Rafael Alcadipani of Brazil’s Getulio Vargas Foundation, a higher education institution At first sight, it looked like a traditional Brazilian protest. Dressed in carnival masks, two young men joked around, shouting slogans as they shared a bottle of cachaça, the country’s sugarcane spirit. However, the scene in central São Paulo in the early hours of Wednesday morning was anything but typical. More The men had just set fire to some rubbish bins, and were using the masks to protect themselves from teargas as they taunted a line of armed riot police. Up until this month, protests in Brazil were generally small, jovial affairs, often involving fancy dress and public barbecues – evidence, sociologists said, of Brazilians’ cordial and non-confrontational nature. However, as hundreds of thousands of protesters took to Brazil’s streets this week, university academics have been forced to review such stereotypes and now consider the failure of these earlier so-called “barbecue protests” to be an important prelude to recent events. “This idea that Brazil is a completely cordial country is a lie. There are 50,000 murders here each year – it can also be an aggressive and brutal country,” said Rafael Alcadipani of Brazil’s Getulio Vargas Foundation, a higher education institution. The inability of the country’s earlier, more festive protests to bring about social change over the past couple of years has also encouraged Brazilians to take a more direct approach, he said. “People have had enough, and it will be difficult for the government to respond now because of the wide-ranging demands of the protesters,” said Mr Alcadipani. Brazil’s first big BBQ protest started off as a joke in May 2011 when São Paulo’s governor scrapped a plan for a metro station in the upmarket neighbourhood of Higienópolis. Wealthy local residents had complained it would bring “undesirables” to the area. As a retaliatory quip, a journalist invited his friends on Facebook for a barbecue outside Higienópolis’s shopping centre. Almost 1,000 people took the invitation literally and turned up armed with sausages. The tongue-in-cheek movement quickly spread, largely as a result of the immense popularity of social media in Brazil. More than a million people a month have joined Facebook in Brazil over the past three years, leaving the country with the world’s second-biggest Facebook community after the US. Since 2011, Facebook users have organised public barbecues to protest against everything from police aggression towards cocaine addicts to homophobia and the lack of investment in regional football clubs – but with little result. The only success story was that of Jamaica, a Rastafarian member of the Brazilian Communist party in Brazil’s southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. He set up a more modest barbecue in a pothole in front of his house last November, which was promptly fixed by the local council after his picture appeared in the local newspaper. For Jamaica, though, recent episodes of violence should be seen as an exception, not the rule. “People are trying to take advantage of the situation by going around breaking stuff and setting fires – they are still just a minority.”
Posted on: Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:01:13 +0000
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