Figure 2.2 Demonstration against the fare increase, São Paulo, February 2011. Source: Reproduced by permission of Douglas Belome.

Traditionally fare increases are introduced during the school holiday period. In 2013, at the request of the Federal government, large cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro postponed the increase as a means of containing inflation. On Saturday, 1 June 2013, however, bus and train fares in São Paulo went up from R$3.00 to R$3.20. The week before, in the districts of Vila Leopoldina, Pirituba, Sé, and Jardim Ângela, students had protested against the announced increase. On the Monday after the fare rise, protests closed the M’Boi Mirim road, in the city’s ‘Southern Zone.’ On 6 June the first major demonstration took place. By 19 June, seven large-scale protests had occurred, and there had additionally been dozens of other decentralized forms of agitation, debate, dissemination, and protest. The demonstrations that began with five thousand people, a very large number for a single mobilization in the city, spread throughout Brazil and involved over a million people in the city of São Paulo alone. The city that never stops stopped. Yet it had also never seen so much movement. São Paulo’s avenues, usually filled with cars, were taken over by the demonstrators. The police were unable to suppress the protests, phone lines were destroyed, and both offices of the executive power were confronted. The gates to the Palácio dos Bandeirantes (the headquarters of the São Paulo state government) were torn down, and a crowd attempted to barge into the city hall, which remained impervious to popular demands.

      From the first large-scale protests onwards, the television news, press, and online news channels labelled the demonstrators vandals, troublemakers, hooligans, and violent people. Editorials in newspapers like the Folha de São Paulo and the Estado de São Paulo demanded tough action from the São Paulo Military Police in order to contain the demonstrators and the demonstrations. This excerpt from a Folha de São Paulo editorial published on 13 June 2013, illustrates the line of the media’s coverage:

It is worth underlining that protestors’ demands to overturn the bus and metro fare increase from R$ 3 to R$ 3.20 – to below the rate of inflation – are nothing more than an excuse, and the most vile kind of excuse. These are young people predisposed to violence due to a pseudo-revolutionary ideology, and who are seeking to take advantage from the understandable general sense of irritation with the price paid for travelling on overcrowded buses and trains. The only thing that is worse is the stated central aim of this bunch: free public transport. The unrealistic nature of their demand already betrays the hidden intent to vandalize public property and what are deemed to be symbols of capitalist power. What have the windows of bank branches got to do with buses? The few demonstrators who appear to have half a brain under their hoods justify the violence as a reaction to alleged police brutality, accusing the police of repressing their constitutional right to protest. They are thus demonstrating their ignorance of a basic principle of democratic co-existence: it is the responsibility of the public authorities to impose rules and boundaries on the exercise of rights by groups and individuals when there is a conflict between entitlements. The right to protest is sacred, but it is not above the freedom to come and go – even less so when the former is demanded by a few thousand demonstrators, and the latter is denied to millions. Aware of their marginal and sectarian position, the militants resort to a manoeuvre enshrined by corporatist opportunism: scheduling protests for rush hour on the Avenida Paulista, a vital artery in the city. Their strategy to attract the public’s attention is to disrupt the maximum number of people. The time has come to put a stop to this. The city council and the Military Police need to enforce the existing restrictions on protests on the Avenida Paulista, on whose boundaries lie seven large hospitals (…) As far as vandalism is concerned, there is only one way of combating it: the force of law. It is duly necessary to investigate, identify, and prosecute those responsible. As with any kind of criminal act, in this case too impunity is the greatest incentive to reoffending. (Folha 2013a)

      The protests were harshly repressed and criminalized by the press campaign, and also by the political stance regarding social movements from mayor Fernando Haddad, of the PT, and the state governor Geraldo Alckmin, of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB). During the first 13 days of the protests over 300 people were arrested, countless numbers were injured, and the right to demonstrate itself was even called into question as a convenient and reoccurring argument was mobilized about respecting the right to freedom of movement of those not demonstrating (Folha 2013b).

The intensity and escalation of the protests meant that their cause could not be ignored (Figure 2.3). Such was the legitimacy that they achieved that the conservative media was forced to change its discourse. In the battle over the meaning of what was at stake at that moment, the movement was partially victorious. The accusations of violence against the demonstrators were overwritten by the recognition of the violence of the fare itself.