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Freelance feature about the political upheaval in Brazil prior to the World Cup published in the Index on Censorship magazine.
Marching on
Brazil’s pre-World Cup riots took the nation, and the world, by surprise, bringing out a crosssection of protesters on to the streets to call for change. But did that change happen? Nicole Mezzasalma reports
When a group of disgruntled rightwing activists announced a protest in São Paulo in March, there were fears it could escalate into a replay of the full-scale riots the year before. This year’s Marcha da Família (Family March) may have had very different aims to the riots – calling for the military to overthrow the president, rather than an improvement of public services – but the fuse for street action had been lit. Prescient in everyone’s minds was a demonstration of the same name 50 years earlier that drew in over 100,000 supporters and caused a coup that led to a 21-year dictatorship.
Yet, despite over 2,100 confirmations on a Facebook event page, this year’s Marcha da Família went out with a fizzle rather than a bang, attracting around 700 demonstrators in São Paulo and a few more at satellite protests nationwide. Domestic news coverage was minimal; internationally, it didn’t even register. No one expected another coup but it was certainly tamer than predicted.
Aside from last June’s riots and the Marcha da Família of 1964, Brazil is not a nation prone to protest. Pots are banged in the plaza on a regular basis in Argentina; in Bolivia, people band together to march on the presidential palace. In contrast, Brazilians rarely take to the streets to voice their problems. They are quick to remind people that their country was not born from a bloody revolution.
Hence the shock felt, both domestically and internationally, from last year’s largescale demonstrations, when hundreds of thousands of discontented people poured on to the streets. Even major news organisations were caught off-guard. “The news team here had never covered large-scale national protests. We had to import all kinds of protective riot gear and helmets so we could go out in the field,” said a news agency journalist in Rio.
The initial impetus for the June riots was outrage at a rise in bus fares, but this soon snowballed. Discontent spread nationwide and drew in more issues: corruption, the cost of hosting the FIFA World Cup, the lack of investment in health and education. Demonstrations became riots when the heavyhanded approach of police towards the until-then-peaceful events triggered a wave of support, which culminated in an estimated two million Brazilians joining protests across more than 100 cities.
International observers might not have realised how out of character this was for Brazilians, but the scale of the events was certainly surprising given that the country had been riding a wave of economic progress. President Dilma Rousseff’s approval ratings back then were high (63 per cent of the population rated the government as good or excellent in March 2013). But did the action – and all the worldwide headlines – have any effect?
Political scientist and Amnesty International human rights adviser Mauricio Santoro said the June protests achieved some immediate results: “The bus fare rises that originally triggered the movement were cancelled in Rio and São Paulo, and while they have since risen once more in Rio, the fares in São Paulo remain the same.” The impact of the demonstrations also affected the federal sphere. “As well as the local gains, nationally the protests resulted in the approval of certain laws and the repeal of others that were heavily criticised,” said Santoro. This included a proposed amendment to the constitution that aimed to reduce the powers of the Brazilian Prosecution Service, widely viewed as a way to prevent the government from taking firm action to curb corruption, particularly in the political arena. The proposal was rejected by federal MPs as a direct result of protests.
However, he warned that the changes have been very small and certainly much less significant than protesters wanted. “The protests happened not only because of the rise in bus fares. They were also about the public transport service’s lack of quality and infrastructure.” Buses in the main Brazilian cities are regularly overcrowded, accidents due to reckless driving are common, and they are constantly the target of thieves and other criminals. “And, to this day, none of these structural problems have been resolved or investigated,” Santoro said.
A good example of this is the investigation into the contracts to operate bus lines in Rio de Janeiro, originally tendered in 2010 and plagued with complaints ever since. As a consequence of last year’s protests, in August the city council opened a CPI (comissão parlamentar de inquérito, or parliamentary inquiry commission) to delve into the lack of transparency surrounding the contracts and fare structures. But little more than a month later, Rio’s courts suspended the commission’s work after a group of councillors claimed that not all political parties were equally represented in it. Legal battles are still being fought to restore it.
Sociologist and researcher Aline Khoury co-wrote an article for Economic & Political Weekly analysing the protests, concluding that while the lasting effects would be hard to judge, the events had succeeded in awakening Brazilians from a long-term political lethargy. “The bus fare complaints that sparked the whole movement ultimately did not achieve their goals, as prices have gone up since then and the bus operators’ contracts were not reviewed or scrutinised. There have been more subtle political gains, however, and it is easier to study them today than it was back then,” she said.
“We saw that the upper-middle class, which had no direct interest in the bus fare issue and in general was averse to public demonstrations – they depend less on public policy as they can afford private healthcare and education, for example – took to the public spaces and rubbed shoulders with the lower classes for the first time ever.”
The downside of their presence in the protests, Khoury added, was the fragmentation of ideas, which changed the general democratic focus of the original movement into several marches defending the interests of particular groups. Doctors, for example, protested against the arrival en masse of Cuban medical practitioners as part of a federal plan to send them to underprivileged and underrepresented parts of the country that do not attract young health professionals.
Professor David Samuels from the University of Minnesota’s Department of Political Science specialises in Brazilian and Latin American politics and democratisation, and has a more cynical view of the protests’ motivations and achievements. “I really don’t think that these protests were societywide – I believe they represent mainly urban upper-middle class people together with assorted middle-class protesters. I don’t see a unifying theme for the demonstrations, so the idea that this is a ‘soft revolution’ seems a little misguided to me,” he said. “In the case of Egypt, Turkey or, more recently, the Ukraine, there has been a clear target – toppling the government – and what is unusual about the events in Brazil is that they weren’t even targeting Dilma or the [ruling Labour Party] PT. They kept highlighting that they were not partisan and that is an indication that they did not know what they wanted and that the movement was ephemeral. That is still my view today and now you hardly see any protests happening – you have strikes and smaller events, such as Occupy City Hall in Rio, but people are not universally discontent.”
To Samuels, Brazilians display a level of disengagement with politics that is especially evident among the youth. He said: “Brazil is not unusual in that respect; young people perceive the world very clearly through Twitter and Facebook and it all looks pretty grim. To them, there is no real way of effecting change through these channels.” He said that the only real achievement [from the protests] was that, with the PT in power, it was still possible for people to protest. College and high-school students are easily mobilised, but to have a consistent long-term movement is much harder and there is no clear evidence of that in Brazil today.
Samuels predicts that protests during the World Cup and before the general elections in October will be, at best, sporadic as the upper-middle and middle classes will not want the country to be represented badly in the international media, while the lower classes will be happy to watch the football even without being able to get into the stadium due to the high ticket prices. “For a real revolution to happen people need a proper target – it happened during the dictatorship [of the 60s and 70s] and it happened when President Fernando Collor de Melo was impeached, when people rallied for several months until something was actually achieved,” he added. “I think part of the problem with the recent protests in Brazil is that people say they are tired of corruption and impunity, but there is not enough political will to really end these problems. Only a small percentage of the population think corruption is an issue that should be higher up on the agenda – the majority just don’t care.”
Santoro holds a more optimistic view and believes the June 2013 protests were only the beginning of a larger mobilisation. “This October we will have the first elections in Brazil since the demonstrations took place and we will be able to see the true impact of the protests. The president’s popularity has plunged since last year and while there has been some recovery, the consequences could still be seen in the poll. The same goes for the governors of Rio and São Paulo.”
But Santoro says there have also been negative consequences to the increase in size and visibility of the demonstrations. “In June, three-quarters of Brazilians were pro-protests, but now just above 50 per cent of the population support the activities. This is due in great part to the increase in violence – the demonstrations have become more aggressive and police repression has been more pronounced. The results are that we don’t know how big the protests during the World Cup will be, but I think we will certainly see people on the streets again.”
Santoro said there is a direct correlation between government supporters and those who have positive feelings towards the World Cup. “The critical movement began well after Brazil’s selection to host the event was announced, so the World Cup itself was not a trigger. Rather, it is an opportunity to showcase and vent general dissatisfaction. For example, traffic in Rio has worsened considerably in the last few months and it is bound to get even worse during the tournament, and people could protest against that. There could also be demonstrations because the changes have not gone far enough.”
With the results of the protests in Brazil less tangible than those in Egypt or Turkey, it is hard to see what happened last year as a soft revolution. “The giant has woken,” said the press, a reference to the commonly held opinion that Brazil used to be a country full of potential, but little will to realise that into tangible prosperity. Recent surveys indicate the percentage of the population that is proprotests has fallen from 81 per cent to 52 per cent, and 42 per cent now declare themselves as altogether against the demonstrations. While the country may not be as completely disengaged from the political sphere as people believed, it looks as though last year’s events were more a blip on the radar than a giant’s awakening.
© Nicole Mezzasalma www.indexoncensorship.org