Bare Flesh Protest

To call attention to their gripe, everything is game for the students:
to carry effigies of the object of their protest,
light candles, dress as clowns, bare it all.

Alessandra Dalevi

First there were the caras-pintadas (painted faces), those students who in 1992 painted their faces, often in the yellow-green national flag colors, to protest against corruption in the government of then President Fernando Collor de Mello. Nine years later their heirs are more irreverent and more risqué: they are the bundas-peladas (naked butts) who have gone to the streets in Brazil to demand morality from politicians. To convey their messages they are lowering their pants and mooning government and its mistakes.

First were the men in Brasília, who on May 23 let their pants down. In the federal capital, the bundas-peladas directed their derrieres to the National Congress building while congressmen were voting to open a process to expel from the senate Antônio Carlos Magalhães, the once all powerful chief from Bahia state, and José Roberto Arruda. Both ended up resigning before the process could move ahead.

The next day, Carla Santos, 21, the president of Ubes (União Brasileira de Estudantes—Brazilian Union of Students) went a step further: she left all her clothes on the lawn facing the Congress and, naked, entered a moat built around the congress with the purpose to avoid that demonstrations got too close to the building. She sang the national anthem, shouted slogans against the President, and ran on the lawn. Over Carla's naked body, there were short protest messages like CPI (Parliamentary Committee Enquiry) and Out FHC, which is an abbreviation for Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Bottomless, she semicovered her breasts with a Ubes's flag. Her exposition lasted close to 30 minutes.

Carla has become an overnight celebrity after her naked act. She was having a hard time to accommodate all the requests for interviews and had to deny several times that she had received and accepted an invitation to pose in the nude for Brazilian Playboy. Born in Rio Grande do Sul, the student leader is a member of the PC do B (Communist Party of Brazil). It's been a year and a half now that she interrupted her last year of high school to dedicate herself exclusively to the activities of her party and of the students union she presides.

Santos explained her disrobing later: "The body is also a form of expression. Aren't women taking their clothes off for other things? Why not be naked for the country?" She also guaranteed that she had her family's backing for the bawdy protest: "My parents approved of my attitude. They certainly would feel sad if I got naked to pose for a male magazine, but for a good cause, the fight for the country, there's no problem."

"The idea is to look for something irreverent, be it taking off the clothes or lighting up candles," says Juremar de Oliveira, director of the Ubes. "What we want is to show our indignation caused by a situation of incertitude facing young people." For Oliveira, Carla's protest was the right thing to do: "It was an irreverent act that called attention to our criticism."

Street protests have been frequent in Brazil those days. There's no lack of causes. High-school and college students have been staging marches to demonstrate against the International Monetary Fund intrusion in Brazil, against corruption in government and private sectors, against President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and more recently against the threat of widespread electrical blackouts in the country. To call attention to their gripe everything is game: to carry effigies of the object of their protest, light candles, dress as clowns, bare it all.

In Salvador, state of Bahia, the protesters had to face a violent police who didn't spare bombs and other kinds of intimidation to disperse the students. In other places, however, like Rio, São Paulo and Brasília, the police had a more subdued participation. They didn't react even when students provoked them in Brasília throwing water in their direction. The taking-your-clothes off stint isn't getting too many converts, however. In a protest in São Paulo students limited to light up 2,000 candles at Praça da Sé, in the heart of the capital. No one showed his or her privates there.

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