You have probably heard that we are living through a difficult water crisis in São Paulo. Longtime From Brazil contributor Claire Rigby wrote an excellent story about it in the Guardian. Then, for reasons which we do not entirely understand but certainly cannot take issue with, Will Butler from the Arcade Fire wrote a song inspired by Claire’s story.

Follow this link to the Guardian to see what he said about São Paulo.

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

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?

Claire Rigby discusses, with Folha arts writer Silas Martí, the difficulty of cutting through visual stereotypes in Brazil, a country which is often too photogenic for its own good. Above, ‘Descansando na Canoa’ (1984) by Luiz Braga, courtesy Galeria da Gávea. Throughout the post and below, other selections from the SP-Arte/Foto fair.

By Claire Rigby

What do you see when you picture Brazil? Football, favelas and goddess-like samba queens? Acres of skyscrapers in shades of white and grey, helicopters flitting about them? Or dense green jungle encroaching on stretches of sand? Visual clichés like these are there for a reason – because they’re part of the truth; but do we need to be a little more choosy about what we let into our mind’s eyes?

Too photogenic for its own good, Brazil is all too often objectified, exoticised and even eroticised in photographic images. Take Mario de Janeiro Testino, the Peruvian photographer’s lush book for Taschen, in which lithe, slightly dressed young beauties drape themselves all over Ipanema and each other; or every football-on-the-beach image you’ve ever seen, where muscular youths run, play, sweat in the sand. Skin glows, the sun beats down, people smile.

The way Brazil is seen from abroad – or to be more precise, the way the country and its people are depicted by foreign photographers – was the subject of a polemic published last week in Folha’s Illustrada supplement by the arts writer Silas Martí. Focusing on a major series of images, The New Brazil by Noor, a photography agency based in Amsterdam, Martí’s think-piece was entitled ‘Para inglês ver’ – literally, ‘for the English to see’, but better translated as ‘for appearances’ sake’. In it, Martí criticised Noor’s images – the result of a set of interlinked assignments by the collective’s photographers, arranged into themes including ‘São Paulo rising’, ‘The power of women’, ‘Brazil’s new middle class’, and ‘Salvador da Bahia’ – for what he saw as their typically clichéd, one-dimensional take on Brazil. Including images by a number of other foreign photographers alongside Noor in his critique, Martí writes, ‘Beautiful bodies glowing on the beach, favelas pacified to the sound of batidão funk, and glimpses of aestheticised misery dominate recent essays by foreign photographers attempting to document the country in times of euphoria.’

He singles out a handful of photos: a man gazing out over the shanty-town, wings tattooed on his back; funk-lovers drinking beer; boys playing football outside favela-chic shacks. Brazil-watchers, like Brazilians, will have seen hundreds of such images – they form an inescapable part of the visual discourse purporting to explain what the country is all about. But as an attempt to try and decipher Brazil for the outside world, the Noor images are arguably both as successful and as flawed as any other attempt to sum up the unencompassable complexity of the country – whether in images or in text. It’s a problem that not only photographers but also journalists writing about Brazil, or indeed about anything else, face every day of the week: that of filtering and distilling complex subjects, and absorbing and deciphering signs to present them to readers in a digestible, palatable form.

A guest post by Mauricio Savarese here on From Brazil this week, Why is Brazil important?, touches on some of the same problems: Brazil’s image abroad, the interest Brazil awakens in those curious to understand more about it, and the level of detail, complexity and attention they are prepared to invest in doing so.

For Martí, even the Mexican photographer Carlos Cazalis’s cold-toned images of São Paulo don’t pass muster: ‘Even when the scenario is different, and the softness of Rio gives way to paulistano chaos, exaggerations prevail that disturb the more critical eye.’ As one of Folha’s leading art critics, it’s fair to say that Martí has a better – and a more critical – eye than most. He allows, in the words of one of his interviewees, for the fact that visual clichés of the kinds he discerns in the Noor images are also reproduced – internalised, perhaps – by Brazilian photographers: ‘Certain clichés are connected to our inner vision of the country,’ says Boris Kossoy, a photographer and professor at the University of São Paulo (USP). ‘It’s an opportunistic point of view, or a colonised repetition of what people want to see abroad. It’s exotic content for the consumption of idiots.’

I emailed Silas to ask whether there were Brazilian photographers he thought were doing a better job of portraying Brazil. ‘It’s tricky,’ he wrote back: ‘I don’t feel up to speed with the work of all the photojournalists working at the moment. And although there are lots of photographers whose work I love doing interesting things, they’re not necessarily focused on looking at Brazil in particular. Some of my favourites, though, are João Castilho, Rodrigo Braga and Luiz Braga, and I like some of the things Cia. de Photo does. But you’d have to be careful not to classify these works as journalistic, since their pretensions are more artistic, and not always documentary. Even so, I’d say that these photographers, using some of fiction’s strategies, are registering a Brazil that’s more real in some aspects.’

Leaving him to have the last word – and taking up his implied suggestion of looking to art for the kind of insight that encapsulates complexity without flattening it out – scroll on for more works from last week’s SP-Arte/Foto fair,  including some of the Brazil-focused works that seem to slip between the artistic and the documentary.

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.

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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.

São Paulo’s Virada Cultural, a 24-hour mega-party featuring more than 900 acts, put the best and the worst of São Paulo on display last weekend. Despite headlines dominated by crime, Claire Rigby had a great time, alongside millions of others, and argues that these kinds of events should be a source of pride for the city.

By Claire Rigby

Headlines – “DEATHS, ROBBERIES AND MASS MUGGINGS MAR THE VIRADA CULTURAL” – “DEATHS AND MASS MUGGINGS: CULTURE LOSES OUT TO VIOLENCE” – “VIRADA OF THE MASS MUGGING” 

São Paulo’s population, waking up after another Virada Cultural, the city’s annual 24-hour cultural marathon, could be forgiven for shuddering with horror at São Paulo’s newspapers over their Monday morning coffee. But for millions of people who attended the festival downtown, the papers seemed to be talking about a parallel event. Not that the robberies, injuries, and even the shooting and death of a young man who ran after the thief who had taken his phone, didn’t take place.

They did; and there was definite tension in the air at times, especially in the early hours, when the mix of thousands of revelers, untold gallons of alcohol, and the carnavalesque all-night party – not to mention the smouldering social tensions that are the mark of every major city, not least São Paulo – took their toll.

But alongside the undoubtedly bad news, there was precious little good news to be read about the Virada Cultural (‘Cultural All-Nighter’), an event that brought an estimated total of 4 million people onto the streets over the course of 24 hours, starting at 6pm on the night of Saturday 20 May. Filling the streets of SP’s dilapidated, occasionally lovely Centro with music, art, dance and theatre, and with hundreds of official food stalls and unofficial beer-sellers, the ninth annual Virada set audiences washing up and down the town to watch shows by thousands of musicians – there were some 900 acts spread across 120 locations – and dancing through the night to everything from techno to samba, lambada and funk carioca.

Art projections filled the Vale de Anhangabaú, where artists and collectives had created 15 installations, including a bridge by BijaRi whose LED lighting glowed in response to the people crossing the valley on it. An art/activist installation Conjunto Vazio, by the collective CoLaboratório, projected Batcave-like lightning flashes onto empty buildings all over town, and under the Viaduto do Chá, grown men and women screamed in excitement as they flew through the air on immense swings attached to the viaduct overhead. Street performers, dancers and theatre companies attracted unlikely, ragtag audiences to their pop-up shows, roping in bystanders and parading them up and down the valley; and George Clinton and P. Funk played to a rapt crowd at 3am, as a tango orchestra struck up 500 metres away at a lonely Estação da Luz. The mesmerizing Gal Costa played a difficult, moving set of new music from her album Recanto; and as Sunday wore on, Racionais MCs, Brazil’s most powerful, important rap group, played a cathartic, euphoric, packed set, also featuring an impassioned speech by the group’s much revered leader, Mano Brown, in which he criticized crime during the event. The band’s previous appearance at the Virada, in 2007, had ended in confrontations between military police and fans that turned to rioting.

We walked the streets for most of the night and again on Sunday afternoon, joining audiences at stages all over the region, home to some of São Paulo’s most historic buildings, and criss-crossing the streets from one show to another, aided (if the light was good enough, and shining at the right angle), by the black, hard-to-read Virada maps and programmes, distributed in their thousands and displayed on structures erected at street corners. The city’s ubiquitous columns of cars were nowhere to be seen, and even some of the roughest of Centro’s troubled streets, which are also home to Cracolândia, an itinerant, crack-riddled no-man’s land, were busy with people strolling from place to place.

None of this is to pretend that all was well with the world at the Virada: it wasn’t. São Paulo is an immense, pressurised megacity with more social injustice and indeed, more rigidly delineated class segregation, than most. It also has a chronic crime and violence problem every night of the week. There’s no doubt about it: assorted pickpockets and muggers were having their own mini-festival of crime at the Virada, while at least one immense band of forty thieves organized a series of arrastões – mass muggings in which individuals or sections of the crowd are surrounded, robbed, and attacked if they resist. I saw a scuffle break out as we passed along Avenida Rio Branco around 3am; and I heard a pop-pop-pop, and saw people running, at what might or might not have been gunshots around the same time, a hundred yards on. (I don’t think it was gunshot, despite the stampede, but I note it here as a possibility.)

And yet as frightening as the contact with crime, violence and sheer drunken disorderliness must have been for anyone on the receiving end of it, it’s what sometimes happens at mass events, especially when mixed with alcohol – and especially when they bring haves and have-nots together in such a sudden, unaccustomed manner.

Super-sized street events always attract the kind of people who disrupt, fight and rob, even in much safer cities. It happens at London’s Notting Hill Carnival, and even, as Vincent Bevins, editor of this blog, points out, at San Francisco’s Gay Pride Parade.São Paulo, arguably, needs more Viradas, and more events like it – it’s what a new surge of street festivals is all about, most recently the Anhangabaú da Feliz Cidade festival that took place in May, as a kind of mini-precursor to the Virada. For every citizen who lost a phone to the thieves (even Senator Eduardo Suplicy wasn’t immune, taking to the stage before Saturday’s opening show by MPB queen Daniela Mercury to ask for his stolen credit cards and ID cards back – then patting his pockets to find his phone also missing) there were hundreds of thousands whose Viradas went off without incident.

I was struck by the overwhelmingly negative press coverage of what was in many ways, and for hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, a successful, enjoyable event. In a telling example of the press’s choice of focus, one headline in the newspaper Agora, a populist broadsheet, read MAYOR HADDAD ADMITS HE NEVER EXPECTED SO MUCH VIOLENCE, over a story in which the mayor, in office since January, also said, ‘From Friday through to Saturday the register of violent crime was identical to that from Saturday to Sunday’. Hardly inspiring words on the city’s problems, but a dash of perspective, albeit a sobering one, on Monday morning’s seemingly hysterical headlines. Describing the smooth running of the Virada’s 900 shows, with just two delayed or with other problems, the mayor went on, ‘What were of most concern was the question of [public] safety and the incidents that occurred above all between 2am and 6am. We had more reports than we’d predicted, but nothing out of the ordinary in an event with almost 4 million people.’

It’s tough to know what the media coverage means. Some have suggested the media may have been especially hard on the new PT mayor. Infographics showing levels of crime and violence at previous editions of the Virada seem to show more or less similar results. But beyond that, a whole tier of the city’s society (the same tier, in the main, who would never dream of attending a mass event attracting huge swathes of people from the city’s poor periphery, as the Virada does) may well have been  put off attending not only the Virada, but all manner of street celebrations and festivals – a growing and much celebrated tendency in São Paulo. Violence and crime are chronic problems. But they’re not a reason to abandon the streets any more than SP’s wealthy already have done. Events or even venues at which the classes mix are extremely few and far between in SP, as the city’s affluent areas and the vast periphery that surrounds them run on parallel tracks, in parallel realities. Moments like the Virada, filing the streets with people, huddled at the crossroads in the patchy streetlight, trying to make out what it says on the map, ought to be celebrated.

Marco Feliciano, a man accused of homophobia and racism, has bizarrely managed to take over as Brazil’s human rights commissioner. So the progressive movements coalescing on the streets of downtown São Paulo set up their own commission, above.

By Claire Rigby

‘Life’s too short to live in São Paulo’. So says a piece of graffiti currently doing the rounds on Tumblr. More than in most cities, there’s a powerful disconnect in SP between what happens on the street and what happens in the rest of people’s lives. In whole swathes of the city – in its more affluent areas especially – closed condominiums, car-loving Paulistanos and a sense of insecurity combine with who knows what other factors to make the streets a place you pass through, rather than somewhere to halt, hang out, and connect with other people.

Recently, though, a surge of interest in reclaiming the streets as a space for culture, parties and politics has given rise to a raft of interesting events and movements – Existe Amor em SP; BaixoCentro festival; Voodoohop and Santo Forte parties, to name but a few – and this coming Saturday, an open-air Anhangabaú da Feliz Cidade festival, in the heart of SP’s old Centro.

Except to the extent that reclaiming street space itself can be said to be political, SP’s ‘occupy the streets’  movement has thus far remained formally politically neutral, barring a flirtation in some quarters with the election campaign of SP’s current mayor, Fernando Haddad. But there are signs that the ‘occupy the streets’ common denominator of the various groups might coalesce into a more decisively political force.

Rights on

In one of the most powerful examples of that, last Thursday night at Praça Roosevelt – sometimes referred to as ‘Praça Rosa’, after the thousands-strong spontaneous festival that gave birth to the Existe Amor em SP movement last October (see ‘Coming up from the street‘), here on the From Brazil blog – a first meeting took place of the Extraordinary Commission on Human Rights and Minorities (Comissão Extraordinaria de Direitos Humanos e Minorias). To the clack-and-roll sound of skateboarders practicing in the square below, and accompanied by a stream of curious passers-by, walking their dogs and their babies in the square’s recently refurbished expanses, 200-300 people gathered for the newly formed Commission’s first ‘public audience’, as it was billed.

The Commission, a grassroots, autonomous body, sprang up in response to the appointment earlier this year of evangelical preacher Marco Feliciano as the president of Brazil’s Congressional Human Rights and Minorities Commission. The pastor’s appointment was about as logical as setting a fox to guard a henhouse, according to the Financial Times and the move’s many opponents, who were shocked off the internet into mobilising in a series of real-life protests nationwide, including two well-attended marches in São Paulo.

Feliciano is accused of rampant, out-of-the-closet homophobia: he has said that ‘love between people of the same sex leads to hatred, crime and rejection’, and claims that ‘many’ members of his congregation, affiliated to the Assembleia de Deus evangelical church, have stopped being gay as a result of spiritual assistance. In another oddly perverse commission appointment in March, the Mato Grosso soya baron Blairo Maggi was appointed president of the Congressional Environment commission, in a move that can be attributed, perhaps, to the wheeler-dealerism that goes in Brazil’s coalition-based politics – one party is given this commission position for that support; another is given control of this government department for backing for that set of policies.

Fox in the henhouse

Quite what someone like Marco Feliciano would want with leadership of the human rights commission started to become clear this week, when in one of his first actions as president of the commission, the pastor rushed through a proposal for the reversal of a 1999 prohibition on psychologists taking part in any treatments purporting to ‘treat’ or ‘cure’ homosexuality.

The nascent Extraordinary Commission on Human Rights and Minorities, while spurred into action by Feliciano’s appointment, is far from being all about the pastor, though: its first meeting was chaired by a lineup of speakers on subjects as diverse as is the remit of the formal Congressional committee: representatives from indigenous and black rights groups as well as the Existe Amor en SP movement sat alongside federal congressman and LGBT activist Jean Wyllys, and the much-loved cartoonist and transgender community figurehead, Laerte Coutinho.

An open mike attracted a stream of speakers, including from the trans community, the movement against the forcible internment of crack users downtown, and including an impassioned speech by the SP councilman Nabil Bonduki, on a new Bill to outlaw funk parties – outdoor, illegal raves held mainly in favelas.

Watch this space: the forces coalescing in opposition to Feliciano and his ilk look likely to branch out into ever more interesting political configurations and – sealed during the last moments of the Extraordinary Commission’s first session, in which congressman Wyllys planted a huge kiss on Laerte, to the crowd’s delight – ever more fruitful partnerships.

Follow @claire_rigby

The opening photo was taken from NINJA

Claire Rigby visits the stunning Casa de Vidro, one of many modernist masterpieces hidden in our tropical concrete jungle. If you’re lucky enough to be in São Paulo, get there. Photo above © Claire Rigby

By Claire Rigby

There’s no vista quite like São Paulo’s, with its long swathes of grey-and-white apartment blocks, punctuated by a few, all too few, exuberant architectural huzzahs. There’s the pink, metallic cylinder of the Instituto Tomie Ohtake – a novelty candy-cane as seen from far away, but a building of real, complex beauty seen from close up. Also by the architect Ruy Ohtake, there’s the Hotel Unique, shaped like an upturned slice of melon (no – really), where the walls of the outermost hotel rooms curve up and away in the strangest of manners. And there’s the MASP, Avenida Paulista’s massive, crouching art museum – a glassy box suspended under a colossal pair of bright red supports, created in 1968 by the architect Lina Bo Bardi.

The city’s rich modernist legacy, In which Bo Bardi played a pivotal part, takes a little longer to uncover than its more whimsical constructions – or at least, it did. São Paulo has never seemed of more interest, architecturally, following a cascade of features in the international press on the city’s modernist DNA – most recently in a perceptive FT piece this month by Edwin Heathcote. It includes a long section on the famous Casa de Vidro – the home Lina Bo Bardi created for herself and her husband soon after their arrival in Brazil from Italy, in 1946.

Few buildings have received more attention here recently than the exquisite modernist home, since having been closed for the best part of six years, the house is currently open for visits until the end of May. And with the house and garden taken over by a major, site-specific art exhibition, ‘The Insides are on the Outside’, this is the best possible chance to see the house at its best – and to enjoy the added layer of world-class art, created specifically in honour of the house and Bo Bardi’s legacy (find out more on the artworks here).

Resting on a set of impossibly slender columns, with its cool tones and glass walls the building has been lauded as one of the world’s finest modernist homes – a style seen to brilliant effect here in the tropics, where even the material, concrete, fares better than in colder climates.

When the house was finished in 1951, the plot of land it stands on had been part of a tea plantation, and was consequently bare of vegetation. Photographs from the period show Bo Bardi gazing from the wraparound windows onto faraway wooded hills, where today, high-rises line up shoulder to shoulder, just visible through breaks in the forest that now surrounds the house, tangled in green on every side, as Lina intended.

Bo Bardi arrived from Italy in 1946 with her husband Pietro Maria Bardi (see pencil-drawn cartoons of the couple, above, by Alexander Caldas). Pietro had been invited to create the São Paulo museum of art – the MASP, which was initially located in a downtown neoclassical building, on Rua Sete de Abril. The contrast between the war-torn world the couple left behind and a Brazil on the brink of modernism – Brasília was created in the period 1956-60 – proved a heady one for Lina. She became infatuated with the possibilities open to Brazil and in particular, throughout her life, with its rich tradition of folk art, much of which is on display in her home, including an immense iron-framed, papier machê goat sculpture from Bahia, in the space below the house. A recorded testimony given by the architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, played in the same space as part of the exhibition, praises her ability, as an outsider, to appreciate the best of Brazilian culture.

He cites a phrase from a samba, ‘Tu pisavas nos astros distraída‘ (‘you stepped on the stars, distracted’). ‘I think she [Lina] saw as like that,’ Mendes da Rocha says – ‘as people stepping on the stars absentmindedly, and wanted to tell us about the wonder that existed here. … If she had remained there in Europe with her erudition, she would certainly not have created this work. She might have produced a beautiful oeuvre, but never with this lyrical and poetic character, with this power.’

Climbing the stairs into the house, there’s a sense of vertigo as your gaze slips between the granite slabs that form the staircase. And inside, vertigo again as you admire the slender columns that punctuate the main space, piercing the blue mosaic floor – and as you realise these are the same pilotis holding up the entire front section of the house. Cool, calm and utterly understated, the house was created to approximate its inhabitants to nature, and to get out of the way in order to do so, rather than being ostentatiously beautiful.

Lina never wanted it to be ‘like a closed house that shies away from the storms and the rain’, as she wrote in a 1953 text in the magazine Habitat. It never was a closed house: the Bardis entertained and put up countless friends and acquaintances in the Glass House in the forty years they lived there, until their deaths in 1992 (Lina) and 1999 (Pietro, at the age of 99). And on a wet April afternoon last week, circulating through the house’s exquisite spaces and admiring the art inspired by it, with rain lashing the windows, the tangled green foliage outside dripping and swaying, and strangers’ children darting about, it felt wide open again. You should go.

Above, an image from the short film Feitiço, by Pedro Barateiro – at SESC Pompeia, where part of the exhibition, ‘The Insides are on the Outside’, also takes place. 

Lots of people could save plenty of money, even if they take taxis everywhere. Above: São Paulo, a terrifyingly beautiful mega-metropolis. With too many cars.

I live in São Paulo, and I can afford a car. Why don’t I buy one? Because it doesn’t make any sense. Personally, I enjoy the rare luxury of being able to walk to work, so it would be wasted money.

But a fantastic new article and graphic tool shows that owning a car is a big waste of money for lots of people that do have to commute to work. And that isn’t just taking into account the obvious economic benefits to be had if they swapped in the wheels for public transport, walking, or biking. That’s not practical for everyone, anyways – the metro and bus system don’t get you everywhere easily.

No, what the numbers show is that many people can save lots of money even if they take taxis everywhere. Since taxis here are ubiquitous and excellent, that hardly seems like a less comfortable solution. But still, more and more cars, everywhere, every day.

In São Paulo, owning a car, like most everything, is expensive. If you add up gas, taxes, parking, insurance, maintenance costs, and what you are losing in the car’s depreciation each year (not the mention the sky-high cost of the vehicle in the first place), having your own is going to cost you more than taking taxis, unless you drive far, every day.

São Paulo is a beautiful and terrifying mega-metropolis, pulsating with energy and culture. I like it a lot. But I think most of us agree it would be a bit nicer with less cars.

So why do so many people keep buying so many of them?

I can venture two theories. The first is that people simply don’t know about this economic calculus. Since a lot of the car’s costs don’t immediately appear in the monthly installment plan presented at the dealership, a car may look like a good investment, even when it isn’t.

The second is psychological.

A car is status, it is personality, it is control. You power a big machine, you have your own music. All of this is freedom, and bliss.

At least, that is what the advertisers tell us. And if that didn’t work on lots of people, there would be no reason to have car commercials in the first place. If buying an automobile was an obvious utilitarian choice, those companies wouldn’t have huge marketing budgets. Sort of like you don’t see many flashy spots for rice or beans.

And, this being Brazil, there is an obvious class element, too. It makes foreigners’ heads spin to hear that some upper-class Brazilians never take the metro, even though it is so much faster and cleaner than counterparts in New York and London. If the train actually goes where you are going (and this is far from assured) the ride is a breeze.

But for a lot of people, including the rising middle classes, even the elegance of taxis is not enough. A car is a crucial status symbol. An expression of success. Even if purchasing one is the opposite of an investment.

So, those are the two reasons Paulistanos may be wasting so much money on cars, and choking the roads with them. Neither is a very good one.

Follow @Vinncent

And if you have any Portuguese at all, click over to the full Folha article, with interactive graphic

Death squads within São Paulo’s military police are widely suspected of mass killings and extra-judicial executions in poor neighborhoods on the city’s outskirts. Above, police inspect the scene of a bloodbath in Jardim Rosana that six of their colleagues are now accused of carrying out. 

By Claire Rigby

With a grim tally of almost 100 police officers murdered in 2012, news stories of off-duty cops being ambushed and killed continued to send ripples of fear through São Paulo as 2012 ended and the new year began. But the start of 2013 has also been marred by the continuation of a different epidemic of executions and mass killings – chacinas, or slaughters – of civilians, in which all too frequently, police officers are suspected or directly implicated.

Last Thursday (24 January), it was announced that six military police officers (‘PMs’) were under arrest, accused of having taken part in a massacre that took place on 4 January in the working-class neighbourhood of Jardim Rosana, district of Campo Limpo. In the attack, around 14 gunmen (and perhaps at least one gunwoman – one of the officers arrested is female) poured from three cars into a simple corner bar, firing dozens of shots that left seven dead and two wounded.

The killing was widely billed in the Brazilian press – ominously, resignedly – as the ‘first massacre of the year’, while hundreds of friends, family and local residents took to the streets of the neighbourhood, deep in the endless sprawl of south São Paulo, on 14 January to protest the killings and the spate of chacinas and apparent executions that has accelerated since October last year.

Small, heartfelt demonstrations for peace and an end to the violence are all too frequent in São Paulo. But this time, for the first time in the recent round of killings, someone relatively well known was among the dead: Laércio de Souza Grimas, aka DJ Lah, a former collaborator of the legendary Mano Brown of Racionais MC’s, Brazil’s most influential rapper. DJ Lah, a 33-year-old father of four, was a member of the band Conexão do Morro, whose melodic rap narrates the story of violence in the favelas from a first-hand point of view, and whose videos offer a glimpse of life in São Paulo’s poor periphery. (Listen on Radio UOL.) And far from pop-a-cap-in-your-ass gangster posturing, many of the band’s lyrics are suffused with fear and loathing of police brutality, harassment and murder.

‘Crooks like them are murderers in grey uniforms,’ go the words to the song ‘Click Cleck Bang’: ‘rats and more rats circulating in the favela. They’re the ones who push it, they’re the ones who shoot. Pray you survive.’

Youtube – Click Cleck Bang

Police under suspicion

Suspicion of police involvement in many of the 24 chacinas that took place in São Paulo in 2012, only one of which was solved, is widespread. At a meeting held on Thursday afternoon at Parque Santo Dias in Capão Redondo (a district just beyond Campo Limpo), to air public grievances triggered by the Jardim Rosana murders, there seemed to be little doubt in anyone’s mind as to who was behind this and many other unexplained murders. Speaker after speaker railed against police violence against the young, poor and black of São Paulo’s vast perifería – the city’s outlying neighbourhoods and favelas.

Even one of the elected officials present at the meeting – billed as a ‘public audience’, and also attended by Rogério Sottili, São Paulo’s Secretary for Human Rights, and Gabriel Medina, the city government’s Youth Coordinator – concurred with the assumption of state-perpetrated violence. Netinho de Paula, SP’s charismatic Secretary for the Promotion of Racial Equality, said, ‘The military police has always killed a disproportionate number of the perifería‘s young, black poor. I say that with confidence, since an actual PM commander has given an order that black and dark-skinned [youngsters] should be stopped and searched. That’s a result of the way the PM thinks, it always has been, and nothing has changed. That’s how I lost my brother and many of my friends.’ The Secretary’s brother was murdered in 1993. ‘My life changed completely when he was killed,’ said de Paula at the meeting, which was streamed live on #posTV, and is available for viewing in its entirety here.

Also at the meeting was Francisco José Carvalho Magalhães (see photo below), the father of Pedro Thiago Souza Magalhães, a young man shot dead on 14 October. ‘He went out to pick up a pen drive for his college work,’ said Francisco. ‘But he ended up dead, at 3 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, with seven bullets in his back.’ Aged 20, Thiago was studying administration at the Centro Universitário Anhanguera, and had worked at Band News, and at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake. He was in the street outside a bar in Jardim das Belezas, close to Jardim Rosana, when three hooded men got out of a car and started shooting, killing two and wounding two.

Does his father suspect the police? ‘I can’t open my mouth and say that. We have suspicions. But I don’t have proof, and people tell me, don’t say it, especially after what happened [the chacina in Jardim Rosana on 4 January]. I’ve still got four other children to bring up.’

Magalhães plans to return with his family to the state of Piauí, from which he migrated to São Paulo 18 years ago. Asked what he hoped for, he said, ‘I’d like a response from the government. They wrote on the report that my son was a bandido, but he was not a bandido. They don’t even know who my son was. They said he had a police record, but it’s a lie. They say that without even knowing who the person was to try and shift the focus of the investigation.’

Doraci Mariano, president of the Jardim Rosana Residents’ Association, was 50m from the bar on the night of the massacre in which DJ Lah and six others died. ‘It’s a normal local bar,’ he says, ‘where people just call in for a beer, or a soft drink. Working people.’

He heard the shots at 11:20pm. ‘There were a lot of shots. It sounded like there was a war going on. There was instant panic: family members rushing to the bar, saying such-and-such was in there. The police wouldn’t let anyone in – nobody could get close or get inside the bar to help the people.’ Were they military police? ‘Yes. They arrived very quickly, about three minutes after the shooting. The civil police came a few minutes later. The PMs pulled down the shutter on the bar and nobody could get close until the civil police arrived and opened the bar.’ Who do you think was responsible? ‘People think it was an extermination group.’

Death squads

Extra-judicial killings, many claim, are a specialty of SP’s military police, carried out by ‘extermination groups’: death squads formed by officers. And although no explanation at all is by far the most likely outcome of a suspicious murder – as is the case for the family of Pedro Thiago Souza Magalhães, and of countless others – on the other hand, occasional news filters through of officers being investigated on suspicion of carrying out executions.

On 14 January, four PMs were arrested and accused of executing a 16-year-old boy they had apprehended for robbing the house of a taxi driver. Witnesses reported seeing them take the boy, crying for help, to a piece of wasteland in the neighbourhood of Cidade A. E. Carvalho and shoot him. The officers claim the boy died in a shootout.

And in November 2012, an alleged execution was filmed by a neighbour and later broadcast on the TV programme Fantástico. The film shows four police officers dragging a man, a 25-year old builders’ assistant named Paulo Batista do Nascimento, out of his house. As a shot is then fired, the person doing the filming hides. According to the police version, Nascimento escaped police custody and, following a car chase in which shots were fired, was later discovered dead in an alley. The five officers involved were all arrested and accused of the execution. Nascimento’s house was directly opposite the bar in which DJ Lah and his companions were murdered two months later, and there has been speculation that it might have been DJ Lah who filmed, or who was suspected by the police as having filmed, Nascimento’s execution.

In November, the outgoing delegado-geral of the civil police force, Marcos Carneiro Lima, told journalists that there is considerable evidence for the existence and activity of military police ‘extermination’ groups, referring in particular to cases in which murder victims’ criminal records had been examined shortly before their deaths. He said, ‘When people hear that eight murders have been committed over a short period of time in a small geographic area, they know something is going on. Criminals are cowards. They kill, then leave the area – they don’t kill and keep killing. They don’t kill then collect the spent cartridge cases to conceal evidence.

Concealing the evidence

A chilling account of the internal structure of extermination groups within the PM, written by the journalist Tatiana Merlino and published in the magazine Caros Amigos in September, details the bullying and even torture rife within the military police, to ensure participation in illegal violence and murder. Using testimonies from a sergeant in the PM and a civil police officer, the article explains the structure of the death squads, brought into action when it has not been possible to arrange a ‘resistance’ murder.

The anonymous sources explain how murder scenes are subsequently interfered with: ‘The important thing,’ says the account, ‘is to adulterate the scene of the crime.’ Bullet casings are quickly collected by a follow-up member of the group’ (in the Jardim Rosana killing, a black Corsa drew up and its occupants gathered up bullet casings, leaving some behind, nevertheless, that led civil police to the 37th Battalion of the military police, and to the officers now suspected of having taken part in the massacre). The article goes on, ‘when necessary, a small quantity of drugs and an untraceable weapon are placed in the victim’s hand to justify the homicide. Sometimes, a cell phone is planted on the victim.’

If possible, the victim is taken to hospital even if he is dead, in a further attempt to destroy crime scene evidence. In apparent confirmation of that problem, last week, a decree prohibited São Paulo police officers from giving first aid or moving the injured victims of crime, ordering them to wait instead for the ambulance service.

What is to be done?

At the meeting in Capão Redondo on Thursday, proposals included the urgent need to generate and maintain detailed information on the cases of every person killed in chacinas or suspected executions, demanding autopsy reports and police data and collating evidence given by families and neighbours. Other speakers called for the impeachment of state governor Geraldo Alckmin. Alckmin has suggested that reporting of SP’s high rates of violent death is overhyped, and could be partly attributed to its large population.

A number of speakers stressed the need for cultural, educational and sporting opportunities in the perifería, and Rogério Sotilli, City Hall’s new Secretary for Human Rights, echoed those proposals, saying, ‘We need to bring policies to these areas that develop culture and valorize citizenship, the individual culture of the community.’

But elevating the investigation of suspected death-squad murders to high priority would also be an obvious step in the same direction, since in the absence of credible action against it, the inevitable conclusion drawn in the affected neighbourhoods is that this kind of violence is tolerated, if not promoted, by the Brazilian state – a state, it bears mentioning, that has no legal death penalty. There can be little doubt that news of the arrests of the six officers suspected of involvement in the Jardim Rosana murders – news that came shortly after the public meeting on Thursday – provides some level of relief to the families, friends and neighbours of the dead, not to mention the community at large.

It might also help if the sense of palpable outrage felt in poor communities were shared city-wide in São Paulo, where a deeply entrenched kind of social apartheid can work to make such deaths seem abstract, happening very far away – or worse, somehow justifiable; and where news items on the violent deaths of victims of robberies appear to have more lasting impact than do the deaths of favela-dwellers. The names and faces of the former become familiar in the days following a new tragedy, while more often than not, images of chacina victims are anonymous-looking corpses, lying dead on badly paved streets. (A notable exception is a gallery created on Globo.com’s G1 website, featuring the faces and profiles of each of the 345 people killed in the bloody month of October – here.)

As the former delegado-geral, Carneiro Lima, put it a candid set of comments as he made way for his successor, ‘Why don’t we have any massacres in [the upscale neighbourhood of] Jardins? Why is it so easy to kill the poor today in the periphery? Because there exists a large section of society that thinks that to do so is to kill the outlaw of tomorrow. It’s a prejudiced view held by society itself that assumes such killings to be legitimate actions. They are not legitimate.’

Photos by Claire Rigby, except main image.

The ‘people’s team‘ from São Paulo upset Chelsea this morning in Japan and delivered Brazilian football a particularly delicious triumph.

By Dom Phillips

It has been six years since a South American team won the FIFA Club World Cup. But today Corinthians deserved every centimetre of their 1-0 victory, having outplayed Chelsea with a performance that showed the São Paulo team at its very best.

Owned by a Russian billionaire, managed by a Spaniard, with a team stocked by expensive, international players like Spain’s Fernando Torres and Brazil’s Ramires, Chelsea were far and away the favourites.

But Corinthians played with the technique, the skill, the defensive capacity, and most of all the garra – or sheer force of will – that characterises their game at its best. And with a headed goal by Peruvian forward Paulo Guerrero that gave them the trophy, the team have caused a major upset in world football.

At kick-off, it did not look so balanced: Corinthians had struggled to beat Egyptians Al-Ahly 1-0 in the semi final, whereas Chelsea had effortlessly disposed of Mexico’s Monterrey 3-1. Even Corinthians coach Tite had refused to promise victory, saying instead the team would leave fans proud.

This was precisely what they did, taking the game to Chelsea from the beginning, while growing in confidence and stature as the match developed and it became obvious that, yes, the team from London could be beaten. Chelsea threatened time and again. But when the Corinthians defence did falter, goalkeeper Cássio held firm – a goal-line save with his legs was just one of his heart-in-the-mouth, match-saving moments. He deserved his man-of-the-match prize.

This was a tense, but fluid game. But Corinthians kept coming back and kept coming forward. Tite’s advance defence system – in which every player, no matter how far forward he is, has the job to close down the opposition and get the ball back – saw Corinthians winning possession time and time again.

It took them 69 minutes to score as the ball rebounded from the Chelsea goalmouth, out to midfield and back again. In a deft and determined play, Danilo moved laterally across the area to shoot – and Guerrero seized upon the rebound to head the ball home. Even then, Corinthians did not sit back: they defended hard, fought for the ball in midfield, constructed attack after attack, while Chelsea, technically superior, always looked dangerous on the break.

And when the whistle blew, Chelsea looked stunned in defeat. They had not expected to lose. With the game over, the cameras panned over the sour, disbelieving faces of Chelsea’s Frank Lampard and Fernado Torres. “Chelsea fume after world final defeat,” read the Guardian headline.

The victory tops a remarkable year for Corinthians. In December 2011, on the same day that they were mourning the loss of their former captain Sócrates, Corinthians sealed the Brazilian championship. Six months later, after decades of disappointment, the team beat Boca Juniors to win the Libertadores – South America’s Champions League. And now, a hard-fought and, outside of Brazil at least, unexpected victory over European champions Chelsea.

It was all very different a year ago, when the high hopes that Santos would beat Barcelona were crushed 4-0. And it is a victory Brazilian football should be grateful for. Two years away from hosting the World Cup, the Brazilian national team still struggles to find its rhythm and has just been given a new manager: ‘Big Phil’ Scolari. In Brazil, attendances are low and the game even in the country’s top division cannot compare to the pace and finesse of Champions League teams. Corinthians are not celebrated for playing the fluid, creative ‘beautiful game’ Brazil is famous for. But today they gave Brazilian football a much needed shot in the arm.

Because for a team from São Paulo that is largely made up of workmanlike Brazilian league players to go to Japan and beat one of the richest, most famous, and most successful teams in Europe with its multi-million dollar line-up of global talent, is a particularly delicious Brazilian victory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

As this excellent guest post at the FT states:

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

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

[youtube gb_qHP7VaZE]

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

Follow @Vinncent

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

São Paulo – the rise of Evangelical Christian politics

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the most recent poll

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

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

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

Latest Datafolha poll on Rio

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

Follow @Vinncent

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

Brazil’s two biggest cities are very, very, different. This is a an argument which never ends here, and one which I couldn’t help but jump into – Vincent

By Dom Phillips

Clichés abound in Brazil, and it’s not just we foreigners who throw them around. One is that life in Brazil, be that in terms of romance, work or national politics, resembles a soap opera, with all its dramatic twists and turns. It’s a cliché. It’s also sort of true. But it’s also much more dramatic than that.

Another is based in the fierce yet friendly rivalry between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the country’s two biggest cities, and the jibes residents of both fling at each other. Recently I’ve been hearing this from both sides: after four and half years in São Paulo, I moved to Rio earlier this year, and have been finding out which of the clichés don’t stand up.

“Ah, paulistanos, they’re stressed all the time, they don’t know how to relax, they just work. They’re so formal, they don’t know how to enjoy life,” a carioca (Rio native) quickly explained to me on arrival. “Cariocas are more relaxed.” You hear this a lot in Rio.

“The trouble with Rio is that cariocas are lazy. You can’t rely on them. They’re always inviting you to their home, but never give you the address,” a Paulistano gently informed me before moving. “And they have no culture,” another added. “But…” a third whispered conspiratorially, “I would live there too if I could.” You hear all of this in São Paulo.

São Paulo could be Brazil’s New York, a dense, intense and immense urban jungle whose forward–thinking residents play as hard as they work. It is the engine room of the Brazilian economy. This is one popular cliché, and it is true in many ways.

In this version of events, Rio then becomes the country’s Los Angeles**: a lazily chaotic beach city, big on samba and beaches, characterised by sexy, tropical glamour. But which, with the Olympics and World Cup looming and its associated programme of infrastructure works, has suddenly found a dynamism that is putting São Paulo to shame. That’s also mostly true.

But each city, in a sense, is defined by its economics and architecture. And the images each has of the other relate, as if each was a mirror, reflecting different images of the same reality. São Paulo is where the banks and car factories are; where the money is generated and spent. Rio is where TV Globo is based, where it makes – and sets – those famous soap operas, and is home to Brazilian cinema and those famous beaches.

São Paulo is posh restaurants, avant garde galleries, and underground discos in city centre car parks. Rio is beer in plastic cups, rice and beans, flip–flops on the cobblestones, samba and sunsets.

But the trouble with clichés is that the real world, and real people, are much more complicated. Paulistanos will tell you it’s a nightmare to work with lazy, chaotic cariocas. But they themselves are nowhere near as organized and productive as they would like you to believe. And there are plenty of stressed–out, overworked cariocas who would like to spend more time at the beach.

Rio is where the big companies in Brazil’s booming oil industry are based, such as state oil giant Petrobras, along with minerals giant Vale. These are all very serious players. São Paulo has samba, and it’s better than Rio gives it credit for. Rio has its underground discos in city centre car parks, but the DJ will definitely play samba at one point.

Paulistanos invite you to their houses because there is no beach. But they also know how to enjoy themselves. In Rio many people live in tiny apartments, the city has plenty of nature and outdoor space, and plus it’s about three degrees warmer, so cariocas prefer to meet in public.

The implementation of armed police bases, called UPPs, in some of Rio’s dangerous favelas has created a sensation that the city is less dangerous than it was. This is partly true.

But that doesn’t mean the city’s problems have disappeared: in the last fortnight alone I’ve been told about two violent crimes – a house invaded and its residents tied up and robbed by armed masked men; and a guy robbed at gunpoint coming out of a bank. While the drug violence problem just seems to have been partly shifted to the Rio suburbs. But crime too is also on the rise in São Paulo.

In focusing on the clichés, both cities miss out. A lot of cariocas won’t go anywhere near São Paulo because they think the city is ugly and polluted, which is true. But all of them are missing everything that São Paulo has to offer in terms of a vibrant cultural life.

Whereas paulistanos love a weekend in Rio, but tend to stick to the city’s South Zone which, beaches and nature aside**, is actually its least interesting area. They complain about Rio’s clichés then do their best to live them out when they visit the city. Perhaps they’re so desperate to escape their infernal megalopolis they live in that by the time they get to Rio they just collapse in exhaustion on Leblon Beach. Or is that just another cliché?

[Editor’s note:  – Vincent]

What’s more interesting is the similarities, not the differences, between both cities. They’re like two very different children born of the same parents, both competing for attention. Both are as modern and competitive, as hard–working and lazy, as clever and dumb as each other. Actually Rio is much more like the rest of Brazil, especially the North East, only much more beautiful. And São Paulo is a giant megalopolis with everything that entails, a city that is unique not just in Brazil, but in South America.

And both are unmistakably Brazilian cities, two misshaped peas in the same pod, and you will never understand anything about Brazil if you don’t get to know both. And appreciate that the smart, ugly sister and her beautiful lazy sibling is one cliché that doesn’t hold up.

**[[Editor’s note: As an American, and native of Los Angeles, I don’t like this analogy. To me, São Paulo is New York and Los Angeles combined, and Rio is a sort of over-sized Miami, if it were also where the emperor used to live. São Paulo reminds me more of LA than NY, with its chaotic sprawl. And getting to LA’s beaches from downtown doesn’t take much less time than it does to get to São Paulo’s breathtaking jungle retreats from o centro.

And, when I come to Rio, I go straight for the beach. Nature in Rio is breathtaking. Most of the other stuff, though nice, is better in São Paulo. Do cariocas come to São Paulo and try to go swimming in the Marginal Pinheiros? Someday, I’ll have to write my own SP-Rio comparison. — Vincent]]

— Both photos above by Dom Phillips, taken on an iPhone and embarrassingly sent through an Instagram filter —

Public scenes of teeming life are harder to find than you might expect in São Paulo, and some of the best examples are under fire

By Claire Rigby

The streets of São Paulo, for a city of almost 20 million, are far from teeming. Quite the opposite. Where other Latin American cities are characterized by busy street life and a palpable density of population, you can walk through some whole swathes of São Paulo and barely meet a soul. It’s an odd feeling to walk through parts of up-market Jardins, for example. Walking from Avenida Paulista down towards Itaim, once you leave the relative bustle of Rua Pamplona and cross Avenida Estados Unidos, you can walk for blocks and blocks past the high-walled houses without seeing anyone but security guards and maybe a maid or two, out walking dogs, and sleek cars that emerge from electronic gates, and whoosh away.

Other neighbourhoods, though, are teeming with life, much as you would expect in a megacity – those around Centro especially, and nowhere more so than Rua 25 de Março, just a couple of blocks from the Mercadão municipal market. The road is famous the length and breadth of Brazil for the intensity of its cheap-and-cheerful ‘popular’ shopping experience [see photo above]. Out-of-towners dream of seeing it one day, and flock to it when they finally make it to the big bad city; and it features as the country’s biggest ‘open-air shopping mall’ in countless tourism brochures and pamphlets, including those of the city’s official tourism body, SP Turis.

For a galvanizing sense of being one face in a crowd of thousands – downtown city thousands at that, all bustling and jostling about their business – this is the place.

Or it was until this week, when decades of street trade in the area finally, suddenly, ground to a halt.

Rough trade

Announced by Mayor Gilberto Kassab in May as part of a crusade to clear the streets of traders by the end of the year, the revocation of the street-trading licences of hundreds of stallholders – ‘ambulantes’ or ‘camelôs’ – has been hastily put into practice this week in pursuit of streets, says city hall, that are freer for pedestrians.

Still in the throes of an on-again off-again process of court orders and counter orders, protests and meetings, the ruling affects traders all over São Paulo, from Lapa and Brás in the west and east of the city to Jabaquara in the south, and has had one very obvious result: the banning of stalls from 25 de Março, complete with the human fallout from that decision for the suddenly unemployed traders, and what looks like the resultant abandoning of the area by a high percentage of the pedestrians who have always thronged the street.

To the satisfaction of some of the shop-owners in the area, the wide street is suddenly a breeze for shoppers to negotiate. Except that there’s little reason for pedestrians to crowd the street any longer. The sewing supplies shops and the costumiers, the knick-knack emporiums, the jewellery sellers and the countless weird and wonderful other shops along the street will always attract custom. But the thrill, the edge and the sparkle have vanished along with the cheap trinkets, the one-use-only bad umbrellas, the hand-crocheted teatowels and the cheap hairclips, and the pirate and borderline pirate good too, from knock-off bags and phone accessories to Sumsung, Polystation and Quingston gizmos.

Street eats

The regulation of food hawkers is another nebulous area. SP isn’t especially notable for its street food, but there’s plenty of informally sold food here if you pay attention: vans and carts selling drippingly fresh fruit – great chunks of pineapple and watermelon, bunches of bananas and the delicious fruta do conde. Other handcarts serve heaped dishes of sweetcorn carved off cobs and served with salty margarine; and espetinhos de gato – ‘cat-meat skewers’ – can always be found being grilled on late-night streets outside bars and clubs, consisting of pork or beef cooked over embers then rolled in farofa, a meal made from manioc.

But when Time Out São Paulo hit the streets a few months ago to uncover the street food scene, finding traders prepared to be photographed only resulted in a very footsore reporter and photographer, and a set of images of more interest for their close-up artistry than for their reportage.

A movement to discuss, promote and enrich São Paulo’s street food culture is set to take up the problem over the next few months, with a newly announced Revirada Gastronômica (‘gastronomic all-nighter’), inspired by the wild popularity of the street food section of the Virada Cultural back in May – see my blog post on that here. As reported by Folha’s Marcelo Katsuki, the event will see 150 food stalls set out all over the city’s downtown on the 25-26 August weekend, featuring food from some of the city’s finest restaurants as well as dozens of lesser-known gems.

Act up

The situation of São Paulo’s street performers is, at least in theory, better: a mayoral decree last year (decree no. 52.504) guaranteed the right to perform in the street, and to pass a hat to collect contributions from passers-by. Tired of still sometimes being moved on from Avenida Paulista by police, some performers have taken to carrying a copy of the decree, and the band Mustache & Os Apaches (see video) have published a ‘manifesto’ on their blog that might equally, arguably, apply to street culture in general, cheap handbags, plastic hairclips, cat-meat skewers and all:

‘Seeing colours, hearing music, dancing, change the atmosphere. We choose to perform in the streets. We choose to take people by surprise and transform their routine. Art creates a more pleasurable environment that’s more alive, and directly influences the day-to-day life of a city.’

Links:
Fashion designer Pedro Lourenço on his love for 25 de Março (New York Times)
Shock and Awe kind of Beauty (From Brazil)
Raul Juste Lores (of Folha) on the domination of private space (in Portuguese)

Claire Rigby is the editor of Time Out São Paulo, in English. She was previously the editor of Time Out Buenos Aires, and has worked as a freelance journalist for titles including the Guardian and the Telegraph.

She writes for From Brazil every other week.
Follow @claire_rigby
Time Out São Paulo