The June 2013 Uprisings and the Waning of Lulismo in Brazil

The recent political crisis undergone by the Brazilian state, with the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in the midst of a massive corruption scandal in the country’s oil behemoth Petrobras, have brought Brazil on to the spotlight again. The attempts to explain recent events have usually chosen one particular starting point—the gigantic revolts of June 2013²—and have ended at another, the definitive ousting of Rousseff on August 31, 2016. It would be an exaggeration to say that all analyses have posited the former as the cause of the latter, but most of the ones to come out of the social sciences have,³ and so have most of the statements made by leaders and supporters of the deposed administration. June led to the coup, we are told by Jessé Souza and several other social scientists. While it is true that there is certainly a connection to be made between June 2013 and August 2016, that connection is best grasped, I would argue, through an analysis of Rousseff’s inability to respond, in a minimally acceptable, prompt, and articulate fashion, to the largest uprising in Brazilian history, one that was indisputably not directed against her as a major target. Even when that link between the June protests and Rousseff’s impeachment is not established causally, that vector tends toward a certain unidirectionality that privileges what should not be privileged. In other words, the problem with “let us tell the story from the uprisings to the coup” is that the narrative takes a truly epochal, revolutionary, and unique event, and retrospectively reads it in the light of something far less important, a minor adjustment in the presidential palace and in the rules of the game, charades that are fairly standard in Brazilian history. This is why I propose a different starting point, namely the foundational narratives of Lulismo, which revolve around the grandiosity of Brazil and its presumed achievement of the international status it had always deserved. In order to construct that narrative, Lulismo modulated a rhetoric that combined antagonisms, contradictions, and oxymorons. This article attempts both to carry out an analytic of Lulismo as a discourse and to argue that the essence of June is its potency as an insurrectional event, that is to say, its irreducibility to all analytic.

If one had to pinpoint the heyday of the Grand Brazil metaphor, a good candidate would be the November 2009 cover of The Economist, featuring Rio de Janeiro’s Christ statue and the headline Brazil Takes Off. Those were the years in which Lula enjoyed stunning 85% approval ratings and Brazilians who supposedly had joined the middle class were counted in the dozens of millions. The country had just won the public relations battles necessary to host the 2014 soccer World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. The 2008 subprime crisis had left it virtually unscathed, due to intense Keynesian programs beefing up the internal market and feeding it with public credit. It seemed that the macroeconomic stability inherited from Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s years had successfully been combined with the social sensibility that was the trademark of Lula’s administrations, producing a country that was simultaneously growing, keeping stable, mitigating inequality, and preserving democratic institutions. For a while, Brazil combined socialist and liberal dreams without a contradiction. The Economist explained the country’s uniqueness in the BRICS bloc with a sequence of compliments: “Unlike China, it is a democracy. Unlike India, it has no insurgents, no ethnic and religious conflicts nor hostile neighbors. Unlike Russia, it exports more than oil and arms, and treats foreign investors with respect” (“Brazil” n.p). In short, in the eyes of the most respected bastions of liberal journalism as well as in those of Brazil’s left-leaning social movements, Lulismo seemed to hold the key to the peaceful integration of emerging powers into the pantheon of capitalist-yet-socially-just nations.

The funny afterthought left by that picture when examined in the light of 2017 is that The Economist’s justification for Brazil’s ephemeral success continues to be fully true. Brazil is as much a democracy now as it was in 2009, it remains free of ethnic insurgencies, hostile neighbors, and religious conflicts (at least of those most typical of today’s international geopolitics), and it continues to treat investors “with respect.” Yet the entire edifice has crumbled down. The country has been in recession for three years and lost 10% of its Gross National Product. It has fallen into massive public debt, produced over 12 million unemployed citizens (as is well known, that figure does not include those who have given up looking), and witnessed a huge corruption scandal that robbed its largest public company of dozens if not hundreds of billions of dollars. A spiral of bankruptcies in the public as well as in private sectors has followed. No serious economist expects the country to recover at a steady pace or mitigate inequality again any time soon. Upon further research, the dozens of millions of no-longer-poor citizens turned out to be fewer than previously estimated or not all that solidly protected after all, as many of them have returned to living below the international poverty line during the late Rousseff years (Mota 12). In the political arena, a number of politicians have been sent to jail while others continue to be investigated. A truly farcical impeachment process crowned the long-winded tumbling down of a government that had barely accomplished reelection by lying through its teeth about where the country was and where the governing coalition intended to take it. The climbing reached its peak in 2009. In 2017, it feels like a collapse has taken place, but it could be easily argued that rock bottom has not been reached yet.

Rousseff’s has not been a precipitous fall, however, much as it has so appeared in the eyes of most of the Brazilian left as well as political scientists. Leonardo Avritzer calls it “the most important fact since the 1988 Constitution” (Labaki n.p). Luís Felipe Miguel calls it “a parliamentary coup” (Labaki n.p), and so do Fernando Guarnieri and Fabiano Santos (485). Santos goes as far as to say that “no diagnosis in 2015 predicted that political elites would risk a process of this nature” (Labaki n.p), certainly a debatable claim, as throughout 2015 protests shook the country, and by December Rousseff’s approval ratings fell to an unprecedented 9%. As a significant number of social scientists have tended to rationalize the country’s rotten political system, they could not help missing the continuities between the pre- and the post-impeachment periods. Many have tended to see Rousseff’s fall as an aberration (a “coup”) that should have been prevented or was somehow the product of flawed acts by social actors. Official notes by the Brazilian Association of Political Science (ABCP) and the National Association of Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences (ANPOCS) have refrained from using the word “coup” but maintained the rationale behind the rhetoric of the coup, by speaking of a “risk to the lawful, democratic State” and an “injustice that compromises the credibility of the democratic system” (“Nota”) and “the perplexity at the illegitimate and juridically ungrounded use of the institute of the impeachment” (“ABCP”). Needless to say, one would hardly think that “justice” is a paradigm for the analysis of the Brazilian political system in any of its moments, and by December 2015, when ABCP publishes their note, not many attentive observers of the political crisis would confess to be “perplexed” by the turn of events.

Most of the left has also seen Rousseff’s impeachment as a watershed, as it has tended to fall prey to Lulismo’s tight affective grip on social movements. That prestige was real, and it derived from the party’s considerable hegemony amongst those movements, its leader’s charisma, and some of his administration’s undeniable social accomplishments. Social scientists and the left have coincided, then, in seeing Brazil’s recent impeachment proceedings as a major rupture of democracy. To be sure, the picture has not been unanimous in those groups, as part of the environmentalist left as well as political scientists such as Marcos Nobre (a philosopher by training, but writing on the country’s political system) have presented more nuanced versions of the contemporary scenario, which I argue is best grasped as Brazil following the June uprisings. From a vantage point that is minimally non-partisan and non-rationalizing of Brazil’s system of political representation, it seems fairly obvious to me that the truly epochal event was June, not the impeachment.

Marcos Nobre has bypassed the lamenting mode of Brazilian political science by descriptively tackling what is most proper to its political system, namely what he has called pemedebismo (Nobre 9–27). The concept describes the nature of the country’s political life by turning into a metaphor the acronym for Brazil’s largest party, PMDB—Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement, in reality a federation of local oligarchic bosses who are always in power no matter who wins the elections. The merit of Nobre’s theory draws upon the originality of the Brazilian party system, highly unique in Latin America. In Colombia and in Central America, political clashes have traditionally taken place within a binary structure opposing liberals and conservatives. In Chile, a triadic system composed of the right wing, the Christian democrats, and the socialist and communist left has maintained itself reasonably stable over decades, discounting the dictatorial intermission. In Argentina, a major political party with real social content has long occupied center stage and organized the political field around it, first the early twentieth-century middle class Radicals and then beginning in the 1940s with Peronism. In Brazil, the norm has been the wild proliferation of meaningless acronyms for parties that are merely tokens for bribe exchanges and budgetary maneuvers in 20-plus-party coalitions. According to Nobre, pemedebismo is the structural, albeit informal, arrangement that allows this mammoth political system to function (Nobre 14).

According to Nobre, pemedebismo has five fundamental traits: officialism (the coalition of oligarchic bosses is always part of government, no matter who wins the election), the production of legislative supermajorities, a hierarchical system of vetoes, maximum blockage against the entrance of new members (so that the coalition can preserve its bargaining power), and the displacement of all antagonisms into backrooms, so that antagonism per se never flourishes on to the political field. The practical results of pemedebismo’s reign in the party structure have been visible in Brazil for 23 years. From the coalescing of Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s governing block in 1994 to Lula’s recourse to PMDB to solidify his base of support as of 2005, the oligarchic coalition has been in power in uninterrupted fashion. Nobre sees this predicament as deriving from the various ways in which the dictatorship’s authoritarian heritage precluded modernization processes from being properly translated into the political system. After Collor’s impeachment in 1992, with Brazil still reeling from the hyperinflation of the 1980s, the currency stabilization plan succeeded in part because it presented itself as a pact “that did not frontally clash with the pemedebista logic of Brazilian politics, but rather proposed an accommodation to it” (Nobre 62). That pact was anchored in forbidding public debt to get out of control, keeping inflation at reasonable levels by monitoring interest rates, and not ever challenging the logic of the markets.

Pemedebismo could then also be defined as that which Brazilian democracy has become in postdictatorial times, in the aftermath of Fernando Collor de Mello’s impeachment in 1992. This is an arrangement in which ideological antagonisms are masked in favor of backroom deals, vetoes behind closed doors, and the production of congressional supermajorities through blackmailing. No President in Brazil is ever elected with an automatic party-line majority, nor is the opposition ever ideologically immune from being lured into government. Congress ends up witnessing the constitution of a large, fluctuating, and amorphous officialist base in every term, one that oscillates according to popular support for the executive, the president’s bargaining power, and the economic and political conditions for the disseminated blackmailing. Its perennial objective is to negotiate support to any government in exchange for pork bills, provide sinecures in the state apparatus, guarantee political support in subsequent elections (which in Brazil brings with it the coveted free TV time to which all parties are entitled) and, as the country has found out with astonishment, accumulate unimaginable piles of cash. Pemedebismo is then the oligarchic arrangement that allows the system to recompose itself after Collor’s fall due to loss of political support. At that point, two opposing blocks, one center-left led by the Workers’ Party (PT) and one center-right led by the Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB), began alternating in power. Both of them, however, succumbed to the blackmailing of pemedebismo and courted the oligarchic coalitions clustered around PMDB and its satellite parties, equally bereft of ideological orientations. Lulismo should not be seen as an antagonist of pemedebismo, but simply as a center-left accommodation to it.

Looked at from the point of view of the longue durée of pemedebismo, then, the Rousseff impeachment becomes a relatively minor readjustment, one that does not alter much of the cabinet and certainly does not touch, either to worsen or to improve, the structures of the pemedebista political regime. Rousseff’s impeachment should therefore be seen as analogous to Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s successful negotiations to pass a constitutional amendment that allowed himself to be reelected in 1998, or yet to José Sarney’s imposing a five-, rather than four-year term for himself, as it had originally been agreed in 1985. On those occasions, as well as during Collor’s impeachment itself, the political system changed its rules while the game was in play, in all cases with some degree of hypocrisy and accusations of corruption in order to accommodate the pemedebista pact. The constant retrospective rewriting of the rules has been the customary functioning of Brazilian democracy as such. There is no entity whose positive existence one could identify as a “Brazilian democracy” broken or interrupted either by Cardoso’s and Sarney’s maneuvers to remain more years in power or by the terminations of Collor (1992) and Rousseff (2016). In all these situations, the political system made the adjustment necessary to maintain the smooth running of the oligarchic pact, which operated according to its normal functioning for decades, allowing for erasures or reinterpretations of the law designed to produce the convenient effect for political elites. Observed from the standpoint of its most constitutive structure, the Brazilian political system has not been challenged or broken by any of the maneuvers related to electoral or parliamentary politics. It has, however, been significantly shaken from the outside, by the host of popular revolts and uprisings that have come to be known in Portuguese simply as Junho (June).

Outside the intra-palace or intra-parliamentary games, the pemedebista political structure has recently been challenged in Brazil, for sure, but not by any force within the party system. While sparked by a humble demand for a halt in the bus fare hike, the popular protests of June 2013 ended up laying bare the mechanisms by which the Brazilian political system shields itself. It also laid bare Lulismo’s entire edifice of contradictions. Two traits must be kept in mind at the outset among the many attributes one could assign to June: The 2013 protests were undoubtedly an uprising, and this was a multifaceted uprising. Inserted into the worldwide autonomist movements of the Occupy Era, June took the form of a multiplicity of uprisings.⁴ Noting its multiple nature is both an obvious and a profound gesture. While political scientists such as Fabiano Santos and Fernando Guarnieri have interpreted the June uprisings as the starting point of an institutional degeneration that culminated in Rousseff’s impeachment, scholars and activists who have followed the diverse threads that emerged out of the uprisings have reached different conclusions, namely that it was first and foremost multiple. June was not the beginning of a presumed “coup,” it was not to blame for the subsequent failings of the Brazilian political system, and it was not an amorphous and ambiguous protest later overtaken by “fascists,” as some have claimed in astounding fashion (Santos and Guarnieri 487). Among many other things, June was a movement of revolt against a rotten system of political representation. In that sense Marcos Nobre is not far from the truth in claiming that it was an uprising against pemedebismo, and thus, a cry of revolt against the entire political system (Nobre 142–57). June marked the demise of the decade-long period in which Lulismo was able to manage silent streets and docile social movements coopted by the allure of collaboration with a progressive administration.

Lulismo was a modulated symphony of antagonisms, contradictions, and oxymorons, as each one of these rhetorical categories describes one aspect of the Lulista experience. As pointed out by André Singer in the most canonical book written on the phenomenon, Lulismo constituted itself around 2005 when, amidst a corruption scandal, Lula reacted by bringing social movements to rally around his figure (Singer 51–83). Beginning with his reaction against Mensalão, Lula began to alternate between the heretofore ubiquitous image of the president of all citizens and smooth conciliator who had written a “Letter to Brazilians” to calm down the markets, and a quite contrasting character, the inflammatory leader of the poor who always needed an antagonist in his discourse. Lula defined that antagonist alternately as the coup-plotting media, the rightwing opposition, environmental conservationists obsessed with saving tree frogs or middle classes deprived of national pride and vulnerable to the national inferiority complex known as the complexo de vira-latas (street dog complex), a frequent target of Lulismo.

The motor of those antagonisms was a profound contradiction between different moments of the discourse and practice of Lulismo, those of Lula the conciliator and those of Lula the fiery speaker and popular leader. Some discrepancy between conciliation and vociferation is expected in all politicians, but Lulismo modulated that contradiction to a remarkable degree, and produced a symphony of speeches that partially negated one another, oscillating between conciliatory talks with business leaders in the morning and inflammatory class struggle rhetoric among the poor or the unionized lower middle class in the afternoon. Perennially on the offensive against the press, Lula was always friendly and generous in his dealings with Brazil’s communications interests, particularly the dominant conglomerate, Organizações Globo. Whether through the distribution of ad money or through the exercise of power in the naming of Ministries of Communication, the Globo network and empire was very much a part of Lulismo’s pact.⁵ Lula’s administration never attempted to implement the constitutional article that requires some breakup of monopoly in communication whenever it happens. At any rate, the relationship with the press is but one among many instances of how, in Lulismo, contradictions between different moments became its discourse-practice, the device that allowed it to modulate and regulate its system of antagonisms.

Lulismo’s discursive defense when attacked from different sides of the political spectrum was also uniquely contradictory. When criticized by a somewhat paranoid far right, who saw it as a dangerous cousin of socialist Chavismo, Lulismo reacted in remarkably moderate terms, correctly pointing out that the business community had never made as much money as they did under Lula and that PT administrations were macroeconomically solid and market-friendly. When criticized by environmentalists such as Marina Silva or by independent center-left politicians such as Cristóvam Buarque or Fernando Gabeira,⁶ Lulismo adopted a quasi-Bolshevik discourse, one that consistently portrayed its admittedly center-left opponents as right-wingers keen on betraying social gains. That move went along a self-portrayal as a revolutionary and truly popular, if peaceful, overtaking of power. Particularly during electoral campaigns, Lulismo’s line of attack against environmentalists and moderates was a visible radicalization toward the left, in clear contradiction with the oligopoly-friendly and market-driven nature of its own administration.⁷ The constant need for an antagonist, coupled with contradictions such as the ones pointed out above, ended up turning the oxymoron into the Lulista trope par excellence. Unlike antagonism, a clash in which opposites occupy different poles of a dichotomy, and unlike contradiction, in which a subject maintains opposing theses in different places or times, in oxymoron the two opposites occupy the same space and time. Hence the agonistic nature of the oxymoron: a phrase such as a “round square” takes language to a point of collapse, an impossible place marked by a cohabitation that truly disturbs the discursive order. In antagonism and contradiction, we have the sense that the subject is resorting to a rhetorical figure; in oxymoron, we tend to feel that the subject has been overtaken by a rhetorical figure. Lulismo maintained that oxymoronic vocation throughout its history: it simultaneously antagonized and reconciled, denounced and built consensus, inflamed and cooled down. These were more than reiterated practices in Lulismo throughout the past decade; they were simultaneous and modulated together, traceable in Lula’s speeches, interviews, and public acts. The tension accumulated by that rhetorical structure collapsed with the June uprisings, under the weight of Lulismo’s cooption of social movements. For Lulismo, oxymoron was a strategy of rhetorical mastery, but you cannot master June, you cannot master a true event, and you can only rely on oxymoron for so long. In that sense, those who lament that June brought about the end of Lulismo are not entirely incorrect, but they should get beyond their melancholy, carry out their mourning work, and start thinking again.

From the first popular protest against the fare hike in São Paulo in early June, 2013, the brutal police repression of which set the uprisings in motion, to the last gasps of revolt by the Rio de Janeiro garbage collectors in February 2014, the June event remained true to its remarkable contingency. This is the most often mentioned yet strangely most often forgotten attribute of the June uprisings. The uprisings were permanently in the making, they always turned out to be something other than their participants had in mind when they joined them, they were true multiplicities, and as such, they were an event in the full sense of the term. If one returns to the most daring set of reflections on the nature of l’événement, particularly to Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, one will see a host of theses related to the singularity, multiplicity, and impersonality of the event. Among the many things that an event is not, you could list: a) it is never connectable as “cause” or “consequence” to another event; b) its meaning is never given in advance, prior to the experience itself; c) it is not attributable or reducible to a subject, individual or collective, who presumably could hold its meaning (Deleuze 152–53; 177–78). The event of June indicates “untimely and unpredictable moments in which a diffuse malaise of potentialities until then latent crystallize in a visible expression that becomes both the focus of a series of social demands and the center that exudes a subjective change” (Nunes, “Geração” 17). Curiously enough, most social scientists have missed the keys highlighted by Nunes, as the previous quotes make clear. In this regard, the social sciences have been in tandem with former officialism in projecting a causal connection that only matters insofar as it explains some later malfunctioning of the political system. In that narrative, one must “return to June” only to unravel the thread that links it up with Rousseff’s impeachment. That charade is accomplished by producing a sequence of links between the June revolts and the Rousseff impeachment, based on the nature of the protests (“disorganized,” “primitive,” “unable to access representation”) and to their composition—“lumpen proletariat,” “black blocs,” “coxinhas,” and, most astoundingly, “Fascists” (Santos and Guarnieri 485). While such labels are June’s most important attributes, its self-managing and do-it-yourself ethic, its contingent and unfinished nature, and its true multiplicity, have often gone unnoticed. In the exhaustive bibliography on the June revolts, two names in particular have been able to bypass this lamenting mode proper to the left and the political science writings on the subject, and have properly done justice to the event’s autonomous and horizontal nature. I refer to Paulo Arantes and Bruno Cava.⁸

In the beautifully titled “Depois de junho a paz será total” (After June peace will be total), Arantes reads the June revolts against the background of the pacifying reason that had manifested itself both in the armed order of militarily occupied favelas (such as Rio’s Maré, where Lula and Rousseff sent the army for a true urban occupation) as well as in housing programs such as the ones implemented by Lulismo through monitored alliances between constructors and civil society associations. The coexistence of welfare and warfare in the logic of pacification does not escape Arantes’s attention. In a meticulous genealogy that analyzes a host of technologies of governmentality that “demobilize by mobilizing” (Arantes 430)—the State’s cooption of social movements, its clientelist relations with trade unions, and so forth—Arantes sets the June event in the proper context of that against which the June protesters revolted. Arantes notes that Rio’s very own Secretary of Security made clear that the Units of Pacifying Police (the highly praised, left and right, “humane” police that occupied favelas in Rio beginning in 2008) secured an area that was designed according to the trajectory of the international megasports events. The logic of occupation of territory was clear. The curious irony, Arantes notes, is that the procedure of counter-insurgency was at play way before any insurgents were ever on the scene: “The times were switched, as were the characters’ arrivals on the scene” (364). In that sense, the arrival of the June “vandals” was an afterthought that served retrospectively to justify a procedure that was already in play. The space of Brazilian metropolises had already been redesigned according to a plan predicated on the occupation of territory, which is the logic underlying pacification efforts. The June revolts truly turned the streets from militarily occupied into contested territory and for a while, particularly in Rio de Janeiro, it looked like armed agents of the state would be swept away by the multitude.

Several sources estimate that between 10 and 15 million protesters took to the streets in more than 500 Brazilian cities during the month of June 2013. The passage from an important but still modest protest against the bus fare hike in São Paulo to an outpouring of multitudes all over the country took place when the state police, emboldened by editorials by both Folha and Estado de São Paulo—the city’s largest papers—carried out an attack with extreme force and brutality in the city center, invaded bars and restaurants to throw tear gas bombs, beat up on bystanders, hunted down protesters far after dispersion, and imposed a true tactic of warfare in enemy territory. The author of this article, who has been present in a representative sample of most major urban protests in Brazil since 1982, was in the streets of São Paulo city center on the night of June 13, and certainly had never seen such a lengthy and cruel display of police brutality. The role of the two city papers was indeed ironic, as they both helped set the hellish whirlwind in motion and clearly were caught by surprise by the extent of the violence. A police rubber bullet blinded one eye of a female reporter of the very Folha de São Paulo that had called police forces to “take back” Paulista Avenue. At any rate, once the multitude decided to react to the bloody night of June 13, there was nothing that papers, television, or any instituted power, including government, could do about it.

On June 17 the multitude was rising no longer against the bus fare hike but to affirm its right to rise. Numbed by two decades of quiet streets, all instituted powers miscalculated the effect of the pre-programmed violence by São Paulo police on June 13. In times of quietism, it is proper for instituted powers (government and its various arms, including the armed one, mass media, the Judiciary) to count on a wave of silence following brutal police activity. In times when social movements are working in close collaboration with the state, that outcome is all the more to be expected. That expectation did not pan out in June: On the 17th, hundreds of thousands took it to the streets “against everything,” as Folha de São Paulo’s headline would report on the following day. The intensity and the creative energy running through the multitude had gone way too far to be reversible. Writing in the thick of things, Bruno Cava noted: “The slogans claimed in the streets broadened from transportation to public security, urban mobility as a whole, housing, health care, education, cultural production. Expenses such as those related to mega-events were questioned, holding in check the official narrative of a Brazil where future was arriving” (Cava, “La multitud” 32). The host of banners raised in June had a way of truly only being seen in their full multiplicity by those in the streets or in tune with them. No struggle was truly dominant over an extended period of time anywhere, but that was not always clear to instituted powers. Seen from the outside, the protests began to be represented with emphasis on certain and not on other issues, depending on who did the representing. Most of the mass media held on to the anti-corruption theme and emphasized it, but the protests were as multiple in their reach as any in Brazilian history. In fact, the same march often had multiple faces, such as the one on June 22 in Belo Horizonte, as a Confederations Cup game was being played in the city. The beginning of the march, gathered in the city center, was very much composed of upper middle class citizens and focused on corruption. As we moved toward the stadium, the influx from working-class neighborhoods such as Aparecida and Lagoinha changed the face of the protest: it was now about demilitarizing the police and protesting the World Cup. Unlike Lulismo, June did not wrestle with contradictions. Its different manifestations took the form of intense, affirmative multiplicity, even as—or perhaps precisely because—antagonistic views clashed within the same march.

On June 17 in Rio, “palaces were scribbled on, windows were smashed, a car was turned upside down and burned, much advertisement was ridiculed, banks were reduced to dust. A watch was organized around the fire. People laughed amidst the chaos. The movement could no longer be detained” (Cava, “18 Brumário” 50). In Brasília, the multitude occupied National Congress, for the first time truly taking over in fury and protest Oscar Niemeyer’s famous and imposing modernist building. By June 20, the same mayors of São Paulo and Rio who had spoken of the impossibility of freezing the bus fare had gone back on the proposed hike. But it was too late. “It is not only about the 20 cents,” as the crowds now roared. Headlines of O Globo and Folha de São Paulo announced that the multitude had defeated the fare hikes. In Rio, June 20 also marked the moment when the crowds overcame all fears of the police. It was so large and fiery that police forces had to retreat into the palace of the Rio Legislative Assembly, as they were targeted by stones, sticks, and home-made bombs thrown from the outside. The totality of the protests, however, in Rio and elsewhere, was composed of multiple facets, including for the vast majority of time—before police intervention—stunningly peaceful and touching gatherings of the largest crowds in recorded Brazilian history.

On June 21 the emphasis in all newspapers was on “violence” and “chaos.” Folha de São Paulo’s major headline was “Violent Protests Spread and Confrontations Reach 13 Capitals.” On O Globo’s first page, we read “No Control.” Focusing on photographs of the bonfires lit up in the protest’s late hours or the action of black bloc activists breaking windows, rather than the massive and peaceful gathering that preceded them, the media reported on “vandalism” without devoting major attention to the undisputable fact that police forces were the major, or at least the first, agent of violence in all instances. The figure of “black blocs,” masked youth who assumed frontline positions in defense of the crowd, began to be portrayed as the dangerous and violent vandals responsible for the “chaos” seen toward the end of protests. In fact, the black bloc tactic turned out to be key in the defense of protesters, who were for the most part able to disperse while youth using the black bloc tactic distracted police with bonfires and attacks on property, particularly banks. In television, radio, and newspaper reports, as well as in the parlance of a good portion of the left, black blocs were painted as dangerous vandals who had “infiltrated” the demonstrations. By then protests had been happening for two weeks, millions of Brazilians had taken to the streets, and President Rousseff was still silent. According to Folha de São Paulo, sources in Brasília described the mood in government as “astonished.”⁹

For the first time in thirty years, multitudes were in the streets without any presence of the Workers’ Party in the organization of the acts. Since the campaign for direct elections for President (1984) through the popular mobilization that led to Collor’s impeachment (1992) to the various land occupations carried out by the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in the 1990s (their occupations declined sharply during the 2000s, not because land reform was achieved, but because the federal government and the movement were now allies), the PT had always been at the backbone of popular mobilization in the country. Amongst the leadership, the initial reaction to the June protests could be summed up in an imaginary quote: “How dare they come out without our permission?” From the host of reactions by PT Senators, Deputies, president Rui Falcão, and the organized party base itself, one could discern at least three that were contradictory amongst themselves and succeeded each other in time, naturally with some overlap: a) while it was a delimited and small struggle against the fare hike, PT’s position was to deem it impossible to be fulfilled—as the demand was directed to a PT mayorship, Fernando Haddad’s São Paulo—but to still condemn repression, as it was conducted by a police force that reported to a state governed by the opposition party PSDB; b) when the struggle took the form of a multitude against the political system of representation, the panicked reaction by party leaders and the base led them to disqualify it as “petty-bourgeois” [coxinha] infiltrated by “vandals”— still in the hopes that the crowds would quiet down and the Lulista political pact could be reestablished; c) when it was clear that the multitude would not back down, the party shifted its position 180 degrees and decided to “join” the marches and “support” them, with explicit calls that PT members should go together, bring their flags, and wear red—although some of them later retreated, in a true show of confusion. It was then, and only then, that some episodes of physical violence against party-affiliated militants wearing red took place in the protests, following insistence by protesters that flags be lowered. At that point, the radical divorce between PT and the streets consolidated itself, not to be restored again. The party lost the pulse of the streets in the storm unleashed by June.

June consisted of “profanations carried out by nameless people who were neither asking to leave nor accepting the blows of life” (Arantes 400). It was as simple as this acute phrasing by Paulo Arantes suggests, but much like the organized left, the mass media missed it too. The two São Paulo newspapers were instrumental in unleashing the nightmare of police repression that sparked the nationalization of protests on June 13. Some good reporting on the successive marches ensued, but both Globo TV Network and the country’s three major newspapers adamantly highlighted violence against banks as a strategy for criminalizing and quieting them. When that proved impossible, the approach changed and the media, particularly Globo, invested heavily in highlighting and privileging the “yellow-and-green” national flag sectors of the crowd, which were more obviously middle class and focused on the critique of corruption. That approach persisted for some time in blatant contradiction with the multiplicity of the uprisings, which while they indeed included yellow-and-green protests against corruption (most of which targeting corruption by all parties), also put on display a host of themes related to LGBT rights, feminism, the indigenous struggle, the decriminalization of drugs, the demilitarization of police, and urban mobility, to mention only a few of the cries that coexisted with the anti-corruption theme. The mass media’s partial focus on one major theme ended up exacerbating the left’s inability to respond adequately to the call for curbing corruption. The left in Brazil has traditionally adopted the discourse that the critique of corruption “depoliticizes” things and in that claim it has been significantly helped by social scientists, who have echoed the same cliché. At best, the left and the social sciences have resorted automatically to “political reform” as a solution for corruption (one that can never be implemented, as it requires that the majority of the Brazilian elected official commit political suicide): “Hence the fact that the Pavlovian reflex of Political Reform sounds like a grotesque mockery every time that the salivating bells of ‘you don’t represent me’ ring again” (Arantes 424). The Lulista left thus easily fell prey to the media’s casting of—and by then, particularly in the case of Globo, influencing of—June as a journey of anti-corruption protests, to the detriment of all the other facets of the uprising. In short, and to sum it up with a somewhat caricatured (but essentially true) formula, Globo was now saying that June was good because it was anti-corruption. Lulismo was saying that June was bad, or at best naïve, because it was anti-corruption. The officialist left helped tie up the cord with which it would later be hung.

The spirit of June, however, was something else. In a country where “the only truly ungovernable is the Indian, whom today’s [2013–14] developmentalism squeegees with the final solution” (Arantes 404), the crowds of June dared, first and ultimately, to affirm themselves as no longer willing to be governed as before. “June was above all about this: how we’ve governed, how we govern ourselves, and how we don’t want that any longer” (Arantes 453). Undoubtedly indebted to 2011–12 movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, or the Spanish indignados, June was unique vis-à-vis all of them. Unlike the Arab Spring, it was not directed to toppling a dictator; unlike the indignados, it took place in a country that was growing, reducing unemployment, and producing upward mobility for the poor; unlike Occupy Wall Street, it truly shook the political establishment, to the point where many thought that it would crumble down. The waning of Lulismo was accelerated by Rousseff’s late and ineffective response to June, proposing as a panacea and response to protesters a “partial Constitutional Assembly” to carry out a political reform [the one that demands political suicide by most elected officials], a legal Frankenstein that she announced on TV before consulting anyone, not even her then loyal Vice-President, a constitutionalist who was her bridge to Congress. Naturally, the proposal died less than fortyeight hours later. June was thus not uprising against Rousseff’s administration by any means, but her inability to respond to it helped set in motion the loss of political capital that would lead to her impeachment, even though in-between she was able to win reelection in a very tight race. Among other off-spring, June would set the ground for the largest corruption investigation in the country’s history, one that has been prey to the structural predicaments and partialities of all police operations, but that has unveiled theft of public patrimony of hitherto unimaginable proportions by all major political parties, left and right, supporters and opponents of the deposed administration. June was not directed against Lulismo per se, but it set in motion its inevitable waning and made evident its divorce from the streets; Lula himself can still return, naturally, pending the results of the investigation against him, but regardless of that outcome he can now only return as an oligarchic candidate among others, a political boss surrounded by paid operatives.

It seems apparent that Brazil’s recent political history is best grasped when June is properly situated as the emanating force that has set this history in several contradictory motions. Many have erred in seeing Rousseff’s impeachment as some sort of final consequence—the beginning of the end or rupture of democracy—unleashed by June. In academia, that unilateral explanation, based on mechanic cause-and-effect logic, has taken the form of a rationalization of the country’s putrid political system, as if protesters who yelled “you do not represent me” were somehow alienated, naïve, or worse, “Fascist” for rejecting established mechanisms of political representation.¹⁰ The true opposition in Brazilian political debate takes place, then, around the legacy of June, not around the more circumstantial negotiation that led to Rousseff’s impeachment and the breakup of the PT-PMDB coalition. That coalition was, after all, united in the repression of June, most emblematically in the state of Rio de Janeiro, which they governed together, with PT being responsible for the World-Cup related removal of populations. What really separates political readings into two major positions (which can be taken with various degrees of nuance, of course) is not the difference between left and right. Those who denounced June as the culprit for the impeachment (the majority, officialist left) and those who supported the repression of it as a movement of vandals (the right) occupy the same side of this divide. On the other side, there are several of us who claim the legacy of June, insist on its simultaneously unique and multiple, singular and polyphonic nature as an event, and see in it the pending claim of that defeated Benjaminian past that does not cease to reappear in search of redemption. To simplify matters, on the one hand there are those who want to forget and bury June and, on the other, those who would like to do justice to it. These are two profoundly different readings of contemporary Brazil and they represent, in my view, the political antagonism that truly matters in the country today.