

Expert Explains Brazil’s Moment of Hope
Paulo Sotero, Director of the Brazilian Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, explains the cause of the street protests. An excerpt from his analysis: “It’s not bus fare rises, it’s not per se the lavish expenditures on the stadiums. It is the irritatingly slow pace of change in a country that has experienced the emergence of a middle class that was promised and has seen some of the benefits of a middle class life with some degree of equity, but that suddenly see that life is very hard, that they may not get there because the economy is stalling, because inflation is on the rise again, because there is too much corruption.”
