RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) -- Brazil awoke Friday to city centers
still smoldering after a night that shocked the nation: 1
million anti-government protesters took to the streets in
scores of cities, with clusters battling police and
destroying swaths of storefronts and government buildings.
President Dilma Rousseff called an
emergency meeting about the protest with top Cabinet members
Friday, after a largely silent and much criticized response
to some of the biggest demonstrations seen in this 192
million-person country in decades.
There were also growing calls on
social media and in mass emails for a general strike next
week. If it materializes, the action could bring in unions
and other organized groups to what has so far been an
amorphous explosion of discontent over everything from high
crime to poor education.
Brazilian media have mercilessly
called out Rousseff and other leaders for their confused
response to the protests.
"Dilma Rousseff and (Brasilia Gov.)
Agnelo Queiroz are the epitome of Brazilian rulers," wrote
political commentator Fernando Rodrigues in the country's
biggest newspaper, Folha de S. Paulo.
"They embody the perplexity and the
lack of leadership capabilities of several parties'
politicians vis-a-vis the new phenomena of protests without
leaders or defined proposals. ... It seems they are just
waiting and hoping the tsunami will end."
To be sure, the lack of any
organization or concrete demands behind the protests has
made a unified government response nearly impossible.
Several cities have cancelled the transit fare hikes that
had originally sparked the demonstrations a week ago, but
the outrage has only grown more intense.
Gilberto Carvalho, the secretary
general of the presidency, provided little direction Friday
after a meeting to discuss Pope Francis' planned July visit
to Rio de Janeiro for World Youth Day.
"We can't anticipate the future,"
Carvalho said. "We don't know what it's going to be like.
Perhaps things will not be so intense (as the recent
protests) but we have to be prepared for anything."
Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota, for
one, hit back at protesters the morning after his modernist
ministry building was attacked by a boisterous crowd. At one
point, smoke billowed from the building, and windows were
shattered along its perimeter.
Standing before the battered ministry,
he told reporters Friday he "was very angry" that protesters
attacked a structure "that represents the search for
understanding through dialogue." Patriota called for
protesters "to convey their demands peacefully"
"I believe that the great majority of
the protesters are not taking part in this violence and are
instead looking to improve Brazil's democracy via legitimate
forms of protest," Patriota said.
The majority of protesters have been
peaceful, and crowds have taken to chanting "No violence! No
violence!" when small groups have prepared to burn and
smash. The more violent demonstrators have taken over once
night has fallen.
Protesters and police clashed in
several cities into the early hours Friday.
At least one protester was killed in
Sao Paulo state Friday when a driver apparently became
enraged about being unable to travel along a street and
rammed his car into a group of demonstrators.
In Rio de Janeiro, where an estimated
300,000 demonstrators poured into the seaside city's center,
running clashes played out between riot police and clusters
of mostly young men with T-shirts wrapped around their
faces. But peaceful protesters were also caught up in the
fray, too, as police fired tear gas canisters into their
midst and at times indiscriminately used pepper spray.
Thundering booms echoed off stately
colonial buildings as rubber bullets and gas were fired at
fleeing crowds.
At least 40 people were injured in
Rio, including protesters such as Michele Menezes, a wisp of
a woman whose youthful face and braces belied her 26 years.
Bleeding and with her hair singed from the explosion of a
tear gas canister, she said she and others took refuge from
the violence in an open bar, only to have a police officer
toss the canister inside.
The blast ripped through Menezes'
jeans, tearing two coin-sized holes on the back of her
thighs, and peppered her upper arm with a rash of small
holes.
"I was leaving a peaceful protest and
it's not the thugs that attack me but the police
themselves," said Menezes, removing her wire-rim glasses to
wipe her bloodshot eyes.
She later took refuge in a hotel,
along with about two dozen youths, families and others who
said they had been repeatedly hit with pepper spray by
motorcycle police as they also sheltered inside a bar.
Protesters said they would not back
down.
"I saw some pretty scary things, but
they're not going to shake me. There's another march on the
22nd and I'm going to be there," said 19-year-old university
student Fernanda Szuster.
Asked if her parents knew she was
joining in the protests, Szuster said: "They know and
they're proud. They also protested when they were young. So
they think it's great."
Clashes were also reported in the
Amazon jungle city of Belem, Porto Alegre in the south, the
university town Campinas north of Sao Paulo, the
northeastern city of Salvador and dozens of other towns.
The protests took place one week after
a violent police crackdown on a small demonstration against
an increase in bus and subway fares in Sao Paulo galvanized
Brazilians to take their grievances to the streets.
The unrest is hitting the nation as it
hosts the Confederations Cup soccer tournament, with tens of
thousands of foreign visitors in attendance. It also comes
one month before the papal visit, and ahead of the 2014
World Cup and 2016 Olympics, raising concerns about how
Brazilian officials will provide security.
Brazilian bishops called a press
conference Friday to discuss the papal visit in light of the
protests, but no announcement of any changes had been made.
Mass protests have been rare in this
country of 190 million people in recent years, and the
mushrooming demonstrations of the past week caught Brazilian
government officials by surprise while delighting many
citizens.
"I think we desperately need this,
that we've been needing this for a very, very long time,"
said Paulo Roberto Rodrigues da Cunha, a 63-year-old
clothing store salesman in Rio.
Despite the energy on the street, many
protesters said they were unsure how the movement would win
real political concessions. People have held up signs asking
for everything from education reforms to free bus fares
while denouncing the billions of public dollars spent on
stadiums in advance of the World Cup and the Olympics.
"This is the start of a structural
change in Brazil," said Aline Campos, a 29-year-old
publicist in Brasilia. "People now want to make sure their
money is well spent, that it's not wasted through
corruption."
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Brooks reported from Sao Paulo.
Associated Press writers Marco Sibaja in Brasilia, Stan
Lehman in Sao Paulo and Ricardo Zuniga in Salvador
contributed to this report.