Surpassing All Limits Of Unpopularity

Brazilian Student Leader Vladimir Palmeira, 23, addresses his followers, including the clutch of strapping bodyguards who ring him in public, as "pessoal," or personnel. Until recently, that comradely term reflected to other members of the outlawed Metropolitan Students Union of Rio de Janeiro's Federal University. Last week, however, Palmeira led 25,000 people along Rio's Avenida Rio Branco in Brazil's largest public demonstration in four years #151; and those who walked with him included ordinary citizens, writers, professors, a labor leader and Roman Catholic nuns and priests. Thousands more waved signs and tossed confetti from office buildings. For the moment, at least, united in protest against Brazil's military-dominated regime, Palmeira's pessoal included a wide segment of Rio.

President Arthur da Costa e Silva wisely ordered jumpy military police to stay in their barracks during the march, thus preventing a recurrence of violence that had shaken the capital the week before when police clashed with marching students. He could hardly be untroubled by the demonstration's theme: "Students and people against dictatorship." As speakers who orated during the five-hour march made clear, Brazilians are deeply dissatisfied with progress under Costa, who promised to humanize the government when he took over as the army-picked candidate for President just over a year ago. Far from doing that, charged the sober dai ly Jornal do Brasil, Costa's administration "has surpassed all the limits of unpopularity known by its predecessor," which was headed by the stern Humberto Castello Branco.

Rough Treatment. The dissatisfaction stems in part from the army's broken promise to hold presidential elections in 1966, its cancellation of the political rights of hundreds of Brazilians, and its use of censorship to keep a tight rein on TV, movies and theater. Moreover, Brazil's minimum wage is a meager $39 a month.

But for the crowd on Rio Branco, and for most of the country, a big cause of the current unrest is the government's arid educational policy and the rough police treatment of students protesting it. In the past three years, education's share of the national budget has dropped from 11% to 7.7% and the number of illiterate, already half the total population of 85,655,000, has slightly increased. Overcrowded Rio universities are now forced to turn away two out of three qualified applicants.

Impressed by the success of student protests elsewhere, Rio's students began their own demonstrations and disorders two months ago. Their discontent has focused on Education Minister Tarso Dutra, a weak administrator whom Costa refuses to replace under pressure. Two weeks ago, students shouting "Down with Dictatorship" marched on Dutra's Le Corbusier-designed administration building to "confront" him. Before they got there, two platoons of police cut them off with tear gas and an antiriot hose truck. The students retreated from street corner to street cor ner, waving clubs disguised in rolled-up newspapers and regrouping each time around Palmeira. Catholic-educated Palmeira, the son of a wealthy state senator who supports Costa, is disdainful of Russian Communism, also opposes "the weight of American capital in our country." When told that Dutra was out of town, he said disgustedly: "Instead of receiving us he sends cops."

Cops, in fact, seemed for a while to be the government's only answer. Authorities arrested more than 800 stu dents, sent plainclothesmen to keep an eye on others. Gradually, a form of urban guerrilla warfare broke out in Rio. Students hurled pointed stones dug up from the sidewalks, burned an army truck and at one point barricaded Avenida Rio Branco. Mounted police charged with drawn sabers; police also pelted students with tear-gas grenades, finally opened fire with rifles. From overhead windows, meanwhile, office workers showered police with such desktop flak as ashtrays and paperweights. Clashes between police and students spread to several other Brazilian cities. The toll: two dead, 83 injured.

With Hindsight. Last week Rio's Roman Catholic Vicar General, Bishop Jose de Castro Pinto, gave his permission to priests and nuns to join the anti-government marches, and the Catholic clergy issued a statement declaring that "we hold just the principal complaints of our youth." Coming from Brazil's powerful Catholic church, the two moves were serious criticism of Costa's government. Anxious to avoid further violence and disturbed by some army officers critical of government inaction, Costa finally promised to name a "work group," including students, to draft improvements in the schools.

Costa's Cabinet, going even further, urged an immediate reform of the country's educational system, arguing, with hindsight, that all the government's plans for technological development were jeopardized by Brazil's educational deficiencies. As a measure of good intentions, Costa ordered Dutra's ""Education Ministry to hand over to universities the operating funds that had been held up during the disorders.

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