|
 To call attention to their gripe, everything is game for the
students:
to carry effigies of the object of their protest,
light candles, dress as clowns, bare it all.
By Alessandra Dalevi
First there were the caras-pintadas (painted faces), those students who in 1992
painted their faces, often in the yellow-green national flag colors, to protest against
corruption in the government of then President Fernando Collor de Mello. Nine years later
their heirs are more irreverent and more risqué: they are the bundas-peladas
(naked butts) who have gone to the streets in Brazil to demand morality from politicians.
To convey their messages they are lowering their pants and mooning government and its
mistakes.
First were the men in Brasília, who on May 23 let their pants down. In the federal
capital, the bundas-peladas directed their derrieres to the National Congress
building while congressmen were voting to open a process to expel from the senate Antônio
Carlos Magalhães, the once all powerful chief from Bahia state, and José Roberto Arruda.
Both ended up resigning before the process could move ahead.
The next day, Carla Santos, 21, the president of Ubes (União Brasileira de
Estudantes—Brazilian Union of Students) went a step further: she left all her clothes
on the lawn facing the Congress and, naked, entered a moat built around the congress with
the purpose to avoid that demonstrations got too close to the building. She sang the
national anthem, shouted slogans against the President, and ran on the lawn. Over Carla's
naked body, there were short protest messages like CPI (Parliamentary Committee Enquiry)
and Out FHC, which is an abbreviation for Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Bottomless, she
semicovered her breasts with a Ubes's flag. Her exposition lasted close to 30 minutes.
Carla has become an overnight celebrity after her naked act. She was having a hard time
to accommodate all the requests for interviews and had to deny several times that she had
received and accepted an invitation to pose in the nude for Brazilian Playboy. Born
in Rio Grande do Sul, the student leader is a member of the PC do B (Communist Party of
Brazil). It's been a year and a half now that she interrupted her last year of high school
to dedicate herself exclusively to the activities of her party and of the students union
she presides.
Santos explained her disrobing later: "The body is also a form of expression.
Aren't women taking their clothes off for other things? Why not be naked for the
country?" She also guaranteed that she had her family's backing for the bawdy
protest: "My parents approved of my attitude. They certainly would feel sad if I got
naked to pose for a male magazine, but for a good cause, the fight for the country,
there's no problem."
"The idea is to look for something irreverent, be it taking off the clothes or
lighting up candles," says Juremar de Oliveira, director of the Ubes. "What we
want is to show our indignation caused by a situation of incertitude facing young
people." For Oliveira, Carla's protest was the right thing to do: "It was an
irreverent act that called attention to our criticism."
Street protests have been frequent in Brazil those days. There's no lack of causes.
High-school and college students have been staging marches to demonstrate against the
International Monetary Fund intrusion in Brazil, against corruption in government and
private sectors, against President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and more recently against
the threat of widespread electrical blackouts in the country. To call attention to their
gripe everything is game: to carry effigies of the object of their protest, light candles,
dress as clowns, bare it all.
In Salvador, state of Bahia, the protesters had to face a violent police who didn't
spare bombs and other kinds of intimidation to disperse the students. In other places,
however, like Rio, São Paulo and Brasília, the police had a more subdued participation.
They didn't react even when students provoked them in Brasília throwing water in their
direction. The taking-your-clothes off stint isn't getting too many converts, however. In
a protest in São Paulo students limited to light up 2,000 candles at Praça da Sé, in
the heart of the capital. No one showed his or her privates there.
Send
your
comments to
Brazzil
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed