This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/world/americas/brazil-protests.html

The article has changed 7 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 3 Version 4
Brazil’s Leftist Ruling Party, Born of Protests, Is Perplexed by Revolt Sweeping Protests in Brazil Pull In an Array of Grievances
(about 4 hours later)
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — The protests were heating up on the streets of Brazil’s largest city last week, but the mayor was not in his office. He was not even in the city. He had left for Paris to try to land the 2020 World’s Fair — exactly the kind of expensive, international mega-event that demonstrators nationwide have scorned. SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Just a few weeks ago, Mayara Vivian felt pretty good when a few hundred people showed up to a protest she helped organize to deride the government over a proposed bus fare increase. She had been trying to prod Brazilians into the streets since 2005, when she was only 15, and by now she thought she knew what to expect.
A week later, the mayor, Fernando Haddad, 50, was holed up in his apartment as scores of protesters rallied outside and others smashed the windows of his office building, furious that he had refused to meet with them, much less yield to their demand to revoke a contentious bus fare increase. But when tens of thousands of protesters thronged the streets this week, rattling cities across the country in a reckoning this nation had not experienced in decades, she was at once thrilled and dumbfounded, at a loss to explain how this could have happened.
How such a rising star in the leftist governing party, someone whose name is often mentioned as a future presidential contender, so badly misread the national mood reflects the disconnect between a growing segment of the population and a government that prides itself on popular policies aimed at lifting millions out of poverty. “One hundred thousand people, we never would have thought it,” said Ms. Vivian, one of the founders of the Free Fare Movement, which helped start the demonstrations engulfing the nation. “It’s like the taking of the Bastille.”
After rising to prominence on the backs of huge protests to usher in democratic leadership, the governing Workers Party now finds itself perplexed by the revolt in its midst, watching with dismay as political corruption, bad public services and the government’s focus on lifting Brazil’s international stature through events like the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics inspire outrage. The impassioned mass protests thundering across Brazil have swept up an array of grievances — from costly stadiums and corrupt politicians to high taxes and shoddy schools — and spread to more than 100 cities on Thursday night, the most yet.
On Wednesday, tens of thousands protested outside the newly built stadium where Brazil faced off against Mexico in the Confederations Cup, as the police tried to disperse them with tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper spray. In what would normally be a moment of unbridled national pride, demonstrators held up placards demanding schools and hospitals at the “FIFA standard,” challenging the money Brazil is spending on the World Cup instead of on health care or the poorly financed public schools. All of a sudden, a country that was once viewed as a stellar example of a rising, democratic power finds itself upended by an amorphous, leaderless popular uprising with one unifying theme: an angry rejection of politics as usual.
Now the authorities across Brazil are bracing for a new round of protests on Thursday, with one newspaper reporting that demonstrations are expected in more than 80 cities throughout the country — from big urban centers like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro to Manaus in the Amazon and Teresina in the northeast. Much like the Occupy movement in the United States, the anti-corruption protests that shook India in recent years, the demonstrations over living standards in Israel or the fury in European nations like Greece, the demonstrators in Brazil are fed up with traditional political structures, challenging the governing party and the opposition alike. And their demands are so diffuse that they have left Brazil’s leaders confounded as to how to satisfy them.
“We want the act to be bigger today,” said Tadeu Lemos, 22, a student leader at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, part of an organizing group that drew up various points to continue protesting, including having a voice over expenditures for the World Cup and the Olympics. “The intensity on the streets is much larger than we imagined,” said Marcelo Hotimsky, a philosophy student at the University of São Paulo who is another organizer of the Free Fare Movement. “It’s not something we control, or something we even want to control.”
Security forces in various cities are preparing for a large turnout. In the capital, Brasília, police said they would cordon off access to buildings like the Congress, a structure that protesters were able to scale one night this week and dance on the roof, providing a shock to political leaders. And in Rio de Janeiro, banks boarded up windows while the authorities placed metal barriers in front of the governor’s palace. Even after politicians in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and other parts of Brazil ceded to the protesters’ initial demands by rolling back bus fare increases this week, the demonstrations continued to spread on Thursday night, and President Dilma Rousseff delayed a trip to Japan amid the crisis.
With support for the protests escalating — a new poll by Datafolha found that 77 percent of São Paulo residents approved of them this week, compared with 55 percent the week before — Mayor Haddad and Geraldo Alckmin, the governor of São Paulo State, from an opposition party, bowed on Wednesday night, announcing that they would cancel the bus and subway fare increases after all. Other cities, including Rio de Janeiro, pledged to do the same. In Brasília, the capital, the police used pepper spray to prevent protesters from reaching Congress, but some changed course and marched on other modernist landmarks in the city, smashing windows at the Foreign Ministry and scaling the Meteor, an iconic marble sculpture in the reflecting pool at the ministry’s entrance. Banners in the crowd carried slogans like “While you watch your nightly soap opera, we fight for you.”
But while the fare increases might have been the spark that incited the protests, they unleashed a much broader wave of frustration against politicians from an array of parties that the government has openly acknowledged it did not see coming. “I saw the youth taking to the streets and I wanted to support them,” said Raimundo Machado, 50, a public servant in Brasília, who is worried about Brazil’s beleaguered public health system. “I pay for a health plan, but I can pay. What about those who can’t?”
“It would be a presumption to think that we understand what is happening,” Gilberto Carvalho, a top aide to President Dilma Rousseff, told senators on Tuesday. “We need to be aware of the complexity of what is occurring.” Large turnouts also shook other regions of Brazil, and hundreds of thousands marched in Rio de Janeiro, where protesters drank beer and sang as they marched toward the city government.
The swell of anger is a stunning change from the giddy celebrations that occurred in 2007, when Brazil was chosen by soccer’s governing body to host the World Cup. At the time, dozens of climbers scaled Rio de Janeiro’s Sugar Loaf Mountain, from which they hung an enormous jersey with the words “The 2014 World Cup Is Ours.” But after the sun set, the police launched tear gas to disperse them, causing hundreds to run on an already packed street, scrambling not to be pushed into the dirty canal in the middle of the highway and using bandannas to cover their faces.
“We are a civilized nation, a nation that is going through an excellent phase, and we have got everything prepared to receive adequately the honor to organize an excellent World Cup,” Ricardo Teixeira, then the president of the Brazilian Football Confederation, said at the time. “They don’t invest in education, they don’t invest in infrastructure, and they keep putting makeup on the city to show to the world that we can host the World Cup and Olympics,” said Jairo Domingos, 26, a technical support assistant in Rio, referring to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. “We work four months of the year just to pay taxes and we get nothing in return.”
Since then, the sentiment surrounding Brazil’s preparations for the World Cup, and much else overseen by the government, has shifted. Mr. Teixeira himself resigned last year, under a cloud of corruption allegations, and while the Brazilian government says it is spending about $12 billion on preparing for the World Cup, most of the stadiums are over budget, according to the government’s own audits court. In Salvador, Brazil’s third-largest city, clashes broke out between protesters and the police, while in Belém, the capital of Pará State in the Amazon, demonstrators pelted the mayor’s headquarters with stones. Here in São Paulo, thousands flowed into Avenida Paulista, the city’s most prominent thoroughfare, with some protesters burning the flags of political parties in a repudiation of the political system.
The sheen that once clung to the Workers Party has also been tarnished by a vast vote-buying scheme called the mensalão, or big monthly allowance, in a nod to the regular payments some lawmakers received. The scandal resulted in the recent conviction of several high-ranking officials, including a party president and a chief of staff for Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was a popular Brazilian president. “Our taxes should not go to line the pockets of Neymar and Ronaldinho,” said Jean Moreira, 26, a business student, referring to the Brazilian soccer stars, as he gripped a sign that read, in English, “We won’t have World Cup because the giant woke up.”
“There’s been a democratic explosion on the streets,” said Marcos Nobre, a professor at the University of Campinas. “The Workers Party thinks it represents all of the progressive elements in the country, but they’ve been power now for a decade. They’ve done a lot, but they’re now the establishment.” For some protesters, the ire has extended to Brazil’s established news media, which they see as tied to the elite and focused on portraying the violent minority of demonstrators. Protesters in São Paulo have burned a vehicle belonging to Rede Record, a television network that had been covering the events, while in another episode, a prominent television reporter for Globo, the country’s largest television network, was assaulted while covering a protest in the city center.
The economic growth that once propelled Brazil’s global ambitions has slowed considerably, and inflation, a scourge for decades until the mid-1990s, has re-emerged as a worry for many Brazilians. As an alternative, some protesters have begun covering the demonstrations themselves, distributing their reports though social media. One group, called N.I.N.J.A., a Portuguese acronym for Independent Journalism and Action Narratives, has been circulating through the streets with smartphones, cameras and a generator held in a supermarket cart — a makeshift, roving production studio.
But expectations among Brazilians remain high, thanks in large part to the government’s own success at diminishing inequality and raising living standards for millions over the last decade. The number of university students doubled from 2000 to 2011, according to Marcelo Ridenti, a prominent sociologist. And while some protesters have taken pains to distinguish themselves from the Occupy movements that have sprouted elsewhere, others have embraced the title. One group of protesters from Complexo do Alemão — a patchwork of slums in Rio that was once seen as an epicenter of crime and drug trafficking — belonged to an organization called Occupy Alemão, created to demonstrate against police abuses.
“This generates huge changes in society, including changes in expectations among young people,” he said. “They expect to get not only jobs, but good jobs.” “We want a public security strategy that is made in dialogue with society,” said Raull Santiago, 24, a community organizer. “We have a high cost of living and precarious services. This is for basic rights. Look at how much is being spent on the Olympics.”
Unemployment is still at historical lows — partly because of the very stadiums and other construction projects that have become the source of such ire among some protesters. But well-paying jobs remain out of reach for many college graduates, who see a sharp difference between their prospects and those of political leaders. The array of frustrations and demands has made it difficult for Brazil’s leaders to respond. Specific concessions, as on the bus fares, were not broad enough to placate the demonstrators. But the kind of sweeping, public acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the protesters’ anger and ambitions — a tactic employed by the president earlier in the week — did not work, either.
“I think our politicians get too much money,” said Amanda Marques, 23, a student, referring not to graft but to their salaries. “This is a remarkably diffuse movement; they don’t even use loudspeakers to get their message across with thousands of people on the street,” said Lincoln Secco, a history professor at the University of São Paulo who teaches several of the organizers in the Free Fare Movement.
Earlier this year, Mr. Alckmin, the governor, announced that he was giving himself and thousands of other public employees a raise of more than 10 percent; his own salary should climb to about $10,000 a month as a result. High salaries for certain public employees have long been a festering source of resentment in Brazil, with some officials earning well more than counterparts in rich industrialized nations. Asked why the protests were emerging now, he said, “Why not now? This isn’t something happening just in Brazil, but a new form of protesting, which is not channeled through traditional institutions.”
Both Mr. Alckmin and Mr. Haddad followed the protests together in Paris last week on their smartphones. But at the time, Mr. Alckmin dismissed the protests as the equivalent to a routine strike by air traffic controllers in Paris, something “that happens.” Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University who has studied social movements, including Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, said it was difficult to know exactly what sparks would set off a broader movement.
“What has to be done is be strong and stand firm to avoid excesses,” he told reporters then, before the protests had spread on the streets of São Paulo and dozens of other cities across Brazil. “It’s similar to the way in which a certain kind of music suddenly is everywhere, and there’s no theory that can tell you which it’s going to be and when,” he said.
By this week, it was clear how thoroughly officials had miscalculated. At one point on Tuesday night, protesters tried to break into the Municipal Theater, where operagoers were watching Stravinsky’s “Rake’s Progress.” The doors to the elegant theater remained shut and as the show went on, they spray-painted the outside of the recently renovated structure with the words “Set Fire to the Bourgeoisie.” But the activists at the heart of the movement — they refuse to call themselves leaders — insist that what is happening in Brazil did not burst out of nowhere.

William Neuman contributed reporting from São Paulo, and Andrew Downie from Recife.

“It has a spontaneous element that is important when people start going to protests,” said Rafael Siqueira, 38. But he added, “It came out of a lot of work.”
The Free Fare Movement was created in 2005, at a meeting in Pôrto Alegre, a southern city. Ms. Vivian, who is now 23, helped organize the event, which drew about 200 activists from around the country. Under a large tent at a campsite in a park, activists came up with a logo: a crude drawing of a stick figure kicking over a bus turnstile.
Ms. Vivian, now a waitress and geography student who was bleary-eyed from lack of sleep after days of continuous protests, laughed when she thought about her early days as an organizer: “In 2005 we were a bunch of kids who had never organized any kind of demonstration.”
Without the organizing grunt work over the years, she and others said, the stage for the current wave of protests would not have been set. Still, Ms. Vivian and her fellow activists could not explain the alchemy that had suddenly brought huge crowds into the streets all around the country.
“People finally woke up,” Ms. Vivian said. Asked why it happened now, she shrugged and said, “We really don’t know.”

Taylor Barnes contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro, and Lucy Jordan from Brasília.