Students reject thugs and paramilitaries in Rio de Janeiro
Featured image: students using shields and throwing projectiles while confronting the military police. Source: Data Bank of A Nova Democracia (AND).
On September 17 the old Brazilian State decided, after the demand from the university authorities, to start the operation to evict the students from the occupation they are carrying out since months in the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). The occupation started after the withdrawal of economic help to more than 6,000 students. Hundreds of students decided in their assembly on September 18 to resist and even expand the occupation strike.
On September 19 in the morning the students showed strength by carrying out a demonstration. The military police was mobilized against it in attempt to intimidate them, but it was unsuccessful.
In the afternoon thugs without uniform, hired by the UERJ entered in the university and attempted to evict the students by using violence. Meanwhile, the vice-rector was close to these developments and watching the scene. The students resisted the attack and made clear that they would physically resist.
This attempt to intimidate and evict the students was unsucessfull and they resisted such attacks. Afterwards more students joined and entered the university to reinforce the struggle. After this first defeat, the UERJ authorities decided to cut the water and gas to the occupying students to force them to abandon. As well they decided to block the gates of access to the university to prevent the arrival of more students and to attempt to isolate the occupiers inside the UERJ. However, AND reports that this has been again a failure by the UERJ and groups of dozens of students kept open the gates and gave access to more reinforces to come to the UERJ. After those events, on September 20 the students met in an assembly and decided to call for a new emergency demonstration to resist the new attacks by the university authorities.
The attack that occurred on the 20th has been an escalation in which the UERJ demanded to the old State to send the Shock Troops of the Military Police of the State of Rio de Janeiro. The university authorities also affirmed that they will send pictures and videos of the students to the repressive forces in order to be identified. The students have made clear that their demands are firm: to give back the economic help to the students and to stop the criminalization of the struggling students.
On September 20 an armed operative with military equipment arrived to the UERJ: hundreds of military police officers with trucks, war equipment, armored vehicles, etc. Then they started the repressive operation around 1 pm. The plan of the paramilitaries was to completely surround and harshly repress the students and to detain the combative student group or make them surrender. Nothing of that has happened.
The students decided once more to combat and resist and they kept all their forces overcoming the siege of the military police. Outside of the university, groups of students blocked some entrances with alight barricades. From the inside, groups of students resisted and dissuaded the military police throwing different projectiles and using shields to withdraw safely. Thus the organized group of students opened a rift in the siege and withdrawn without casualties.
AND explains the political implications of what occurred: “From a political point of view, the situation developed negatively for the rectory. Firstly, because the mobilization, although the occupation ended, was not demoralized and its organizing core remains intact; secondly, because the active resistance and to the last consequences, by the student movement, produced the broadest popularization of the students’ struggle and fair agenda as well it was well-known the repression unleashed today, providing new waves of struggles and limiting the rectory’s room for maneuver, forced to negotiate or to definitively unmask itself as a reactionary rectory, despite its party affiliation with a false left party. As for the military police military plan, to surround and make the student movement capitulate through pressure and to make it capitulate in order to demoralize the movement, it was unsuccessful. It was not even able to stop the most active nucleus of the student struggle.”
