Many Americans’ image of Brazil is colored by films like the Oscar-nominated City of God (2002), which described the tribulations of young people growing up in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. This favela image—crowded, gangland slums with little hope of escape—paints a picture of a nation that still seems to be suffering from enormous socioeconomic inequality, where the poor are too often left in dangerous, impoverished neighborhoods plagued by drugs and crime. Even Pope Francis’ visit to Rio this past July was marked by a tour through the Varginha favela, which has been compared to the Gaza Strip.
At first glance, the massive protests that began on June 6, 2013, and spread throughout the country seemed to be about inequality. It was a reasonable assumption: many other large protest movements over the past few years have spoken out against class divides. Occupy Wall Street pushed against the one percent. Protests during the G20 summits in London and Toronto included calls to lower poverty and punish financial malefactors. Even the Arab Spring began with union-led strikes and marches following a poor Tunisian street peddler’s self-immolation, after a policewoman confiscated his equipment. Brazil seems to fit the model perfectly. “Brazil is historically one of the most unequal societies on Earth,” Paulo Sotero, the director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, told the HPR. “The reason has a lot to do with our colonial past. It has a lot to do with slavery … in terms of inequality, we still have an enormous way to go.”
But it would be inaccurate to argue that economic inequality alone caused the Brazilian protests. Rather, it played a relatively minor role among several factors, all of which led to one conclusion: Brazilians today are disillusioned with their government, which they hold responsible for abuses stemming from political inequality. In Brazil, taxes do not yield dividends, and politicians do not live up to promises; corruption is rife, and public services are poor.
The Underpinnings of Protest
The protests began with groups organized by the radical Movimento Passo Livre (Movement for Free Travel) demonstrating against an increase in São Paulo bus fares. However, following a brutal, seemingly disproportionate police crackdown a week later, the marches spread like wildfire. Demonstrations in over a dozen cities focused on a medley of topics, from corruption to economic policy change to the extravagant spending on the series of sporting events that the country is hosting. Apart from the Confederations Cup that occurred during the protests, Brazil will also host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics. Costs for the World Cup alone are projected at around $14 billion.
“These protests were so gripping because they were so unexpected,” Frances Hagopian, Lemann Professor for Brazil Studies at Harvard, told the HPR. Imagine, “things are going well, the government is popular, the economy is growing, poverty’s been reduced, inequality’s been reduced, and all of a sudden we have this explosion of protests.”
Before the protests, everything appeared optimistic for the country. Since 2000, Brazil’s Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality) had dropped by six percent. Years of strong economic growth, since stalled, had allowed the nation to mitigate many of the repercussions of the 2008 global financial crisis. The poverty rate had decreased nearly 10 percent in eight years. Things were going well, and this national optimism was reflected in political rhetoric: “You had the rhetoric of the government that seemed to suggest that Brazil is improving,” noted Sotero, “almost a ‘Morning in America’ type of thing, like [under President Ronald] Reagan.”
Notably, this same political class was falling farther out of touch with its constituents. Corruption was common, even infiltrating into political initiatives. Perhaps the most egregious scandal occurred in 2005, when reports accused then-President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva’s Worker’s Party (PT) of bribing politicians for votes. Lula and the PT had risen to power as “the party that introduced ethics into politics.” As Sotero noted, Lula’s defense that the PT’s actions were continuous with Brazilian political tradition reinforced citizens’ belief that the political elite would never change. The PT still remains the strongest party in Brazil’s multiparty system, but the polemics arising from the so-called Mensalão scandal and the recent protests have severely damaged its credentials, perhaps irreparably.
“If the Fare Won’t Drop, the City Will Stop”
Profound discontent with government social programs further fueled protest. However, the demographics of the protests seemed unusual.
“If you were to draw the profile of the average protester, he would be young, urban, middle-class, and well-educated. So it would definitely not be the average Brazilian,” Andrei Roman, a graduate student in the Harvard government department who completed a study of the Brazilian protests, told the HPR in an interview. Protests solely focused on economic inequality, on the other hand, likely would have drawn from poorer populations.
The growth of the middle class in Brazil has been perhaps the most salient change of the new millennium. A World Bank study showed that the Brazilian middle class grew 40 percent between 2003 and 2009, making it the fastest-growing such demographic in Latin America. With this new wealth came new expectations of government for effective public schools, health care, public transportation, infrastructure, and policing. But the government has not delivered on these commitments: public services remain fragile, inept, and often corrupt. Instead, citizens saw their taxes spent on expensive preparations for soccer tournaments.
These grievances were not unique to the middle class, and ultimately much of the rest of the population supported the demonstrations. Protesters organized marches to coincide with Confederations Cup matches, which serve as prequels for next year’s World Cup. Banners were covered with catchphrases like “If your son is sick, take him to the stadium!” and “If the fare won’t drop, the city will stop.”
While the protests did not focus on economic inequality as a priority issue, the idea of an unjust system did inform how many Brazilians perceived their government and their society. “The fact of inequality maybe doesn’t make society feel like it’s a large, middle-class society where everyone is equal and doing well,” explained Hagopian. “Even if the middle class has grown, even if it now has 100 million people, it could be that this is in the background and this is what makes the appeals able to resonate.” Today’s Brazilians have grown up in a society with high inequality, and it is probable that this influences their politics: protestors who took to the streets believed that they were being ignored, underserved, and underrepresented. They felt as though they were at the bottom of a pyramid of political power, just as their parents had been at the bottom of an economic one. The government, on the other hand, seemed completely oblivious.
The PT’s Political Trap
The PT was born from inequality, emerging in 1980 from workers’ movements against the then-military dictatorship. It has long branded itself as the representative of the common man and of the lower classes, and historically it has been behind many working-class protests and strikes. It is ironic, then, that as the disillusion-fueled protests spread throughout the country, the ire of nearly every socioeconomic class in Brazil was centered on the PT. Politicians were nonplussed and paralyzed: they attempted to include the party in the marches, but PT leaders who tried to join the demonstrations were rejected and shut out. It wasn’t until June 22 that President Rousseff, a PT member herself, and a former member of the anti-dictatorship resistance, appeared on television to deliver a statement calling for peaceful protest and promising reform. “The problem was that she didn’t really appease anybody, and that she wasn’t really credible,” explained Roman. Add to that perception of Rousseff as an uninspiring—albeit usually dependable—bureaucrat, and the protesters remained unconvinced that the government could really help them.
Although Rousseff proposed a series of reforms and constitutional changes, nearly all of these failed in Brazil’s legislature. The one surviving measure—a plan to bring foreign doctors to underserved Brazilian populations—has been severely weakened. Admittedly, much of the legislative dead ends can be explained by Brazil’s fragmented political system, which consists of dozens of weak political parties, each with only a few seats in government. Roman believes that the protests could exacerbate this situation even more. “The protests tend to actually accentuate the fragmentation of the system. The parties are very weak, [and] they’re getting even weaker now because of the protests,” he said. “Instead of driving positive change, there is also a risk that they might actually lead to institutional processes that could make it even harder to fight the ills that the protests are all about.”
Baby Steps
The future of Brazilian political reform is unclear. Although the protests have established wide-ranging social consensus on a number of problems in public life, solutions are hard to come by. Certainly, for now, the government could bolster confidence in the short run by improving transparency and working to streamline existing agencies. A constitutional amendment that would have given legislators impunity was robustly rejected in Brazil’s Congress soon after the protests, but symbolic measures will only appease people to a point. Real reform will be difficult, but it is nonetheless necessary as a means of giving political representation and empowerment to the Brazilian public.