Brazil’s bubble pops loudly in angry demonstrations
SAO PAULO, Brazil — In 2007, as this country was being praised for its strong economy and fight against poverty, officials announced that Brazil had arrived on the world stage with its selection as host of soccer’s biggest event, the 2014 World Cup.
Two years later, the president at the time, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, shed tears of joy as Rio de Janeiro was chosen as the site of the 2016 Olympics.
“Brazil went from a second- class country to a first-class country,” said Lula.
Now, hundreds of thousands of Brazilians who have been protesting in dozens of cities nationwide are telling the world a much different story.
People across Brazil’s social strata have been swarming the streets night after night for more than a week to vent their rage against the status quo. The biggest outpouring came Thursday, when 1 million people protested nationwide, astonishing Lula’s successor, President Dilma Rousseff, and her cabinet.
The spark was a strike against a 9-cent bus-fare hike, with the bulk of the protesters coming from the middle class.
Now factory workers and waiters have joined university students and middle-class professionals who are livid about the billions of dollars in public funds being spent on sports facilities for soccer matches and Olympic track meets when public hospitals are substandard and schools are rundown.
Leaderless, faceless and assembling through social media, they have become a loud, collective voice against widespread graft, with some protesters carrying placards vowing, “Stop corruption or we will stop Brazil.”
Friday night, Roussef offered to create a national plan for public transit. She said she would improve health care and education by bringing in foreign doctors and reviving an earlier plan to funnel oil royalties to schools.
But it appeared too early to tell whether her words had defused the anger. One protester in Sao Paulo on Saturday, Tiago Luiz de Marcos, 28, said Rousseff “talked and talked” but simply “made people want to fight for their rights.”