This Book Will Change How You Think About Protest Forever

[Judi Lynn]

Vincent Bevins’ new book, “If We Burn,” asks why a decade of mass mobilizations led to the “opposite” of what the streets demanded.

EAMON WHALEN 43 MINS AGO



Mother Jones; Cassia Tabatini for PublicAffairs

On June 13, 2013, the Brazilian military police attacked the journalist Vincent Bevins. A foreign correspondent in São Paulo working for the Los Angeles Times and the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, Bevins was covering a protest by Movimento Passe Livre (MPL)—an anarcho-punk collective with a “leaderless” structure—pushing for a reduction in the price of the cost to ride city buses. During the demonstrations, the police pepper-sprayed and shot rubber bullets at MPL protesters. They made no exceptions for members of the media. Officers shot a Folha de S.Paulo journalist named Giuliana Vallone in the eye with a rubber bullet; Bevins was tear-gassed.

As videos of the violence spread on television and social media, the perception of the protests changed. Many more people joined and progressive demands expanded. Those in the streets wanted better schools and hospitals; an end to political corruption and police violence. The demonstrations became some of the largest in the country’s history. But then a strange thing happened. As the protests grew, the message lost its original coherence. Did the signs declaring former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva a “thief” that popped up mean the protests were about corruption within Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) or was it still a movement aligned with the PT’s ethos of uplifting the poor and working classes?

By June 20, as Bevins documents, new arrivals had overtaken the original leftist groups. Right-wing nationalist sentiment began to take hold. Despite the fact that President Dilma Rousseff of the PT advocated for the originally demanded improved public services, her approval rating was cut in half in a three-week period. In 2016, the street protest movement returned in support of her impeachment. This time, protesters didn’t fight the cops. They took selfies with them. By the end of the decade, the country had elected a once-fringe far-right congressman named Jair Bolsonaro.

“In short,” Bevins writes in his new book chronicling mobilizations in the 2010s, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, “the Brazilian people got the exact opposite of what they appeared to ask for in June 2013.”

More:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/10/vincent-bevins-if-we-burn-interview-mass-protest-decade-2010s-change-how-you-view-protest-forever/

[NoMoreRepugs]

1. Sounds Putinesque.