Tom Phillips : Students protest across Brazil over Jair Bolsonaro's sweeping cuts to education

By Dilip -
Tens of thousands of students, academics and teachers have taken to the streets of Brazil for their latest mass protest against what they call far-right president Jair Bolsonaro’s assault on education.

Up and down the country – from Amazon cities to small towns in Brazil’s deep south – demonstrators turned out to condemn Bolsonaro’s highly controversial moves to slash funding for public education and science. In the capital, Brasília, student protesters were filmed burning an effigy of the Brazilian president while chanting the increasingly common refrain of his opponents: “Hey, Bolsonaro go and get fucked”.In the northeastern city of Salvador, where a reported 70,000 people marched, one dissenter carried a diabolic caricature of Bolsonaro stamped with the phrase: “Not today Satan”. Thousands of students marched through downtown Rio with placards reading: “Education isn’t an expense, it is an investment”.

“This isn’t just an attack on universities. It is going to affect all levels of education,” said Rodrigo Iacovini, an urban planner who joined a march in Brazil’s economic capital, São Paulo. “We knew it would be bad – but not this bad,” Iacovini, 33, said of Bolsonaro’s six-month-old administration. “Unfortunately, they have shown themselves to be not just a conservative government, but a completely incompetent conservative government that is utterly detached from the Brazilian reality.”

Tanisia Maria Almeida, a masters student who demonstrated in the northeastern state of Sergipe, said she was horrified by spending cuts she feared would make it harder for students from poor backgrounds to gain an education... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/31/students-protest-across-brazil-over-jair-bolsonaros-sweeping-cuts-to-education

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