Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil

3. From Martyrdom and Militancy to Memory: 1968 in Brazil

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 from martyrdom and militancy to memory 1968 in Brazil On March 28, 1968, the Guanabara state police shot and killed Edson Luis de Lima Souto, a young secondary school student purportedly about to engage in a street demonstration in downtown Rio de Janeiro. Newspaper reports gave conflicting accounts as to whether the group of some three hundred to six hundred mostly secondary school students assembled outside of the Calabouço, a student restaurant, had just initiated a protest march against the poor conditions there or whether some of them were merely attempting to organize one. Nor were they clear about what exactly led the police to enter the building that day. What was transparent, however , was the fact that soon after the o≈cers arrived some of them began shooting. Before people could flee the scene several students were injured, and one passerby su√ered a bullet wound to the face. The shot that killed Edson Luis went through the heart.∞ The killing of Edson Luis, a poor student from the northern state of Pará who worked and sometimes lived at the Calabouço, set o√ an enormous surgeinstudentmobilizingasalmostimmediatelyyoungpeopleacrossthe country protested his death in massive demonstrations. Their actions shocked o≈cials who had considered the problem of the student movement to be dissipating. Just one day before the shooting Gen. João Dutra de Castilho, a regional army commander, had espoused confidence that studentdemonstrationswouldnotdisrupttheupcomingcommemorationsof the coup d’état of 1964 that brought the military regime into power—what the military, as noted earlier, called the Revolution of March 31—casually 108 chapter three asserting that it was ‘‘useless for a small minority to try to perturb the country as they’ll find no climate for that.’’≤ While it was true that the outlawed une and other suspect student organizations had not entirely disappeared and that the short-lived dne had failed miserably as a governmentsponsored alternative, student protests in the last year had become relatively small a√airs, drawing reduced numbers of participants. While groups like the excedentes had recently staged several creative demonstrations to draw attentiontotheirplight—forexample,theyheldanironicpartyprotest( festaprotesto ) to celebrate the one-year anniversary of their having been denied enrollment—none had galvanized mass numbers of students. Nor did the clandestine lefts—those extralegal revolutionary organizations that counted many student movement leaders as members—produce much cause for concern , as they had undertaken few public actions so far. And although tumultuous student strikes in Poland had recently become front-page news in Brazil, stories of Polish students’ criticism of the Communist Party in power there appeared unquestionably foreign to the Brazilian situation. Notwithstanding the political radicalization of some Brazilian students, many presumed that the great majority of them, like others from their social class, generally if quietly supported the military government. Thus when General Dutra delivered his assured comments on March 27 few would have guessed that 1968 would soon become forever marked by an upsurge in massive university student demonstrations in Brazil and around the world. The death of Edson Luis not only spurred an immediate, nationwide response it also mushroomed into nine tumultuous months of violent confrontations between students and police that would resound throughout the ensuing seventeen years of military rule as students became the most visible and emblematic symbol of opposition to the regime. During the period basically encompassing the March-to-November academic term, the concerns and grievances of a wide variety of student sectors—notwithstanding their frequent disagreements with one another—coalesced around a shared opposition to the dictatorship, as they fittingly referred to the military government. As student activists built on the momentum generated by Edson Luis’s death, they implicitly and explicitly staked new claims to students’ political authority, recasting themselves as a hybrid mix of martyrs and militants, both compelled to respond to the regime’s repressive acts and eagerly poised to do so. Meanwhile military o≈cials and others cast students’ behavior as decidedly unnatural, provoked by nonstudent influences. These charges became further animated as student pro- from martyrdom to memory 109 testsinotherpartsof theworldbecamefront-pagenewsinBrazil.When,at the end of the year, the military took even more drastic steps to end student movement activity, enacting the most authoritarian piece of legislation of its twenty-one-year rule and plunging Brazil into its most repressive period , it marked a turning point in the history of the Brazilian military regime. It also augmented appeals...