On 15 May millions of school and university students, their teachers, professors, and other staff in more than 180 cities across Brazil, demonstrated against education budget cuts, the first mass protests since the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro took office in January. Alvaro Michaels reports.
The president’s education minister, Abraham Weintraub, announced budget cuts across all levels of public education on 30 April, having threatened to reduce funding for universities that ‘promoted rackets’ and that ‘are just making a mayhem’ instead of improving their academic performance. 30% of ‘non-mandatory spending’ is cut for federal universities, payment for all the outsourced workers such as cleaners and security staff, spending on build-ing work, on equipment and even water, electricity, and internet bills.
Shock waves spread through fed-er-ally funded universities, including hospitals, and Brazil’s most prestigious and competitive schools. To pressurise middle class parties in Congress, Weintraub hinted that the freezing of 42% of the science ministry’s investment budget, along with over 3,000 scholarships for postgraduate research, may be lifted if they approve the reductions in social programmes.
Overall, the education cuts hit the middle and ordinary working classes and their youth, already facing serious problems finding work. This explains the mix of protesters in the demonstrations, which sprang out of calls by trades unions to reject the proposed pension and social security ‘reform’, which will be central to the general strike scheduled for 14 June. With Bolsonaro’s attack the demonstrations now attracted hundreds of thousands of school and college students.
In Rio de Janeiro, 200,000 demonstrators took to the streets and police fired gas and percussion grenades at protesters, who set a bus on fire. The police broke up groups at the end of the rally. São Paulo and Belo Horizonte each saw 250,000 protesters marching. In Fortaleza 100,000 gathered, and in Salvador 50,000. The capital Brasilia saw 50,000 protesters who were attacked with teargas and rubber bullets by the police. Police also attacked the protest in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil; 20,000 people gathered outside the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, where 41% of the budget has been cut. Protestors chanted ‘education is not a commodity’ and ‘there will be no cuts, there will be a fight’ and condemned Bolsonaro’s connections to paramilitary gangs.
The same day, by decree, Bolsonaro’s administration took new powers to control the selection of senior administrators in the federal university system, reversing the principle of academic autonomy. Bolsonaro was in Texas that day and commented that the demonstrators were ‘useful idiots, imbeciles, who are being used by the manoeuvring mass of a clever minority who make up the nucleus of many federal universities in Brazil’. He has declared war against so called ‘indoctrination’ by left-leaning teachers in schools, by instructing students to inform on their teachers.
Reacting to the economic crisis, the priority is to ensure effective drilling of students to meet capital’s needs. Wein-traub is clear: ‘A scientific, technical, number-based, efficient and managerial approach is vital to save this country from the economic stagnation of the last 20 years…’ Higher education will become inaccessible to the lower classes. It’s practically privatisation.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 270 June/July 2019
