gear, and Two Big Cans of Beer’, a readable and engaging academic paper about Fora do Eixo written by Shannon Garland, an American Ph.D. student. Garland studied the collective over a long period of time as part of her research, looking into the way Fora do Eixo became a player on Brazil’s live music scene, and on its practices in that context. You can download it in English here, in Portuguese here, and read Garland’s interesting, insider contributions (in Portuguese) to the current debate at her blog, La Gringa Sudaca.

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.

By Dom Phillips

Rio de Janeiro is a city with a strong libertarian and radical political tradition, that goes back to the dictatorship era. And though the numbers turning out to protests in recent weeks have come down drastically down, they continued before and during the Papal visit, as I covered in these two stories for the Guardian.

The ‘SlutWalk’ joined other marches on Monday July 22 and headed towards Guanabara Palace where Pope Francis, who had just arrived, was meeting President Dilma Rousseff. Violence later broke out – as I reported here – and controversy still surrounds the cause of that violence. This New York Times blog has the latest–

Last Saturday afternoon, July 27, with millions of ‘pilgrims’ (as World Youth Day called them) crowding Copacabana Beach, around 2-3,000 joined another Slut March – or Marcha das Vadias, as it is called in Portuguese. Above, her sign reads ‘“Take your machismo out of the way because I want to pass without shame.”

[Below is a photo gallery from the Saturday protest.]

This was all potentially confrontational. The concept of the Slut March, in which women demonstrate for freedom, control over their bodies, and proclaim their right to sexual freedom, while dressed either provocatively or half-naked, is controversial enough. Even more so in a country as religious as Brazil and especially during World Youth Day.

One of the march’s main demands was safe, legal abortion – which is illegal in Brazil. This can appear to be a country at ease with its sexuality, but it is also a deeply religious, macho and conservative society with high levels of violence against women. An estimated one million illegal abortions are carried out each year and are the fifth highest cause of death for women, representing some 400,000 deaths a year, according to this Associated Press story.

Thaísa Violante, one of the marchers, said she objected to the money spent on the pope’s visit and that she objected to Catholic church doctrine which does not give women responsibility over their own bodies.

“It is against machismo. It is  in favour of abortion. It is against the pope’s visit,” she said.  “Today a bishop put out his hand and pushed me. This youth of the pope should learn something before they come to another country. They are making a big mess. The organisation is very bad, even though it is not their fault.”

There was no violence. This could in part be because Rio police finally seem to be learning some ‘intelligent policing’ tactics to avoid violence – as was seen the previous night when a smaller demonstration of some 4-500 caused fear, confusion and chaos amongst pilgrims when it entered into the vast crowd in an attempt to reach the pope’s stage on Copacabana Beach.

I was at Friday’s demonstration too and noticed the very visible presence of a police officer in the middle of all the confusion who seemed to be doing his best to accommodate what demonstrators wanted while maintaining some police control and stopping hotter heads on either side coming to blows.

Anonymous Rio later shared this article about the police chief concerned on their Facebook page – the page is a widely-read source of information on Rio protests.

The Slut March was certainly the most celebratory of any march I have seen so far in Rio, with samba drums and instruments giving it a carnival street party atmosphere.

Later, after I had left, some of the demonstrators apparently conducted some gratuitously sexual acts using religious icons that have caused an unpleasant fall out. Not just amongst Catholics, but also amongst some who were on the march.

All photos Dom Phillips July 27 (text continues after photos)

Later, The SlutWalk seemed to have finished, but a smaller contingent later regrouped and headed onto the beach to try and reach the pope’s stage, only to be stopped by this line of National Force – a branch of the police.

Here, two worlds collided, on the sand: the slut march, and hordes of pilgrims, many of whom were planning to sleep the night on the beach. [The photo at the top is from after this ocurred.]

As some marchers exposed their breasts and others shouted at police who would not let them past, pilgrims on the other side of the police line either prayed, looked nervous or picked up their bags and moved on.

“They are criticising our religion. It is a lack of respect,” said Harla Rachel, who had travelled from Pará state in the Amazon to see the pope. “You can understand their cause but it has no focus.”

Foreign pilgrims were simply confused. Sara Zuni was with a group of Catholics from Isleta, in New Mexico, USA, and had no idea what the protest was about. “This is the first I’ve seen of it,” she said. She did not know that abortion is illegal in Brazil. “I know it’s controversial, but I would say I’m pro-life,” she said. “It’s a woman’s right to choose, but I’m pro-life.”

In 2013, this is what it looks like when the Pope is about to pass by in front of crowds. Smartphones and cameras everywhere.

It’s Popeweek here in Rio de Janeiro, and that has absolutely dominated news coverage. Since my main employer, the LA Times, is a newspaper in a Catholic-heavy city in a very religious country, we’ve done a lot. Brazil watchers should also check out Folha’s excellent English-language coverage,  but what follows below is a summary of what’s happened so far as I report for LAT.

Brazil is “the world’s largest Catholic country,” but it is less Catholic than ever, and it’s worth asking how Catholic people here really are compared to the rest of Latin America, and how often self-professed believers agree with the Church on moral doctrine.

In Brazil, it’s the Evangelicals that have strong opinions on religion, and whom the secular-liberal protesters view as a threat. Just as often as not, being “Catholic” here is a default option for anyone who hasn’t thought much about religion. Only 16% of Brazilians report going to Catholic Mass once a week – and the word “report” in there implies it could very well be less.

The faithful are hopeful Francis will inspire the flock to come back to the Roman Church. He is certainly popular, largely because of a perception he goes out of his way to live simply and get closer to ‘the people.’

He was received like a pop star on Monday, with crowds laughing, and cheering, and singing, and snapping, and snapping, and snapping (see photo above). I have never seen so many photos taken at the same time in my life. One amazing scene unfolded as a group of nuns mobbed his moving car with open windows…to take pictures of him on their camera phones. But I didn’t see anyone crying or praying.

Tomorrow, he heads into a favela which was pacified last year. That will be symbolic for both the Church and for protest-ridden Brazil.

OK, I think I got all the links in there. For the full list so far, go here. And for those that really care, you can follow me on twitter.

I was at the Brazil-Uruguay game on Wednesday, which was surrounded by protests marked by an especially large amount of property destruction and clashes with police. I left the game, and walked past a line of Police Shock Troops (I was wearing a big Fifa press badge, so they let me) into a bizarre world. I left a tightly organized sports mega-spectacle into what felt like a post-apocalyptic movie, with street fires, smashed windows, terrifying (though polite) police, and journalists and residents wandering aimlessly among the wreckage.  Above, some motorcycles on fire in the street.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Things that seemed impossible less than a month ago are now happening every day here in Brazil. In a political Big Bang of swirling movements, causes and new protagonists, a new Brazilian universe is taking shape. Above, protestors in front of Congress, Brasília.

By Claire Rigby

Thousands of column inches have already been written on recent events in Brazil, and more are surely being written as I write these. Nobody could have predicted, on 3 June, the day of the first in the series of protests organized by the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL, Movement for Free Public Transport), that events would take this turn, impelling a political and social Big Bang from which the fall-out is still spiraling, stars colliding and new bodies emerging in the Brazilian sky.

The protests and their aftermath have given rise to a cast of thousands and indeed, millions, in what is perhaps the most profound effect of the unrest: the sudden political protagonism of huge swathes of formerly passive citizens, on the street and on social networks – mainly Facebook. The site has come into its own brilliantly as a public–private forum for discussion and planning, for real-time reporting, and for registering protests, repression, meetings and assemblies in text, film, photos and audio.

Less than a month ago, as noted by Samantha Pearson in yesterday’s FT, two of the main slogans of the multi-sloganed protests, ‘The giant has awoken’ and ‘Vem pra rua‘ – ‘Come to the streets’ – were most famous as straplines for Johnnie Walker and Fiat TV ads, respectively. And even if, in the weeks preceding the slow-building explosion of people onto the streets to demonstrate, hundreds of images and texts were being shared here about the protests and repression in Taksim Square, Istanbul, there was nothing to suggest that Brazil might be next.

Less than a month ago, the Confederations Cup was already looming large, but the idea of there being protests associated with it was nowhere near the agenda. ‘Imagina na Copa‘ (meaning ‘if it’s this bad now, imagine what it will be like in the World Cup’), a catch-all phrase for structural problems large and small, was little more than a collective, anxious fretting over the World Cup, and the likelihood of Brazil’s infrastructure being ready for it. But it is now linked to protests and skirmishes outside the stadiums, and to discontent with what’s perceived as massive over-spending as well as bad planning for the Cup.

As I write this, in the streets of Fortaleza, North-East Brazil, where the Confederations Cup match between Italy and Spain is underway, a ‘sonic cannon’ crowd-control weapon has just been switched on for the first time by police, and protests have turned to tyre-burning on the parts of protestors, and tear-gassing and shooting on the part of the police. Witness this Storify of the days’ events in Fortaleza, which shows protesters with a FIFA GO HOME banner, police firing smoke bombs and teargas, and protesters scattering, their faces covered. One tweet by @KetyDC, whose feed is a tireless, compelling ticker-tape covering protests all over Brazil, reads ‘Palestine? No, Fortaleza. #ProtestoCE #VemPraRua #ChangeBrazil (AFP) ‘.

And in an example of the hundreds of causes spiraling off from or piggy-backing the protest movement and its original demand for a reduction in the cost of public transport, another image on the Storify shows a set of designer-sunglass-wearing, bermuda-shorted young men holding signs reading, ‘Political Reform Now!’ That call for political reform, not a issue in the original protests except, arguably, in the most peripheral way, has been in the mainstream political pipeline for some time now, and its revival has become one of the ways in which Brazil’s government – federal, state and municipal – is scrambling to accommodate (or be seen to accommodate) protestors’ perceived demands.

On 25 June, President Dilma Rousseff announced a five-point plan for change that included public consultation on political reforms. In vintage Brazilian style – the level of bureaucracy in Brazil, for even the simplest piece of business, is daunting – Dilma’s announcement contained half-a-dozen procedural steps to get to the matter at hand: a proposal for ‘a debate over the convening of a plebiscite to authorize the functioning of a constituent process to carry out the reform’.

The ‘debate’ on that lasted less than 24 hours, and Dilma, along with the rest of government, is now looking at simply calling a plebiscite on reform. (The political reform in question is twofold, covering the way elections should be funded [Dilma’s party, the PT, wants them to be publicly rather than privately funded], and whether the currently proportional voting system should be changed to voting on the basis of districts [the PT, a relatively small party, would prefer it to stay as it is].)

Who’s who

As for the sunglass-wearing protestors in the Storify, they’re an example of the multiplicity of actors now onstage all over Brazil, on the streets and online, making their voices heard. A battery of assemblies, meetings, demos and street battles is going off on all sides, in city centres and across their peripheries, in an atmosphere in which working out who is who has become almost comically difficult at times. On Tuesday night, I attended a public assembly about the democratization of the media, held underneath the looming hulk of the MASP museum on São Paulo’s Avenida Paulista. As a speaker was proposing ‘agrarian reform of the airwaves’, a march approached along the avenue, and drawing level, stopped. The two groups regarded each other with a mix of curiosity and suspicion for a few moments, trying to get the measure of one another.

‘Vem pra rua!’ called the marchers, unsure what kind of assembly they had stumbled upon. The assemblists regarded them silently, sizing up the placards, noticing the Brazilian flag around one pair of shoulders, wondering. Eventually, with an expression of solidarity, the speaker holding the microphone deftly sent them on their way, albeit a little uncertainly, and picked up where he’d left off.

The confusion is understandable: lots of things aren’t what they seem, and others seem not to be what they are. Some young men in Occupy-style Guy Fawkes masks turn out to be rightist agitators, hurling abuse at left-wing parties on 20 June, when a PT march was routed from Avenida Paulista. A photo of an unlikely burly, white-shirted and masked rioter who stood out from the crowd, piling in at São Paulo’s City Hall and smashing at the door, was suspected by protestors of being an infiltrator and a provocateur, but turned out to be an over-enthusiastic architecture student. A ‘General Strike’ event on Facebook, since removed, with at least 700,000 confirmed attendees, was found to have been called not by workers’ movements, but created by a single person: a man named Felipe Chamone, an amateur marksman who appeared photographed bearing a gun, triggering a counter-event on Facebook, ‘Denouncement of the General Strike event‘. Even more confusingly, a group of unions now apparently has called a general strike, for 11 July… 

‘Think hard,’ reads the page urging people not to join the General Strike event, ‘before you join any event related to the protests, even if your participation is only symbolic or virtual. Make yourself aware of who is responsible for the initiative, and whether it aligns with your convictions.’ Given that less than a month ago, out of the hundreds of thousands of people who have now taken part in the protests, many would have displayed little reaction to news of a protest other than a loud tut at the disruption to traffic, it’s to be hoped that the habit of critical thinking, developed during these first weeks of the movement, will persist.

For now, as various strains of conservatism scramble to contain, co-opt, appease and control what parts of the movement they can, the Movement for Free Public Transport (MPL), having met with Dilma this week (and having declared her to have a woeful lack of knowledge about transport), is moving onto its own real agenda. Hint: the clue’s in the group’s name, and in its slogan, ‘For a life without turnstiles’. Having achieved the 20¢ reduction in bus fares it took to the streets for at the start of June, the MPL is continuing to campaign for universal free public transport, a gateway right, its activists claim, without which many other rights – to hospital treatment, to education, to culture – are impossible for people to exercise.

Walk this way

In an open letter to Dilma in advance of its meeting with her this week, the MPL wrote about a range of other issues beyond transport, including the militarization of the police, the plight of Brazil’s indigenous peoples, and the ongoing repression and criminalization of social movements. It might be a logical progression, too, for an overtly anti-car current to emerge in or around the MPL. There’s no apparent sign of it yet (though the MPL’s open letter refers to an eleven-times greater public investment in individual than in public transport).

But given a set of factors, in São Paulo at least, that include chronic traffic gridlock, a vocal cycling activist lobby, a horrifying death toll annually on the roads, and the sharp focus on transport nationwide, a serious critique of cars and car culture would be an interesting development, to say the least. Coming in the wake of growing demands and actions here in São Paulo for people to ‘occupy the streets’ together, in the form of festivals, demonstrations and other events, the wave of recent protests managed to sweep cars from the picture effortlessly, banishing them from the scene in a single stroke and filling the streets with throngs of people, walking in unison.

There’s even a ready-made slogan, crying out to be appropriated – it’s the punchline of that Johnnie Walker TV ad: Keep Walking, Brazil.

Follow @claire_rigby on Twitter

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.

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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.

After the excellent video Dom Phillips and Otavio Cury sent in to From Brazil on Monday’sprotest, we have two more. All with English subtitles.  Above, an extended interview with a lower middle class protester, and below, as the New York Times Lede Blog called it, a wordless glimpse of the energy on São Paulo’s streets on Tuesday.

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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.

*****************************

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.

“Tear gas, pepper spray, and stun guns were used yesterday in Rio to disperse more than 500 protestors who had met in front of the Military Club to protest against an event in honor of the 1964 coup.”

Wait. Military brass still get together to celebrate the coup that led to two decades of dictatorship, one widely accused of human rights abuses?

Apparently they do, and this used to be a much calmer event. But protests of this type are growing, as the question of what form the controversial Truth Commission will take is becoming more urgent.

In January, I published this piece in the Los Angeles Times about the decision to create the commission, which will investigate crimes committed under military rule, long after most other countries in Latin America have undergone a similar process.

But since then, we’ve had an unexpected development. Protests led by youth groups have  insisted that the accused actually be prosecuted criminally, something that is not envisioned under the current plan.

To simplify issues, some argue that a 1979 amnesty law – for both the military and anti-government guerrilla groups – put that question behind us. Others, like those that gathered yesterday, argue this was not enough.

What we are essentially seeing is a battle over what will be the official version of Brazil’s 20th-century history, a battle into which yesterday’s scuffle provided a striking view.

Links:
An excellent set of photos from yesterday’s clash
Los Angeles Times – Brazil finally ready to confront abuses in past dictatorship
AFP – Rio students protest military coup anniversary – coverage from the ground yesterday, in English

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