Fresh protests rocked Brazil on Saturday despite conciliatory remarks by Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who pledged to improve public services and fight harder against corruption.
Rousseff’s televised address late on Friday appeared to have failed to sway protesters, as activists vowed to continue the struggle and ordinarily soccer-mad Brazilians once again protested outside Confederations Cup games.
More than 70,000 people chanting “The Cup for whom?” rallied in the southeastern city of Belo Horizonte as Mexico edged Japan 2-1 in the soccer tournament seen as a dress rehearsal for next year’s World Cup.
Photo: AFP
Police fired tear gas when some of the protesters hurled stones and tried to break through the security perimeter around the Estadio Mineirao. About people, including five police officers, were reported injured in the clashes and another 22 protesters were arrested.
Later, the unrest spread as shops were looted and banks and a car dealership vandalized.
“We are against the World Cup because it masks the problems the country faces,” said musician Leonardo Melo, who dismissed Rousseff’s speech as “rhetoric.”
Over the past two weeks, hundreds of thousands of Brazilians have protested against the billions of dollars being spent on the World Cup, accusing the government of wasting money and neglecting health, education and transport.
More than 1 million marched in dozens of cities on Thursday.
In Sao Paulo, 35,000 people took to the streets peacefully on Saturday to denounce a proposed constitutional amendment that would take away the power of independent public prosecutors to probe crimes, making it harder to fight corruption.
In the southern town of Uruguaiana, demonstrators peacefully occupied the bridge linking Brazil to Uruguay for four hours.
In Santa Maria, where a disco fire killed 242 young people in January, 30,000 people protested.
In Salvador, where Brazil beat Italy 4-2 in another Confederations Cup match, about 200 people protested, according to a reporter.
Inside the Estadio Octavio Mangabeira, dozens of fans brandished placards proclaiming: “Let’s go to the streets to change Brazil.”
West of Rio de Janeiro, near the Bangu Prison, police confiscated Molotov cocktails, sticks and stones and arrested 30 people for looting and smashing furniture after a protest by aboui 500 people, according to the Globo G1 Web site.
As the Rousseff government tried to address the ever rising tide of dissatisfaction over its social policies, former soccer star-turned Brazilian Socialist Party politician Romario joined the debate, dubbing soccer’s world governing body FIFA as “Brazil’s real president.”
In her address, Rousseff offered Brazilians a “great pact” between the government and the people to improve shoddy public services and stressed the need for “more effective ways to fight corruption.”
However, her intervention left protesters unmoved, judging by a torrent of comments on social media Web sites amid the release of a poll showing that three-quarters of Brazilians back the demonstrations.
“I was depressed listening to Dilma. It’s a joke, right? Dilma treats us as if we are idiots,” one read.
“We want dates and times, action. Promises are not enough,” another said.
The protests have been largely peaceful, but some have been marred by violence and acts of vandalism, notably in Rio and Brasilia, with two deaths recorded so far.
The popular outrage, dubbed by some a “Tropical Spring” after the protest movements in the Arab world and echoing similar turmoil in Turkey this month, has come as a shock to outside observers.
Rousseff’s political mentor, former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, helped raise Brazil’s international profile and the World Cup was seen as a key milestone in its emergence as a global power.
However, the protesters say they feel left behind as they watch gleaming new stadiums spring up in cities paralyzed by traffic and clogged with aging trains and buses.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema