The protests in Brazil began over an issue of a fare increase on public transportation, and grew to encompass demands for better public services and protests over the amount of public money being spent on the World Cup and the Olympics. Economist André Lara Resende writes that after the economic and political changes in Brazil over the last decades, the protests cannot be “blamed” on pure economic hardship, inflation, unemployment, lack of democratic representation, authoritarianism, or lack of freedom of expression, as they might have been in the past or in other countries. He suggests that the reduction of absolute poverty in the population has increased the demand for quality services, and that social media allows people to see how many others feel as they do, and to assemble before government leaders get the memo.
According to Resende, the issue of mobility in large cities is paradigmatic of the exhaustion of…
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The River Revista 