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Marina Capusso and Matheus Preis ¹

The June 2013 ‘revolts’ that occurred throughout Brazil have become one of the most controversial political events in the country’s recent history. These enormous protests, which took issue with all of the main national political parties and overturned public transport fare increases for buses and trains in over 100 cities and towns, have had a tremendous impact on the context of Brazilian national conflicts, and have been referred to by the left and the right, whether by way of celebration or vilification. Political differences, disputes over the interpretation of these events, and opportunist discourses framing them, continue the struggle over the meaning of the past and obscure possibilities for the future.

The impact of the revolts is unsurprising given the vast importance of this collective experience for the formation of Brazil’s national politics; many of those who protested throughout the country in June 2013 did so for the first time. The confusion about the nature and the cause of the demonstrations, as well as the major news channels’ and newspapers’ reaction, which announced the unprecedented nature of what was taking place appears to have resulted from a widespread lack of understanding about these specific protests, as well as an absence of knowledge of the historical context of urban struggle in Brazil. The June 2013 demonstrations were the result of a long battle led by organized social movements in different regions of the country, which had been taking place in other Brazilian cities 10 years before 2013. It is undeniable that the events of June 2013 were triggered by bus and train fare increases in the country’s major cities and by the resistance against this that ensued, and that their national repercussion was principally due to the visibility and intensity of the protests over the rise in transport costs in the city of São Paulo.² But focusing only on opposition to the rise of public transport fares runs the risk of unveiling the old, covert, class struggle, reminding us that social classes still exist in Brazil, and that conflicts are not resolved by ‘specialists’ or ‘rationality.’ The plight of the oppressed classes is only altered via struggle.

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In order to understand the protests that take to the streets of Brazil’s big cities year after year, it is important to acknowledge the centrality of public transport in the lives of its urban population. Whilst the land-ownership logic of capitalism bestows great value on a city’s best-located and best-equipped areas (with high concentrations of urban patrimony, public facilities, services, and employment), the capitalist logic of exploitation displaces the working women and men – who produce this wealth day after day – to its outskirts. The majority of the urban population is pushed to the fringes of the city, where the cost of housing is more accessible. Public transport connects all wage earners to their workplace and links the outlying ghettos to the city centre. At the same time, it connects wage earners to each other in their everyday experience of the city, regardless of their specific labour. Most wage earners spend many hours a day on expensive and overcrowded public transport. In São Paulo, workers spend up to the equivalent of two-thirds of their working day (six hours) on their daily commute and spend R$11.84 doing so.³ According to statistics from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, IBGE), a family’s expenditure on public transport is similar to that spent on food, and is exceeded only by the cost of housing (GI, 2012). That this situation led to protests in 2013 should thus be no surprise.

In the 1930s, the impossibility of paying for public transport was the subject of a popular carnival song called ‘Não pago o bonde’ (I won’t pay the tram fare):

I won’t pay the tram fare

Because I can’t afford to

I have very little

Not enough to get by

I live in those houses

Over there, on the other side of the city,

I have a door and a window

Tell the tram company to come and get the

money from me!⁴

In order to live in the city, everyone has to use the public transport ticket turnstiles, not only to make a living – to go from home to work and back again – but to actually experience the city, to make use of everything that continues to be produced by the urban workforce every day.

In a big city, all social rights, such as health and education, necessarily depend on the right to transportation. However, this right is effectively denied to many in virtually all Brazilian cities. Research by the Institute of Applied Economic Research (Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada, IPEA) from 2010 found that 38 million Brazilians (almost 20% of the entire national population) do not use collective transport because they cannot afford it. To fully grasp these limitations on urban mobility in Brazil, we have to consider the journeys that people with some access to the transport system fail to make, as well as those that they do not even contemplate making because they lack access to transportation. Day trips, medical treatment, supplementary educational courses, visiting family members or friends, and taking part in political events and acts, become extremely expensive depending on one’s income bracket. Even benefits that have been obtained after lengthy political struggles, like transport vouchers (which are only provided for registered workers, in other words, approximately 50% of the economically active population of Brazil), or the free student pass (obtained in just a few of the country’s big cities), still do not rupture this exclusivity caused by the market logic of collective transportation systems. The only mobility which is guaranteed is that of workers as commodities, as a workforce sold for wages (to go to and from the workplace), and for basic education (to go to and from school).

Transport fares in Brazil’s large cities are among the highest in the world, and have some of the lowest subsidies (Folha 2015). Each time fares are increased, exclusion and urban inequality are aggravated, leading to numerous protests that have marked the history of Brazil’s cities. To cite a few examples, in 1879 there was a revolt in the city of Rio de Janeiro, the then capital of the Brazilian Empire as it was known, in protest against an increase in the tram fare. The Revolta do Vintém (the Tram Revolt), as it was dubbed, was victorious. After eight days of protests, the population forced authorities to cancel the fare increase.⁵ In 1947, 30% of the entire fleet of trams in the city of São Paulo were rendered useless due to protests against a fare increase – this was the first of many well-known, recurrent demonstrations, which today are a constant feature on the routes of the São Paulo Metropolitan Train Company (Companhia Paulista de Trens Metropolitanos, CPTM) when there are breakdowns and when the system grinds to a halt. Even during the military dictatorship, between 1964 and 1988, the Aliança Nacional Libertadora (National Liberation Alliance, ANL), an urban guerrilla movement, set fire to buses as a political act protesting the increase in public transport fares. And, prior to June 2013, Florianópolis, Vitória, Natal, Goiânia, Porto Velho, Teresina, Porto Alegre, and Brasilia all witnessed large-scale organized demonstrations against public transport price rises; at the beginning of this century they succeeded in freezing fares.

The Movimento Passe Livre (Free Fare Movement, MPL), the key social movement that organized the demonstrations of June 2013, is linked to this history of urban struggle over public transportation. There are two specific moments that were important for the movement’s appearance: the Revolta do Buzú (the Buzú Revolt) and the Revoltas da catraca (Turnstile Revolts). The Buzú revolt took place in 2003 between August and September in Salvador, when thousands of people, mainly high school students, took to the streets to protest against the increase in bus fares in the state capital of Bahia, although they did not succeed in overturning it. The Turnstile revolt occurred in Florianópolis in 2004 and 2005. It involved thousands of people who were successful in reversing fare increases over two consecutive years. These particular demonstrations in Florianópolis were precipitated by the city’s Campahna pelo passe livre or Free Fare Campaign. This campaign was initially launched in 2000 by the group Juventude revolução (Revolution Youth) – then linked to the O trabalho (Labour) group within the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, PT) – after a referendum in the city’s schools. From options that included political causes related to drugs, access to cultural facilities, and more, the city’s students chose to fight for free transport and embarked upon an intense process of organization around that cause.

At the turn of 2002–2003, the Revolution Youth broke ranks with the PT and became the Juventude Revolucionária Independente (Independent Revolutionary Youth). This split coincided with the formation of closer links with anarchists who acted in collectives such as Rádio de Tróia – a free radio based at the Federal University of Santa Catarina – and, notably, the Independent Media Centre (also known as Indymedia), as well as the Centro de Mídia Independente. In addition to helping to publicize their actions and create several collectives organized around the free-fare agenda across the country, these links were fundamental to the organizational structure that the MPL would adopt. Founded on principles such as a decision-making process based on open meetings, the Florianópolis Campaign soon attracted followers from a wide political spectrum, which resulted in a variety of different groups and tendencies that willingly gathered and were unified in a common goal: free fares on public transport.

One of the materials used as part of the activities organized in schools was Carlos Pronzato’s film about the Buzú revolt in Salvador.⁶ That particular revolt became a source of inspiration for the militants in two ways. First, it demonstrated the importance of public transport in Brazilian cities and its ability to mobilize people. The revolt was a process that involved the large-scale participation of students from the working classes and brought the city to a complete standstill for ten days. Second, the revolt showed the importance of having a strong organization committed to the cause and to achieving its demands, something that was not a feature of the revolt in Salvador and which, therefore, contributed to its lack of success. This revolt in Salvador, in which the population did not manage to overturn the fare increase (although they did achieve some benefits for students), ended when groups of students who had not taken part in the protests, and were alien to the demands from the streets, met with public authorities to bring the protests to an end by negotiating concessions. They announced the cessation of the mobilization, thereby undermining its legitimacy, and began actively taking steps to demobilize the movement. Critical assessments by those involved in the revolt centred on the lack of any organization with commitment to the struggle, in other words, the lack of any autonomous social movement steadfast to its cause.

These historical revolts against the fare increases and the failings of a faulty transport system show that the free fare battle is not a stunt that emerged in the 2000s. Indeed, in March 1990, just two years after the demise of the military dictatorship in Brazil, student demonstrations successfully secured a free student pass for high school students in Rio de Janeiro (Botelho 2009). Throughout Brazil countless mobilizing committees and campaigns for free transport were established, many of them initially linked to left-wing political parties. These saw the free-fare cause as an effective way of gathering the young, given the importance of public transport to their urban life.

It was in this specific historical context of the struggle for right to public transportation and the awareness of the importance of constructing an independent organization for this, that in January 2005, after an invitation from Florianópolis, militants and groups from 29 cities⁷ met at the Caracol Intergaláctico ⁸ to demand the introduction of the free fare and to oppose fare increases (Figure 2.1). They founded the MPL. So, just as the Florianópolis Campaign linked together a series of groups and organizations, the MPL too was made up of various groups of people with distinct political views. Within the principles of independence, horizontal organization, and non-partisanship, the emergence of the MPL sought to create an autonomous movement to fight for public transport.

Figure 2.1 Demonstrations on the National Day of Struggle for the Free Fare. São Paulo, October, 2005. Source: Reproduced by permission of Douglas Belome.

The organizational form of the MPL is not hegemonic within the Brazilian left. In fact, the existence of independent, horizontal, and non-partisan movements is nothing new. The MPL was born in the context of the surge of anti-capitalist movements that opposed economic globalization in the 1990s and early 2000s, notably the Zapatista uprising in Mexico and the protests in Seattle, which had a significant impact on the left, principally in organizations that sought to strengthen social struggles beyond the State, and included a series of autonomist and organized anarchist groups. Many of those who joined the MPL took part in the Encontro de Grupos Autônomos (Meeting of Autonomous Groups), which was held in São Paulo in 2004 and brought together 53 groups from different Brazilian states. The aim of this meeting was to unite groups and individuals from all over Brazil who were participating in the anti-capitalist struggle in an autonomous and horizontal way so that they might exchange ideas and experiences. Although the groups knew of each other’s existence, they had no physical forum in which to meet. It was agreed that such a forum was important in order to oppose the notion that political action was restricted to political parties or bureaucratic, hierarchical organizations. This meeting took place in the year that the Área de Livre Comércio das Américas (Free Trade Area of the Americas, ALCA), which these groups opposed, was scheduled to be established and some participants actively took part in the campaign against this.⁹

The role played by the Peoples’ Global Action Network (PGA), an association which brought together different groups locally and globally, was also significant, as was the Independent Media Centre. Both were fundamental for their influence on the organizational model, and also with regard to publicizing activities and communicating with social movements, at a national and international level, at a time when social networks did not exist or had only limited use. These movements were in turn inspired by other struggles and groups that situated themselves outside the State and in opposition to hegemonic power throughout history.

As this historical overview shows, it was because of the combination of an awareness of the centrality of public transport in the life of city dwellers, the struggle for the right to free transport, and the formation an autonomous, organized social movement (the MPL), heir to a tradition of social struggles that have advocated direct action and independence in relation to the State and public and private institutions, that June 2013 was able to happen.

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The MPL had been acting in the municipality of São Paulo since 2005, organizing discussion groups in schools (in which the film Revolta do Buzú and videos about the revolts in Florianópolis were screened), public debates, lectures, seminars, and demonstrations, creating associations with other social movements, and producing publications,¹⁰ amongst other activities. The demonstrations in 2013 against the fare increase were preceded by others organized by the MPL that took place in 2005, 2006, 2010, and 2011 (Figure 2.2), as well as one-off demonstrations on specific issues, such as the national day of struggle for the free fare, commemorated every year on 26 October, the day when Florianópolis’s city councillors approved the free fare for students in 2004.

Figure 2.2 Demonstration against the fare increase, São Paulo, February 2011. Source: Reproduced by permission of Douglas Belome.

Traditionally fare increases are introduced during the school holiday period. In 2013, at the request of the Federal government, large cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro postponed the increase as a means of containing inflation. On Saturday, 1 June 2013, however, bus and train fares in São Paulo went up from R$3.00 to R$3.20. The week before, in the districts of Vila Leopoldina, Pirituba, Sé, and Jardim Ângela, students had protested against the announced increase. On the Monday after the fare rise, protests closed the M’Boi Mirim road, in the city’s ‘Southern Zone.’ On 6 June the first major demonstration took place. By 19 June, seven large-scale protests had occurred, and there had additionally been dozens of other decentralized forms of agitation, debate, dissemination, and protest. The demonstrations that began with five thousand people, a very large number for a single mobilization in the city, spread throughout Brazil and involved over a million people in the city of São Paulo alone. The city that never stops stopped. Yet it had also never seen so much movement. São Paulo’s avenues, usually filled with cars, were taken over by the demonstrators. The police were unable to suppress the protests, phone lines were destroyed, and both offices of the executive power were confronted. The gates to the Palácio dos Bandeirantes (the headquarters of the São Paulo state government) were torn down, and a crowd attempted to barge into the city hall, which remained impervious to popular demands.

From the first large-scale protests onwards, the television news, press, and online news channels labelled the demonstrators vandals, troublemakers, hooligans, and violent people. Editorials in newspapers like the Folha de São Paulo and the Estado de São Paulo demanded tough action from the São Paulo Military Police in order to contain the demonstrators and the demonstrations. This excerpt from a Folha de São Paulo editorial published on 13 June 2013, illustrates the line of the media’s coverage:

It is worth underlining that protestors’ demands to overturn the bus and metro fare increase from R$ 3 to R$ 3.20 – to below the rate of inflation – are nothing more than an excuse, and the most vile kind of excuse. These are young people predisposed to violence due to a pseudo-revolutionary ideology, and who are seeking to take advantage from the understandable general sense of irritation with the price paid for travelling on overcrowded buses and trains. The only thing that is worse is the stated central aim of this bunch: free public transport. The unrealistic nature of their demand already betrays the hidden intent to vandalize public property and what are deemed to be symbols of capitalist power. What have the windows of bank branches got to do with buses? The few demonstrators who appear to have half a brain under their hoods justify the violence as a reaction to alleged police brutality, accusing the police of repressing their constitutional right to protest. They are thus demonstrating their ignorance of a basic principle of democratic co-existence: it is the responsibility of the public authorities to impose rules and boundaries on the exercise of rights by groups and individuals when there is a conflict between entitlements. The right to protest is sacred, but it is not above the freedom to come and go – even less so when the former is demanded by a few thousand demonstrators, and the latter is denied to millions. Aware of their marginal and sectarian position, the militants resort to a manoeuvre enshrined by corporatist opportunism: scheduling protests for rush hour on the Avenida Paulista, a vital artery in the city. Their strategy to attract the public’s attention is to disrupt the maximum number of people. The time has come to put a stop to this. The city council and the Military Police need to enforce the existing restrictions on protests on the Avenida Paulista, on whose boundaries lie seven large hospitals (…) As far as vandalism is concerned, there is only one way of combating it: the force of law. It is duly necessary to investigate, identify, and prosecute those responsible. As with any kind of criminal act, in this case too impunity is the greatest incentive to reoffending. (Folha 2013a)

The protests were harshly repressed and criminalized by the press campaign, and also by the political stance regarding social movements from mayor Fernando Haddad, of the PT, and the state governor Geraldo Alckmin, of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB). During the first 13 days of the protests over 300 people were arrested, countless numbers were injured, and the right to demonstrate itself was even called into question as a convenient and reoccurring argument was mobilized about respecting the right to freedom of movement of those not demonstrating (Folha 2013b).

The intensity and escalation of the protests meant that their cause could not be ignored (Figure 2.3). Such was the legitimacy that they achieved that the conservative media was forced to change its discourse. In the battle over the meaning of what was at stake at that moment, the movement was partially victorious. The accusations of violence against the demonstrators were overwritten by the recognition of the violence of the fare itself.

Figure 2.3 Demonstration against the fare increase, São Paulo, June 2013. Source: Reproduced by permission of Douglas Belome.

The U-turn of the narrative concerning the June 2013 protests and protestors was illustrated by something that occurred on a public TV programme that was attracting large audiences at the time. The presenter carried out a poll to find out if people were in favour of the protests. As the survey was taking place, he talked about what he termed acts of vandalism. When he realized that the majority of people were voting in favour of the protests, he requested that the question be reformulated, since, he claimed, people could have not understood it properly: ‘Where’s the other study I asked for, to see if people really understand? Are you in favour of protests involving rioting?’¹¹ Once the question was reformulated, not only did the results not change, but the numbers in favour increased. The public were in favour of protests involving rioting and the presenter was forced to accept the legitimacy of the demonstrations.

In the days that followed, the corporate media collectively began to construct a new narrative. They began differentiating between peaceful demonstrators and a minority group of vandal infiltrators who were distorting the aim of the protests (Figure 2.4). This discourse criminalizing the mobilization intended to frighten the population, and to make it therefore turn its back on the demonstrations. Fewer questions were asked about the demand for the fare reduction or the ‘unrealistic nature’ of a zero fare. What was deemed ‘impossible’ from then on was that thousands of people would take to the streets simply because of 20 cents. The attempt to deconstruct the agenda of the fare reduction principally took the form of an insertion of a series of generic and abstract demands. As a headline in the Folha de São Paulo newspaper on 18 June 2013 stated, ‘Thousands take to the streets “against everything,”’ and placards subsequently announced that protests were not just about 20 cents. The media thus sought to dilute the conflict and its specific causes; since generic causes do not have agents and targets, they involve no-one.

Figure 2.4 Demonstration against the fare increase, São Paulo, June 2013. Source: Reproduced by permission of Luiza Calagian.

The MPL’s proposed debate regarding transport proved to be unpalatable. The fight against corruption and for quality health and education, subjects always mentioned by candidates running for political office in Brazil without any concrete proposals, were very welcome by those who wanted nothing to change. By bringing the fare increase to the fore, the MPL raised the issue of the profits of private companies, the use of public money to maintain these profits, tax reforms to subsidize people’s rights, social inequality, and access to the city. In other words, they raised disturbing subjects for Brazil’s political and economic elite. Saying that the protests were not ‘just about 20 cents’ obscured just how much the transport fare prevents a major part of the working class from having the right to move around the city and, thus, to access other rights.

The efforts to bury the transport issue can also be understood as an attempt to hide the MPL movement itself and its popular organization. The slogan ‘the giant has awoken,’ much repeated at the time, implied the awakening of the population, as if countless people had not been organizing for years, as if Brazil did not have countless examples of popular organizations and revolts, as if June 2013 was an aberration. The discourse of spontaneity, of a revolt in reaction to everything, ignored the daily efforts of organizations that have clear goals and are linked to different traditions and histories of social struggle regarding the right to transportation.

Alongside this narrative shift, there was a surge of protests throughout the country. The radical escalation of events that followed the demonstration of 13 June was attributed by the press and intellectuals to excessive police violence. The disproportionate repression was said to have harnessed the general population’s support for the demonstrators, which would explain the increase in the protests and the victory that was to ensue. This interpretation overlooks the fact that historically social movements are repressed, that the police in Brazil always deal violently with protests, and that, rather than boosting activism, the police action suffocates it. Once again the narrative shift obfuscated the existence and historical experience of popular organizations and their role in forging social activism, just as it concealed the problem of transport costs, which exclude people from taking part in the city. The question is, therefore, how to understand the growth of the protests in spite of the repression that took place?

It is also necessary to understand the local political context in which these demonstrations took place in São Paulo (see Chapter 3). With the PT at the head of city hall, organizations, social movements, and a section of the population hoped that there would be greater opportunities to discuss and revoke the fare increase. Here, the PT city councillors’ opposition to the 2011 fare increase during Gilberto Kassab’s administration (2006–2012), as well as Haddad’s campaign to be São Paulo’s mayor in which he declared himself as a candidate more open to popular demands was still fresh in people’s memory. However, what was witnessed in 2013, instead, was Haddad as an intransigent mayor who, on the very same day he was obliged to reduce the fare, standing beside Governor Geraldo Alckmin, who made the announcement about overturning the fair increase, had stated to the press that very morning that he would not back down.

Another factor to bear in mind is that due to the centrality of bus travel in São Paulo, the bus fare increase sparked the indignation of the population.¹² Taking advantage of this indignation, the press, which to this day continues to situate itself in opposition to the PT and in favour of more right-wing administrations, gave greater visibility to the 2013 protests. They compared them to the struggles against fare rises in previous years expecting that they would weaken Haddad’s administration, whilst not offering significant popular support to precipitate the fare’s actual reduction. But, the fare was brought down.

The legacy of the events of June 2013 continues to be disputed. Some try to strip the protests of their meaning in terms of conflict and confrontation, whereas others attempt to deny them their popular meaning. The PT condemns the June protests for having brought the right wing onto the streets, for letting them out of the closet. Undoubtedly, Brazil witnessed a subsequent large-scale mobilization of the right, which has only strengthened since. But we should ask ourselves whether that uprising is a continuation of the June 2013 protests, or a response to the popular mobilization that threatened the elite’s privileges, demanding a right to the city? If we look back over recent history, we see that the dominant classes have never silently accepted any kind of initiative on the part of their subordinates. The PT’s argument reveals little more than the belief that there is no left beyond their own party so that any movements that are not organized by them, must be right-wing movements. In the PT’s view, social movements must be satisfied with the policy of what’s ‘possible,’ in what they propose, based on what is supposed to be class conciliation. They do not accept the criticism that they have adopted the elite’s agenda and have been defeated within it.

Anyone who happened to be in São Paulo in June 2013 would have realized that the main topic on everyone’s lips was public transport. Inside buses, trains, offices, factories, bars, restaurants, and shops, people were talking about the fare increase and about something that had previously been unimaginable: free public transport. The general diffusion of this demand, combined with the generalized demonstrations throughout the city, forced those who had continually stated it was impossible to revoke the increase to do precisely that. Significant victories were obtained without the support of any of the country’s traditional institutional political forces: the reduction in fares in over 100 cities over the country, the inclusion within the constitution of transport as a social right, policies to prioritize collective transport (like exclusive bus lanes, and more funding for the construction of metros, trains, and bus routes), the school pass in São Paulo, and an enormous gain in the public debate around the subject of transport, opened up the possibility of free transport in people’s minds and its effective implementation.

It is important to note that these tangible gains are policies in the popular classes’ interest, and that they reduce urban exclusion. So while the right wing intensified its activities after the presidential elections of October 2014, the left wing and social movements have nevertheless grown a great deal since the reduction in the transport fares. To give a few examples, the housing movement, and the indigenous movement to regain their lands, have grown stronger. Public schools have been occupied by high school students opposed to the closure of schools and budget cuts in education, and strikes have broken out in Brazil, hitting numbers not seen since the 1980s.¹³ As well as achieving concrete policies, the June 2013 revolts reconstructed an important memory, that only struggle changes peoples’ lives.

Translated by Lisa Shaw