10 years ago, the so-called ‘Tropical Spring’ took to the streets of several cities throughout Brazil. It was the boiling point of a long-standing social discontent in the midst of corruption, inequality and poverty, among other problems, but it was triggered by the high investment figures in the World Cup that the country hosted a year later. , in 2014, while the population assumed increases in the prices of public transport. Although that measure was withdrawn, the spirit of protest continued for weeks and became a unique moment in the history of the Latin American giant.
“It was an uprising, a cry, an outburst. Undoubtedly, a unique moment in the recent history of Brazil, when the inhabitants of favelas and black people from the periphery took to the streets to demand their rights. I don’t like this word, but it was really an act of empowerment. And like all uprisings, it was doomed to fail.”
This is how Luiz Baltar, a Rio de Janeiro-based photographer who at that time was part of the ‘Imagens do Povo’ agency, recalls the demonstrations in June 2013. This is a group of popular photographers showing the daily life of the favelas and poor neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro with a humanistic look.
Baltar, who later won the Fundação Conrado Wessel photography prize with this documentary work, was 45 years old in those days that marked the Latin American giant forever.
He was not, therefore, a young protester who was looking at social activism for the first time. Even so, he acknowledges that he came to think that something was really changing in the sleepy Brazilian society. “I thought something exceptional was happening, not so much a revolution or a seizure of power, but a transformation of the people’s consciousness,” this photographer told France 24.
The protests of June 2013, which a decade ago marked a milestone in the political and social history of Brazil, were triggered by the increase in public transport fares in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
Those 20 cents of reais were able to channel, through the ‘Passe livre’ Movement, a series of heterogeneous social demands, which included an end to police violence and political corruption, opposition to spending considered excessive by the World Cups Football in 2014, the demand for health and education in the same “FIFA standard” and, more generally, a revolt against a hegemonic social project that excluded the poorest classes and widened the already enormous social imbalance.
Two rival favelas united in the face of social weariness
In less than a week, the demonstrations had spread to the main cities of the country, reaching an unprecedented dimension. On June 17, 2013, Brazil witnessed one of the most emblematic images of those days: the invasion of the roof of the National Congress and the depredation of the Legislative Assembly of Rio de Janeiro. It didn’t take long for the most popular slogans to emerge, such as “the people woke up”, “the giant woke up” and “we got out of Facebook”.
“One of the most exciting things in those days was seeing the inhabitants of Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro and one of the largest in Brazil, come down to protest. It was an unforgettable moment”, remembers Baltar. The act took place next to the Vidigal community, a favela traditionally considered a rival.
At the same time, the emergence of the Black Blocks, hooded youths who looted stores, banks and vehicles during the protests, brought even more tension to the already troubled social scene.
The police began to brutally repress the protests. “I have never seen such a big offensive, so many bombs (…) There was smoke everywhere, it was impossible to breathe. People made security cordons to protect themselves from the agents. I used to stay alone, because a photographer needs to move quickly through the crowd. One day I took off my gas mask and my eyes began to water, I couldn’t see anything anymore. I didn’t have an escape route, it was very tense”, remembers Baltar.
Clashes with law enforcement destroyed more than one life. One of the most publicized cases occurred on June 13 in São Paulo, when the photographer Sérgio Silva was hit by a rubber bullet fired by the Military Police and lost an eye.
Ten years later, Justice has denied him compensation. Judge Olavo Zampol Júnior alleged that the photographer assumed the risks of his trade “by placing himself between the protesters and the Police.”
“The festive joy of the Rio de Janeiro protests disappeared and hostility began to emerge. In many cases, it came from groups of right-wing infiltrators”
The apogee was reached on June 20, when more than a million people took to the streets to make their voices heard. The protesters decided to explicitly distance themselves from the parties, something unprecedented in a country where the Workers’ Party (PT), founded by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva when he was still a young metalworker and trade unionist, had traditionally led the main strikes and protests in the last decades.
“At the beginning, the parties were not expelled. They were simply invited to stand at the end of the demonstration so as not to monopolize all the limelight. But at one point the tension rose, the festive joy typical of the Rio de Janeiro protests disappeared and hostility began to emerge, explicit violence to drive out the parties. In many cases, it came from groups of right-wing infiltrators, who even dedicated themselves to provoking the Police. It is what I saw through my lens during the coverage of the events”, says Baltar, who in the past was a member of the PT and ended up being disappointed with the institutional politics.
That June 20, in Brasilia, a group of protesters tried to invade the National Congress again, but the security forces prevented it. More than 100 people were injured in the clashes.
In Rio de Janeiro, collector Rafael Braga was arrested for carrying a bottle of disinfectant. The Police accused him of manufacturing a Molotov cocktail and the Justice sentenced him to five years in prison.
In the following years, several NGOs that work in the defense of human rights would turn his case into an example of the so-called “judicial racism”, which inflamed part of public opinion.
Subsequently, Rafael Braga was sentenced for drug trafficking to 11 years and three months in prison for carrying 0.6 grams of marijuana and 9.3 grams of cocaine. However, in 2018 He was acquitted of the accusation of belonging to drug trafficking and his sentence was reduced by half. Since then he has been in house arrest.
“There was an intensification of the action of the security forces”
As pressure on the street mounted, suspicions grew that organized right-wing groups were capitalizing on or even manipulating tens of thousands of young people who, for the first time, could organize almost instantly thanks to cell phone technology.
“Reacting to this radicalization that the month of June 2013 brought about, there was not only an intensification of the institutional action of the security forces, but also an attempt to dispute that space by forces more to the right, from the liberals to neo-monarchists”, says Acácio Augusto, professor of the International Relations course at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp).
On June 21, former president Dilma Rousseff of the PT gave a televised speech, in which she promised to launch a pact with governors and mayors to improve public services. Rousseff called the wave of demonstrations a “democratic and fair movement.”
At the same time, he warned that his government would repress the violent actions, which he attributed to a “minority” of the participants. “If we allow violence to throw us off course, we will not only be wasting a great historic opportunity, but we will also risk losing a lot,” he said.
The protests continued until the end of the month. On June 26, on the main avenue of São Paulo, the economic capital of Brazil, a small gathering of elderly people, accompanied by people dressed in camouflage clothing and Brazilian flags, called for the “return of the military” to power and a ” military intervention” in the country.
At that time, it was considered a minority and insignificant phenomenon that, however, would end up leading to the coup attempt on January 8, 2023.
As a result of that hot June, Dilma Rousseff’s popularity fell 27 points, from 57% to 30%. For some political analysts, those protests marked the beginning of the decline of her government, which would culminate in her impeachment on August 31, 2016.
Shortly before, in March of that same year, Rousseff promulgated a law on terrorism that was interpreted as a direct attack against social movements who led the riots of June 2013. The law, approved by the National Congress, defined as terrorist acts “burning, looting, looting, destroying or blowing up means of transportation or any public or private property.”
“The spirit of June seems to be present in the enduring support for the Lava-Jato investigation, in the mobilization of app dealers, and in the intriguing 2018 truckers’ strike.
June 2013 is, at the same time, the blood of the new Brazilian politics and a persistent enigma to be deciphered”, sums up Pablo Ortellado, columnist for the newspaper ‘O Globo’ and professor of Public Policy Management at the University of São Paulo. (USP).
