A Cornered Democracy: The Echoes of the 2013 Demonstrations in Rio de Janeiro and the Architecture of a Crisis

Abstract

One way to understand the complexities of Rio de Janeiro and the current political crisis in Brazil is to observe the 2013 demonstrations. The protest movements exposed a divided city, its contrasts and its contradictions, projecting a Cornered Democracy—the language of the division between the democratic asphalt and the permanent state of exception imposed on the slum. The Cornered Democracy expresses the aesthetics of violence. When analysing the protest movements that took over the streets in 2013, it is possible to empirically investigate how the current crisis was developed, how the traditional media acted through a political technique of reality construction, and how this behaviour promoted division and polarization, reducing democratic possibilities. If in 2016 we witnessed the “self-destruction” of the country, it is necessary to investigate the fire, the arsonists and the importance of embers, instead of trying to erase them.