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Thousands Of Workers Strike In Brazil

By Countercurrents.org

12 July, 2013
Countercurrents.org

Tens of thousands of union demonstrators blocked roads in Brazil on July 11, 2013 in a one-day strike aimed at seizing the momentum of huge protests that swept the country last month. Banks and schools stayed closed. The demonstration snarled traffic in dozens of cities. A few hundred landless peasants occupied land reform institute INCRA to demand agrarian reforms.

The protest was part of a union-organized National Day of Struggles in which demonstrations were held and roads blocked in all 27 Brazilian states.

Media reports from Brazil said:

Bus drivers, metal-workers, stevedores and bank tellers were among the unionized workers who took to the streets nationwide as organized labor attempts to elevate workers' rights.

More than 80 sections of highways were blocked across Brazil. In Campo Grande, deep in the country's interior, 35,000 people demonstrated. In Belo Horizonte, 7,000 people took the streets.

Demonstrators set tires ablaze on a freeway outside Rio de Janeiro and marching over a suspension bridge in Sao Paulo's financial district.

Activity at key ports in the country including South America’s largest and busiest port in Santos was at a standstill as unionized dockworkers walked out. It delayed a sugar vessel and several container ships.

Thousands demonstrated in front of the National Congress in Brasília. There were protests in Recife, Fortaleza and Maceió in the north-east of Brazil, Belém in the Amazon and Florianópolis in the south. The majority of the protests were peaceful.

In Rio, home to Brazil's oil industry, a bid round to auction of a huge offshore subsalt oil prospect in October was targeted by protesting oil workers before violence broke out. Others protested against forced evictions of favelas for World Cup and Olympic works.

In parts of the country with a strong history of union activity, such as Porto Alegre, public transportation, stores and even intercity buses shut down.

Some 8,000 people protested in the northeastern city of Natal, and around 2,000 people were reported to have occupied the Ministerial Esplanade at the heart of Brasília, the country’s capital.
Sao Paulo's highest-profile union rally drew a few thousand participants at its peak along four blocks of Avenida Paulista, the city's main avenue. Police cordoned off the area and diverted traffic to allow the march to proceed.

The disruptions, mostly peaceful aside from scattered clashes between police and protesters in a few cities, were limited compared to June protests.

However, police in Rio de Janeiro fired tear gas and used batons to disperse an unruly group of demonstrators, some of them hooded and masked that sought to take advantage of the march by union workers to create unrest. Labor activists also tried to push back some of the aggressive demonstrators.

Protests were intended to be peaceful but one flashpoint erupted after the discovery of a cardboard box full of homemade Molotov cocktails made of beer bottles as the march reached the central Floriano Square.
As a demonstrator smashed the Molotov cocktails underfoot police began firing teargas – and panic and violence rapidly ensued.

In the middle of running battles a soundtrack continued playing the national anthem while a speaker urged calm.

Piles of rubbish and a street stall were set on fire. As riot police regrouped on the steps of the Municipal Theatre a small boy passed out from teargas and was helped by volunteer medics who formed a circle around him. A smaller group of demonstrators then headed to the state government headquarters in Laranjeiras where teargas was also used by police.

Brazilian media blamed anarchist groups for starting trouble – a minority of demonstrators wore anarchist insignia and carried gas masks.

But there was also suspicion that the discovery of the Molotov cocktails near press and TV crews meant they could have been planted.

There were notable absences of subway and train workers in Sao Paulo and Rio, minimizing the impact in Brazil's two biggest cities.

Ten people were arrested and one policeman injured.

Indians blockade railway

Brazilian Indians seeking better public services blockaded a key railway carrying iron ore from global miner Vale's giant Carajas mine to port.

The railway, known as EFC, carries close to 100 million tonnes of iron ore a year, or nearly 10 percent of the world's 1 billion tonnes of seaborne exports.

COAPIMA, an organization representing indigenous groups, said various tribes were demonstrating in the area to demand better services including health care, on their reservations.

Brazil, which has set about 13 percent of its territory for Indians, is struggling to defuse a series of conflicts with natives over farmland, proposed hydroelectric dams and mines.

President Dilma Rousseff has tried to prevent more violence since two Terena Indians were killed when police evicted members of the tribe from a former congressman's cattle ranch last month.

Unions claim: Not late

Leaders of Brazil's largest umbrella union, known as CUT, which provides support for Rousseff's leftist Workers' Party, aimed to channel popular discontent and counter the notion that they were late to the movement.

"We're not late, we've always been here. We're here to demand that Dilma follows through on her promises," said Adriana Magalhães, a bank employee and CUT organizer in Sao Paulo.

Union groups played a marginal role in the earlier wave of discontent in recent weeks.
Organized labor was sidelined in the June demonstrations, but is now trying to assert leadership and provide direction for what was a diverse and leaderless protest movement.

History teacher Fernando da Costa Vieira said the event had a clearer agenda than June's protests and put the unions back at the centre of the debate.

"Here you have representatives of professors, doctors, transportation workers. These sectors had been fractured, they had forgotten their role as the vanguard of the working class," he told the BBC.

An Anadolu Agency correspondent at the place of incident said protesters carrying a variety of banners, union flags and balloons, were virtually all affiliated to a union, but the list of grievances was reminiscent of the mass protests in June, including transport, health, education, political reforms, gay rights, the decriminalization of abortion, and many against the country’s funding of the World Cup in 2014.

“I believe now is the time when the workers must come to the street to claim long-fought rights. I work for the government, but there are also people here from the private sector that have being demanding a change in what we consider criminal rules governing pension rights. We’re here to call for a 40-hour week, more respect, better education and health,” Ismael Souza, 30, a public worker from São Paulo told Anadolu Agency.

São Paulo-based accounts assistant Suely Feio, 42, who is a member of the Central General Union of Brazil (CGTB) told AA: “I’m here to call for better education, health and the reduction of interest rates. I’ve had enough of paying bankers high interest rates.”

Rousseff under fire from all sides

Commentators appear divided over whether the events mark a rekindling of wave of mass protests, but the authorities will be concerned that the protests have now entered their second month, unabated, with major events on the horizon – some closer than others.

Whichever is true, pressure has against mounted on president Rousseff, who must address protesters’ demands as well as balancing the books within the straitjacket of promises over financial responsibility.

Rousseff’s approval rating has slumped to a record low of just 30 percent. The president was also booed on Wednesday at a meeting of the country’s 4,000 prefects.

The president is facing unrest in the unwieldy 16-party coalition that her party, PT (Workers’ Party) leads.

 

 

 




 

 


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