Ten years ago, at the beginning of June, activists took to the streets in major Brazilian cities to protest against a 20-cent increase in public transportation fares. Grassroots protests in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Porto Alegre were brutally repressed by the police, with hundreds arrested.
While much of the mainstream media treated the protesters as vandals, the population took the demonstrators’ side. In one emblematic example, daytime news program Brasil Urgente — home to law-and-order values and a bleeds-it-leads sensationalism — held a live poll of its largely conservative viewership, showing scenes of blocked roads and public disorder and asking if those watching at home were in favor of the protests.
Around 60 percent said yes.
Clearly thinking this was a mistake, the program’s anchor restarted the poll and rephrased the question, which now read: Are you in favor of protests with vandalism?
The result? 70 percent said yes.
Massive protests came in the days that followed, some with more than a million people on the street.
The June 2013 demonstrations certainly changed the country, though many have their own views about in exactly what way.
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In this episode:
- André Pagliarini is an assistant professor of history at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. Before that, he taught Latin American history at Dartmouth, Wellesley, and Brown, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2018. He is currently preparing a book manuscript on the politics of nationalism in 20th-century Brazil.
- Fernando Bizzarro is a Ph.D. researcher in Political Science at Harvard’s Department of Government. His research is focused on the nature, causes, and consequences of political institutions, particularly on political parties, regimes, and their impacts on human and economic development.
Background reading:
- Fernando Bizzarro says in this episode that the 2013 protests helped pave the way for Jair Bolsonaro to win the Brazilian presidency. In 2017, when the press still treated Mr. Bolsonaro mostly as a joke candidate, we wrote: “Six reasons why Jair Bolsonaro could become Brazil’s next president.”
- Read “June 2013 Spawned a Decade of Clashes in Brazil between the Left and Right Wings,” by Joelmir Tavares for Folha de S.Paulo.
- Vincent Bevins wrote for The Atlantic about how the hopeful protests of June 2013 were co-opted by forces intent on bringing down the left in the article “The Brazilian Spring That Never Arrived.”
- Brazilians were not the only ones to be discontent with how their country was being run. In 2019, Chileans broke into a wave of protests that triggered the process of drafting a new Constitution for the country. A process that has not panned out as expected. Listen to episode #83: Latin America’s veins are wide open
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