WIDESPREAD SYMPATHY IN BRAZIL FOR STUDENT DEMONSTRATORS
In the aftermath of three days of violent, massive clashes between Brazilian police and demonstrating students -which began when a student demonstrator was shot to death by police on March 28 -- a wide range of public opinion in Brazil has united in condemnation of the police actions and against threats of stepped-up repression.
The archbishop of Rio de Janeiro, Mer. José de Castro Pinto, declared, as quoted in Le Monde of April 9, that "the violence and arbitrariness of the police were such that many asked themselves if the policemen were not under the influence of excitant drugs." Fifty clergymen in the state of Guanabara issued an appeal to the authorities to "substitute dialogue for violence and justice for arbitrariness."
The final tally scored by the police assault on the students showed five persons dead, one hundred wounded, and roughly five hundred arrested. The total cost to the Brazilian economy of this repression is estimated at the equivalent of $50 million.
It is rumored that the government intends to exile the alleged leaders of the dissident students in the forbidding Amazonian back country. Threats of broad repres— sive measures have also been made by spokesmen for the military dictatorship. However, despite these threats the government is reportedly reluctant to chance imposing a state of siege or wholesale political repressions.
Irenée Guimaraes, Le Monde's special correspondent in Rio, noted in the April 9 issue of that paper that the student unrest in Brazil had revealed serious weaknesses in the regime: dissension in the government and total lack of any program for education in a country with a population of more than forty million under twenty years of age and an illiteracy rate of 60 percent.