Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies

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ISSN: 1356-9325 (Print) 1469-9575 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjla20

A Response to Fabiano Santos and Fernando

Guarnieri

Idelber Avelar

To cite this article: Idelber Avelar (2017): A Response to Fabiano Santos and Fernando Guarnieri,
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2017.1314954

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Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2017.1314954

Idelber Avelar

A RESPONSE TO FABIANO SANTOS AND

FERNANDO GUARNIERI*

Abstract
This article responds to Fabiano Santos and Fernando Guarnieri’s dispatch, published
under the title “From Protest to Parliamentary Coup: An Overview of Brazil’s Recent
History” in the December 2016 issue of JLACS. I start by pointing out several errors
in the authors’ use of terms such as “fascism” and “coup.” I proceed to map out the
omissions that allow them to portray Rousseff’s impeachment in a moral and Mani-
chean light, as a coup of malignant social actors against innocent victims. I then
reconstruct the chronology of Rousseff’s long-winded downward spiral of self-inflicted
agony, from the electoral larceny of October 2014 through the gigantic popular pro-
tests of March 2015 to the final vote in August 2016, showing how the authors chose
to omit every fact that revealed Rousseff’s and the Workers’ Party’s own responsibilities
in the economic collapse and the political crisis of the country they governed for five
and a half and thirteen and a half years, respectively. I conclude by pointing out the
contradiction between the authors’ claim that there was a parliamentary coup in Brazil
and their claim that the country’s political system has remained intact.

Keywords: Brazil; coup; fascism; Dilma Rousseff; Lula; PT.

In the December 2016 issue of JLACS, political scientists Fabiano Santos and Fer-
nando Guarnieri offered an account of what they call a ‘parliamentary coup’ against
former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff. The article has the merit of presenting
a version widely dominant amongst supporters of the former administration as well
as in sectors of the social sciences. It is, however, a version in stark contrast with
how the vast majority of the Brazilian population has lived the process, one that
omits relevant facts and ignores the meaning held by concepts in the literature,
beginning with the very word ‘coup.’ This piece will be a detailed response to

*
I am indebted to many interlocutors of online activism, most especially to several members of
the ‘Perequetônica’ group on Facebook, for help with the gathering of materials. I owe a
special debt of gratitude to Aline Passos for comments on this piece.

Ó 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

2 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

Santos and Guarnieri paragraph by paragraph, with abundant reference to facts and
bibliography they overlook.
According to the authors, Brazil went ‘from protest to coup’ and the uprisings
of June 2013 are the key to understanding a presumed ‘institutional degradation.’1
This is the causal and chronological arch they would like to draw. After correctly
pointing out that those massive protests started as a struggle against a bus fare
hike, they go on to lament that protesters remained on the streets after the São
Paulo administration agreed to recoil on the hike and that the theme of corruption
gained centrality, supposedly opening up the space for ‘fascist logic’ to ‘enter com-
mon parlance.’ Without reference to any of the many studies of June, the authors
name a presumed arrival of these ‘fascists’ in the protests as the origin and
explanatory key of what comes later. Even though millions of Brazilians have been
back protesting since then, their narrative departs from the streets and focuses on
the 2014 presidential elections, the intra-palace maneuvers and betrayals that fol-
lowed it, Rousseff’s cabinet changes, and the impeachment proceedings in Con-
gress. Throughout their chronology, the reader has the sense that Brazilians have
not been back on the streets. As an afterthought, they do mention the pro-im-
peachment demonstrations, not without decisively falsifying their record.
Santos and Guarnieri point out that ‘it came as no surprise’ that corruption was
added to protesters’ grievances, as Brazil was hosting an event by FIFA, the world foot-
ball federation investigated in a bribery scandal that involved ‘hitherto respectable Brazil-
ian public figures.’ Soccer-savvy readers might wonder who in the world ever considered
Ricardo Teixeira, then President of the Brazilian Soccer Federation, a ‘respectable’ fig-
ure, but in any case the authors overlook the fact that corruption had become a theme
since the Lula administration’s vote-buying scandal known as Mensalão (2005) till several
Ministers were fired by Rousseff herself under accusations of corruption in 2011 and
2012. It is false, therefore, to affirm that FIFA can take all the credit for the anti-corrup-
tion component of the protests – Brazilian politicians, federal government included, had
done their fair share, as that was clear to protesters before the launching of the Car Wash
investigation (2014) that unveiled the theft of dozens of billions of dollars from Petro-
bras. In describing the composition of the protests, the authors correctly list left-wing
parties, anarchists, middle-class citizens, and add to that roster ‘neo-Nazis and confirmed
fascists, staunch believers in violence and intolerance as a legitimate means of protest’
(486), a wild claim for which they present no empirical support, no evidence of field
work, and no reference to any item in the copious bibliography on the 2013 protests.
A little later we get a better sense of Santos and Guarnieri’s concept of ‘fas-
cism’ when they claim that

‘attempts by fascists to arrogate the street protests was shocking [….] A large
portion of the protesters, mainly those who were linked to political parties,
generally of the Left, suffered a serious setback when they saw themselves
marching alongside placards saying things like “Dictatorship Now,”

“You Don’t Represent Me” and the like’ (487). Santos and Guarnieri get this spec-
tacularly wrong, as the latter banner was ubiquitous and the former was barely visi-
ble or representative at all whenever it appeared. It is ungrounded enough to
imagine that those two banners were present to the same degree in the protests,
 A RESPONSE 3

but the authors go further in the error and also hold the stunning premise that plac-
ards reading ‘You Don’t Represent Me’ are ‘like’ or can be at all compared with
placards demanding ‘Dictatorship Now.’ That equation is novel enough for us to
expect some bibliography or field work to back it up. The authors present neither,
but they do offer a rather interesting definition of fascism a few lines later: ‘The
Brazilian fascist logic is very simplistic, very basic: in Brazil the educational and
healthcare systems are suffering because the government has spent too much money
on stadiums for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games’ (487).
It is astounding, but Santos and Guarnieri reserve the term ‘fascist’ to smear
the coalition of citizens who took to the streets to protest corrupt spending on
mega-events and in defense of education and health care. Every major author who
ever wrote on fascism would marvel at the originality of this definition. Antonio
Gramsci would certainly be proud to march alongside such ‘fascists.’ Santos and
Guarnieri throw this at the reader not only in flagrant contradiction of the bibliog-
raphy on fascism, but also in complete ignorance of the Brazilian bibliography on
the 2013 protests, which includes several items that could have guided them away
from such elementary errors (Arantes 2014; Cava 2014; 2016; Ortellado 2014;
Nunes 2014; Bonilla and Capiberibe 2014; Neto 2015). As the piece progresses,
the ghostly caricature of a ‘fascism’ not supported by any research continues to
haunt Santos and Guarnieri, who naturally also spot it in the media: ‘The fascist
logic, which beforehand was confined to certain segments of the elite who read
Carioca or Paulista newspapers, has since been openly and unashamedly expressed
and has entered common parlance’ (487). Fascism is now equaled with ‘citizens
who read the country’s three major newspapers,’ another wild generalization that
misses the mark, however insufficiently progressive or even right-of-center you
could claim Folha de São Paulo, Estado de São Paulo, and O Globo to be.
We are up to the third page of Santos and Guarnieri’s mumbo jumbo of misin-
formation about the 2013 protests and the list of social actors that have been
labeled ‘fascist’ includes citizens who marched in defense of education and health
care and against overspending on stadiums and parking lots, citizens who were
inspired by the Spanish indignados and Occupy movements to yell ‘you do not rep-
resent me,’ citizens who protested corruption, and readers of the country’s three
admittedly centrist (at worst, two of them, center-right) major newspapers. The
ubiquitous bogeyman of fascism haunts their fantasies about a multifaceted, lengthy,
complex set of protests that they have clearly not studied well enough.
But it does become clear what the authors intend. They propose a sequence of
causal links made with equal signs, going from: protests against corruption =
refusal of political system tout court = fascism = coup against Rousseff. They present
us with that rudimentary, mechanical rationale as if anti-corruption protests could
sum up and exhaust June, as if they amounted to anything resembling fascism, as if
rebellion against the apparatus of representative politics equaled fascism, as if Brazil’s
political system were not indeed rotten (the will to salvage, promote, and defend that
system is visible in the authors), and as if the legacy of the June uprisings did not
include a myriad of other dimensions far more important and decisive than the farcical
breakup of the PT-PMDB, Rousseff-Temer electoral coalition that the authors call ‘a
parliamentary coup.’ This is a non-exhaustive list of distortions necessary to claim
that Brazil has gone ‘from protests’ to ‘parliamentary coup.’ But it gets worse.
4 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

It is mind-boggling that the word ‘violence’ appears only twice in Santos and
Guarnieri’s piece, both times associated with protesters and not with the police.
Even a cursory glance at the record or rather elementary ethnography of the events
would have shown them that in the vast majority of cases, violence was an initia-
tive of police forces and not of protesters. More than that, as Paulo Arantes has
shown, the logic of state pacification of territory had been put on display through
the Units of Pacifying Police and the army occupation of favelas carried out by the
PT administration according to the procedures of counter-insurgency, way before
any ‘insurgents’ were on the scene. To be sure, Santos and Guarnieri do make a
reference to police repression to explain the early radicalization of the protests,
but they limit their observation to São Paulo police (governed by then-opposition
PSDB) and omit the fact that in PT-governed states such as Rio Grande do Sul,
Bahia, and Distrito Federal, police massacres of protesters were equally brutal.
They also omit the fact that the entire coordination of repression was in the charge
of the federal government through Rousseff’s Minister of Justice (and later her
lawyer in the impeachment proceedings) José Eduardo Cardozo, who acted in tan-
dem with the State Secretaries of Security responsible for military police forces.
And they speak of the ‘violence’ of protesters who were most often breaking win-
dows, lighting bonfires, and building barricades to defend themselves against assault
by Brazil’s feared military police forces!
Perusal of Bruno Cava’s participatory ethnography of the protests, published a
full two years before Santos and Guarnieri wrote their piece, would have given
them several tools to go a little beyond this simplistic notion of violence as an
absolute attribute always to be identified (or not) in protesters. Their ignorance of
Cava’s books on the 2013 protests is to be lamented all the more as Cava’s
ethnography of June in Rio, the authors’ very city, shows how the movement
extended well into October, with a teachers’ strike, and culminated in February of
2014, with the memorable uprising of the garbage collectors. It also shows June’s
remarkable multiplicity and uniqueness as an assemblage of contingent events that
seriously held in check Brazil’s rotten political system. Particularly in Rio, June
was a longue durée completely ignored in Santos and Guarnieri’s peroration about
‘fascism’ in the protests. Given the architecture of their piece, the reader may
infer that the omission has something to do with the fact that in Rio PT was the
political force co-coordinating the massacre unleashed upon protesters, while
Rousseff pushed anti-terrorism legislation through Congress. Those clearly partisan
omissions are three of many that allow Santos and Guarnieri later to present
Rousseff as the ‘victim’ of a ‘coup.’
Their ‘fascism’ includes everyone who is unhappy with the system of political
representation, while their definition of ‘coup’ contradicts the bibliography as well.
Suffice it to say that they refer to a parliamentary coup ‘that is still ongoing,’ with-
out suspecting that an ongoing coup is like square circles or dry water: it is the
very definition of an oxymoron. Marcus Fabiano has demolished the rhetoric of the
coup applied to the Brazilian case with an erudite review of the literature, a
demonstration of how often the accusation of ‘coup plotting’ was used by PT
administrations against the opposition since 2005, and a revision of the publicly
and openly debated impeachment process that was already thirteen months old
when Fabiano published his piece, on April 17, 2016 (and which would not be
 A RESPONSE 5

concluded till August 31). Fabiano notes that Rousseff’s very use of the rhetoric of
the coup put her in a bind, as Article 136 of the Brazilian Constitution offers the
President the choice of decreeing a state of defense and implementing coercive
measures to preserve social peace threatened by ‘imminent institutional instability.’
While Rousseff claimed to be the victim of a coup, she never considered making
use of that article, as she knew there was no ‘institutional instability’ to speak of
and protests for and against the government were happening normally. Fabiano
shows that in order to be coherent with her rhetoric, Rousseff was obliged to
make use of Article 136, which in the Brazilian circumstances of March 2015–
August 2016 (from the first massive protests to the final vote) would have
amounted to a violation of the law itself. In other words, Rousseff, PT, their sup-
porters and mouthpieces talk about ‘coup,’ but do not act as if there was one. In
any case, it is not – and never was – the law that mattered, but rather the play of
political forces. Rousseff fell because no relevant social agents would move a finger
to stop the long-winded, eighteen-month-long downward spiral. But Santos and
Guarnieri fail to explain how that happened as well.
Much as they miss striking teachers and revolting garbage collectors in their
search for a phantasmic ‘fascism’ in the 2013 protests, they also miss several politi-
cal landmarks in their account of the square circle they name ‘ongoing coup.’ In
accounting for Rousseff’s loss of popularity, they partly blame ‘the adverse eco-
nomic conditions of 2014 and 2015,’ without telling the reader that those ‘ad-
verse’ conditions (if we keep the euphemism), far from being consequences of an
international crisis, had been produced by Rousseff’s administration itself, with its wild
policy of tax breaks for sectors such as the automobile industry or jewelries, its
generous state loans at record-low rates to oligopolies responsible for grandiose
and overpriced stadiums or hydroelectric dams, and its artificial control of prices
for electoral purposes in 2014. Instead of tracing that history, the authors explain
Brazil’s economic collapse by praising the ‘policy of tax exemption for key indus-
tries’ (without for a moment suspecting that those industries may not be ‘key’
after all) and then finding the culprit: ‘the productive sector acted in an oppor-
tunistic manner,’ for it enjoyed tax breaks ‘yet it did not deliver what the govern-
ment and the people had expected: it did not invest.’ Santos and Guarnieri do not
tell us which ‘people’ they consulted to reach the conclusion that Brazilians
expected anyone to invest much in the ominous climate of 2014. Folks who knew
anything about economics did not. It is curious to note their premise, however:
investors should somehow have acted against their own interest in response to a
desperate attempt by the state to rekindle the economy with tax breaks. It is
astounding, but Santos and Guarnieri explain the origin of the Brazilian crisis by
labeling ‘opportunistic’ the choices of … an economic agent making an economic
choice! After innovating in the concepts of fascism and coup, the authors innovate
by introducing gratitude as a category of political analysis, as the only possible pre-
mise here is that ‘the productive sector’ should have reacted gratefully and not out
of self-interest to Rousseff’s tax breaks.
The authors continue pursuing the mystery of Rousseff’s drop in popularity
(nothing seems more important to them) by following the same pattern: they omit
every fact that harks back to Rousseff’s and PT’s own responsibilities in the politi-
cal crisis and the economic collapse of the country they governed for five and
6 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

a half and thirteen and a half years respectively. Meanwhile, they search for
explanations in ‘adverse economic conditions’ created by God-knows-whom, ‘fas-
cists’ they see in every political position antagonistic to theirs, and investors who
mysteriously did not invest after being granted tax breaks at a clearly pre-recessive
moment. Let us take October 2014 through March 2015 and see what the authors
chose to omit. They make reference to Rousseff’s tight win over Aécio Neves in
October 2014 as a symptom of the Rousseff presidency’s ‘erosion,’ which led to
the ‘political landscape’ that ‘made the economic crisis worse’ in 2015. Yet they
fail to mention the decisive facts that shaped those two moments: first, Rousseff’s
massive defamation campaign against environmentalist and most feared adversary
Marina Silva in the first round, the fiercest barrage of attacks suffered by a presi-
dential candidate since Collor’s onslaught on Lula in 1989. Rousseff’s strategy,
concocted by her propaganda wizard later jailed for corruption, João Santana, was
designed to produce a run-off against a candidate easier to be depicted as reac-
tionary and right-wing, Aécio Neves. It worked, barely.
In both rounds of the 2014 election, the Rousseff-Temer coalition accused its
opponents of planning privatizations, austerity measures, fiscal tightening, cuts in
social benefits, and reduction of labor rights. Immediately after being inaugurated,
Rousseff proceeded to do exactly what she spent the electoral campaign accusing
her opponents of planning to do. Her first acts of the second term focused pre-
cisely on privatizations, austerity measures, fiscal tightening, and the cutting of
labor rights and social benefits, as she now had to pay for the massive deficit she
had produced and worsened by hiding. That monumental electoral larceny goes
completely unmentioned in Santos and Guarnieri’s description of the ‘political
landscape’ that ‘made the economic crisis worse.’ No wonder they get everything
wrong. Their account has nothing to say about a government that lied through its
teeth and manipulated the federal budget to an unprecedented degree in order to
massage public accounts and win an election, following that with measures that
carried out everything it had accused its opponents of planning.2 The electoral lar-
ceny was particularly damaging to the country because maintaining the lie during
the campaign demanded creative accounting and artificial price control that made
the crisis far worse. Yet Santos and Guarnieri tell the story as if Rousseff and the
PT were innocent victims of bad economic circumstances and malignant social
actors.
Their account reaches heights of intellectual dishonesty when they affirm that
‘the pro-impeachment street movement was but a supporting act in this play’ that
‘provided an appearance of legitimacy to the actions of the other characters.’ They
affirm that as an afterthought to their tale of Rousseff’s impeachment as a conse-
quence of intra-palace maneuvers, as if millions of Brazilians had not been on the
streets. The authors may not have noticed, but the largest street protests in the history
of Brazil took place on March 15, 2015, demanding Rousseff’s ousting.3 Those
events were a visible, direct consequence of her own betrayal of campaign rhetoric
and the unveiling of the depths of the economic crisis masked during the election,
and they took place way before any major political party or media outlet voiced
any support for impeachment proceedings. The authors’ will to describe Brazil’s
political process as the coup of malignant bogeymen (‘fascists,’ the media, coup-
plotting crooks in PMDB) upon innocent victims (PT, Rousseff) is such that they
 A RESPONSE 7

did not even bother reconstructing the chronology in which events happened. On
March 15, 2015, as hundreds of thousands took to Paulista Avenue and millions of
others to public places all over Brazil, the center-right opposition of PSDB was still
flatly refusing the hypothesis of impeachment proceedings. No media outlet was
campaigning for it. No discernible movement on the part of coup-plotting bogey-
men Eduardo Cunha and Michel Temer was visible. In fact, as late as May, June,
July, and well into August of 2015, Temer was busy spending his political capital
approving Rousseff’s austerity measures in Congress as her political coordinator, a
necessity to which she had to bend as she had no transit in Congress. Meanwhile,
PT’s and Rousseff’s strategy was to ‘dehydrate’ Temer’s PMDB by luring its repre-
sentatives to other small parties such as PSD, artificially created for that purpose.
Rousseff’s right arm Aloizio Mercadante attempted to undo at night what Temer
had negotiated in the afternoon, in a true mess of political disarray that left Brazil
without a functioning government for much of 2015. In sum, PT chose as its gov-
erning partners the savviest crooks in the neighborhood, tried a host of clumsy
moves to pull the rug from under them, obviously got schooled, and departed cry-
ing ‘coup.’ Santos and Guarnieri omit and distort data in order to lend credence
to that crying.
As late as August 2015, when millions of Brazilians were in the streets again,
the much-maligned Globo network was broadcasting (on its prime-time news show
Jornal Nacional, no less) an editorial against Rousseff’s impeachment. Bogeyman
coup-plotting Temer was still Rousseff’s point man in Congress, no major opposi-
tion party had truly adopted the ‘Out Rousseff’ cry coming from the streets, and
Rousseff’s government continued its downward spiral of self-inflicted agony, chang-
ing minister after minister in order to respond both to blackmail and to the results
of the corruption investigation that found $42 billion diverted in corruption from
one state company only, just at the tip of the iceberg. Yet for Santos and Guarnieri
the millions of Brazilians who took to the streets were ‘but a supporting act’ that
‘provided an appearance of legitimacy to the actions of the other characters.’ They
hope to confer legitimacy on that mirage by pointing to research that shows those
protests to have been majority white and middle class, but simply omit equally
true data showing that the (way smaller) anti-impeachment acts had very much the same
social composition (GPOPAI 2016) and that Rousseff’s fall in popularity was just as
precipitous among the poor as it was in the rest of the population.
Santos and Guarnieri’s account of an ‘ongoing coup’ needs a preferred villain
and their obvious choice is Eduardo Cunha, the now jailed ultra-corrupt local boss
of Rio’s PMDB who fattened his Swiss accounts by financing the electoral cam-
paigns of other deputies. True enough, he was in charge of opening impeachment
proceedings as President of the Lower House, which he did just a few months
before he was sent to jail for corruption. The authors manage to reconstruct all his
maneuvers, but forget the two truly relevant pieces of information: Cunha was ele-
vated from common local thief to national leader by a choice of Rousseff’s coalition
and the Workers Party itself, who named him their spokesperson in the evangelical
community in 2010, when anyone minimally informed about Brazilian politics
knew Cunha’s two-decade-long history of corruption. The authors also forget that
Cunha sat on the impeachment charges for the better part of a year while Lula
himself engaged in that very same politicking to escape and help others escape the
8 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

investigation into the theft of public patrimony. Those are maneuvers that Santos
and Guarnieri unilaterally see only in the pro-impeachment coalition. The authors’
cherry-picking method to yield an ‘ongoing coup’ of bad guys against good guys
continues when they recall that then-interim President Temer ‘had an approval rat-
ing of a mere 11%’ while omitting that Rousseff’s had been even lower, a record
low 9% (in fact, the authors play around with Rousseff’s approval ratings for sev-
eral paragraphs and still manage to omit that fact). They allude to ‘the adoption by
the interim government of a political agenda that would have been defeated in a
popular vote’ without remembering that such an adoption began with Rousseff her-
self, as she abandoned all social democratic promises of the 2014 campaign and
acted precisely on the neoliberal austerity principles of which she had accused her
opponents. Santos and Guarnieri’s precarious and selective account crumbles spec-
tacularly in the eyes of anyone in possession of the most basic facts of contempo-
rary Brazilian politics.
It is no surprise, then, that every prediction they made turned out to be
wrong. A mere ten months after their writing, in March of 2017, the ‘many more
now protesting on a daily basis’ against Temer have all but disappeared. The cen-
ter-right PSDB continues in the Temer administration, contradicting the authors’
speculation that ‘PSDB seems to be closer and closer to abandoning the interim
government’ and the plebiscite for new elections that the authors saw ‘gaining
force’ is nowhere to be seen. It was all wishful thinking by sloppy and partisan
political science.
After telling the story of what they consider a ‘coup,’ Santos and Guarnieri
conclude that ‘the Brazilian model of governance is able to withstand even ele-
ments as disruptive as Eduardo Cunha’ (493), which may leave the reader puzzled.
Heck, but wasn’t there a coup? Is the model of governance intact or not? What
kind of coup is this? The flagrant contradiction bespeaks a gap between the rhetoric
of the coup and Brazilian political science’s attempts to justify the country’s coali-
tional presidentialism. The authors are committed to both and cannot avoid the
contradiction. Echoes of these attempts to normalize Brazil’s political system are
found throughout Santos and Guarnieri’s disqualification of protesters against cor-
ruption and political representation as ‘fascist,’ as if the theft of hundreds of bil-
lions of dollars of public patrimony or the oligarchic nature of Brazil’s
parliamentary democracy were minor problems, and as if citizens in revolt some-
how needed to be instructed into the good manners of respectable politics, lest we
fall into the abyss of fascism. If the authors are so worried about salvaging Brazil’s
rotten political system, they would do well to listen to the very citizens they so
off-handedly disqualify. There is no doubt that Temer’s administration is a govern-
ment of crooks, but Santos and Guarnieri do not seem to have paid attention to
how long the crooks have been there, running the show. Neither have they paid
attention to those who have always really fought the crooks, regardless of the acro-
nym in power at any given time.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
 A RESPONSE 9

Notes
1. I will follow contemporary Portuguese usage and refer to the uprisings of June
2013 in Brazil simply as ‘June,’ but keep in mind that those events continued to
take place well into February of 2014, with a memorable strike by Rio’s garbage
collectors.
2. For a detailed study of the manipulation of the federal budget during Rousseff’s
administration, see Villaverde (2016).
3. For lack of space, I will not go into all the ways in which Santos and Guarnieri
misread the street protests against Rousseff. It is clear that they have not bothered
to study them. Also for the lack of space, I will refrain from giving full links for
every piece of news alluded to here, but they are available online in the Folha de
São Paulo and O Globo archives. For a further analysis of the waning of Lulismo,
see Avelar (forthcoming).

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O Globo. Acervo. June 2013. http://acervo.oglobo.globo.com/.

Idelber Avelar is a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane University. His lat-
est books are Transculturación en suspenso: Los orígenes de los cánones narrativos
colombianos (Bogotá: Caro y Cuervo, 2016), Crônicas do estado de exceção (Rio de
Janeiro: Azougue, 2014), and Figuras da violência: Ensaios sobre narrativa, ética e
música popular (Belo Horizonte, UFMG, 2011). His The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial
Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (Duke UP, 1999) won the MLA Kovacs
Award and appeared in Spanish (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2000) and Portuguese (Belo
Horizonte: UFMG, 2003). Among his awards are an ACLS fellowship (2010–2011) and
first place in Itamaraty’s international essay contest on Machado de Assis (2005).