As a former political protester who was tortured during the "Years of Lead" of Brazil's military dictatorship in the early 1970s, Dilma Rousseff now finds herself trapped in what must be the most vexing conundrum of her administration.
Despite riding high in popularity polls, President Rousseff is now embattled: Brazils' largest cities are in flames and the the poor and middle class are revolting. People have climbed upon the roofs of Oscar Niemeyer's elegant government buildings in Brasilia and brazenly threatened the inhabitants of the Planalto. While crowds have resorted to violence and vandalism, heavily-armed cops have reacted disproportionately in several cases--as they did in the photo taken above by Victor Caivano of an unarmed student, Liv Nicolsky Lagerblad de Oliveira being pepper-sprayed on a relatively deserted street (not only was she taken to the police station, she had to pay her own bail of 2000 reals, which is approximately USD$885).
As I write this, I am staring at live video of the human chain of police that have encircled the poshly-situated Leblon home of Sergio Cabral, Rio's governor, while an angry mob is baying for the blood of the "cowardly" cops. Barra, the massive Rio shopping mall has been looted and BOPE, the elite SWAT-team equipped with more firepower than many countries' own militaries, is driving convoys of their skull-logoed armored vehicles down Avenida das Americas towards Ipanema.
Rousseff has been walking a tightrope since she took office. She has to tread carefully as both the protege of the wildly popular former president Lula da Silva and the inheritor of the cronyism and corruption rife within their shared party networks; she has to contend with sexist sniping and undermining maneuvers from Brazil's macho industrialists and opposition politicians; she has had to appease the military while upholding democratic principles in pursuing freedom of information legislation that would reveal the ugly truths of its time in power; and she has had to reconcile her past as a guerilla and a Marxist with the free-market liberalism and fiscal rigor the world expects of her as the leader of the world's sixth largest economy. But now this? How does she appeal for calm among protesters who are as enflamed as she once was over the state's failure to serve the people's needs now that she IS the state?
This is not the Arab Spring, nor is it Taksim Square. Like the Occupy movement, this movement's roots lie in the discontent of middle class students who have turned a jumble of grievances into a form of kindling. Leaderless and lacking an agenda, one mob in Sao Paulo quickly multiplied into multi-city mobs--their protests at first aimed at a rise in bus fares, but now ranging across a spectrum of ills, including the expense of building stadia for the World Cup and the Olympics, police brutality, and the lack of quality in healthcare and education.
Dilma has diverged from other leaders similarly under attack, like Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, by refusing to negatively characterize the protesters. Instead she has taken an affirmative position, exclaiming how such unrest is the proof of Brazil's democratic vibrancy. She has not threatened crackdowns or military action--Brazils' police forces are perfectly capable of taking the initiative to crack some heads if they see fit, which history has shown, they always do. And are doing, as evidenced by the appalling photo shown here.
But despite her soothing platitudes, Dilma and her associates have effectively confessed their bewilderment over the strength of the discontent and what a useful proposal might look like. The reversal of the bus fare hike that incited the fury in the first place--a limp gesture by any measure--has not sufficed to quell the rioting. Rousseff has just unveiled a reform package with promises of all oil revenue going towards education and a mass drafting of foreign doctors to address the need of medical services. In the past week, the chaos has become more entropic by the day, with a million people marching through this past night. And while the reform package Dilma and her emergency cabinet have offered suggests that Dilma hasn't entirely run out of ideas, it's hard to see how any of these promises can be implemented quickly enough to please the enraged masses. Her proposals are long-term concepts, rather than short-term fixes, many of which require acquiesence from recalcitrant politicans who see Dilma's undoing as their opening for advantage.
Dilma's not the first politician in Brazil to use kicking the can down the road as an expedient substitute for political action. But Dilma now finds herself in a terrible trap, because the change that the crowds desire but are unable to effectively articulate is one that may be beyond any Brazilian leader's capacity to deliver. Such change would require an unraveling of the patronage and clientelism embedded in Brazil's political economy; it would require undoing the systems that allow the country's elite to hoard Brazil's resource wealth while the provision of basic services like sanitation, education, healthcare and equality in legal protection, while improved in the last decade, remains flagrantly inconsistent. Fundamental change that reverses a longstanding order that has been in place for centuries will not happen overnight or even within a generation.
Brazilians are going to have to dig in for the long haul and work together, but they will need to find common ground first, and right now the haves and have-nots could not be further apart.
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