Another day passes, and is followed by another night of rioting in cities across Brazil, in scenes that are becoming increasingly familiar.
The Guardian reports on the latest night of unrest and police heavy-handedness:
A vast crowd – estimated by the authorities at 300,000 and more than a million by participants – filled Rio’s streets, one of a wave of huge nationwide marches against corruption, police brutality, poor public services and excessive spending on the World Cup.
A minority of protesters threw stones, torched cars and pulled down lamp-posts. Police responded by firing volleys of pepper spray and rubber bullets into the crowd and up onto overpasses where car drivers and bus passengers were stuck in traffic jams. At least 40 people were injured in the city and many more elsewhere.
Simultaneous demonstrations were reported in at least 80 cities, with a total turnout that may have been close to 2 million. An estimated 110,000 marched in São Paulo, 80,000 in Manaus, 50,000 in Recife and 20,000 in Belo Horizonte and Salvador.
This isn’t going away any time soon – as President Dilma Rousseff seems finally to realise, as she has now cancelled her upcoming overseas visit to Japan. But what is becoming increasingly clear is the fact that the protests – ostensibly about nominal increases in public transport fares – have now taken on a life of their own, tapping into a lingering and deep-seated resentment of the Brazilian political and business establishment, and that the relatively minor affront of an increase in travel fares was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Indeed, the article continues:
Matheus Bizarria, who works for the NGO Action Aid, said people had reached the limit of their tolerance about longstanding problems that the Confederations Cup and World Cup have brought into focus because of the billions of reals spent on new stadiums rather than public services. Rio is also due to host a papal visit to World Youth Day next month, and the Olympics in 2016.
“It’s totally connected to the mega-events,” Bizarria said. “People have had enough, but last year only 100 people marched against a bus price rise. There were 1,000 last week and 100,000 on Monday. Now we hope for a million.”
I must admit that I am only now starting to familiarise myself with the political situation in Brazil and the huge, until-recently untapped reserves of anger and contempt that the population has for the incompetence of their political leaders – as manifested by a creaking infrastructure, inadequate education and healthcare outcomes, and the mismanagement of large projects such as the preparations for the 2014 World Cup.
Andrew Sullivan (and his knowledgeable readers) has a couple of excellent primers on the situation over on his blog at The Dish.
Certainly there are some very acute problems specific to Brazil which are providing much of the fuel to this particular fire. But step back and look at the causes rather than the symptoms and we realise that they are exactly the same motives that drove people onto the streets and to protest in many other countries (most notably Turkey in recent days) – an arrogant, disengaged government that wears its contempt for the people on its sleeve.
Watch Brazil closely – when public anger can explode like this in the sixth largest economy in the world, all those other countries in the top ten should be getting nervous.
Semi-Partisan Politics 