Early this morning I was on the phone with an English speaking member of Anonymous Brazil. This is the group that is more or less spearheading the protests around the country – the protests that started when bus fares were increased by twenty cents.? Major protests are planned for tonight, Thursday, and they plan to continue until the government “does something about the corruption, education, hospitals.” I was informed the twenty cent bus fare increase has been canceled. ?My source within the protest movement claims that this is not enough to cancel the protest.
The wine has been spilled how are they going to put it back in?
Brazil. Home of pretty girls and boys, Carnival and favelas. Not so much remembered or discussed is the military dictatorship that ruled, and plundered, the country from 1964 to 1984. People don’t talk about it and the fortunes made off of it are off limits for discussion. People like to remember Lula,?labor organizer and fatherly looking, two term President who just handed power over to his hand picked successor Dilma Rousseff. Herself an accomplished economist, activist and a former prisoner of the old military government.
This has become more than a protest about the cost of bus fare. Truth be told there seem to be multiple protests happening. The biggest complaint seems to be the cost of ?the World Cup in Football crazy Brazil. ?I heard from this source and also found repeated assertions, that the amount spent on this World Cup are on track to exceed the previous spending of the past three World Cups combined. ?That is not quite the case. It’s only three time more than the last World Cup. ?That combined with more information leaking out about civil service pay?and the return over the past three years of high inflation with low wages, creates the prefect storm for this type of protest. My source from Anonymous said
In France it was the price of bread that led to revolution, in Brazil, it is twenty cents.
That twenty cents actually meant forty cents a day more. In a country where most minimum wage workers work six days a week, ten hours a day, for a flat wage, the minimum in Brazil is currently R$674.96 (US$ 299.34) a month. ?One of the biggest complaints is that stadiums are being built in the middle of nowhere at a cost of up to 1.5 Billion reais.
Corruption has also become the fire beneath this boiling pot. The protesters are angry about Lula’s rumored R$9.5 million fortune and his son’s “very lucky” contracts with a Spanish company that made him a multimillionaire overnight. Anonymous said they could go on and on with examples of politicians and their families enriching themselves. I believe the son of the President was very lucky?considering he went from being a zoo attendant to a successful media baron the year his father was elected President.
The rally is set to begin at 5Pm in four different parts of the city of Sao Paulo, and then the four parts will walk to a central location.
I also spoke with an employee of the government in Sao Paulo and he made clear that most of his fellow employees agree with the protesters but they have been warned not to participate.
Everyone knows that things are very bad here and we are not allowed to try to change it? (Brazil is) getting more and more dangerous because even people with jobs could not afford enough to eat.
We shall have to see if the returning of bus fares to their old rate will be enough to stop the protests. For now.
