Brazil's Status, The Politics of Protest

Assessing Brazil's Status as the Olympics Arrive Guests: Christopher Lewis, PhD, Assistant Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at the University of Utah; Evan Ward, PhD, Associate Professor of Modern Latin American History at BYU; Rex Nielson, PhD, Assistant Research Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at BYU The Olympics have arrived in Rio. It’s an international spectacle tailor-made for showing off. When Brazil secured the hosting gig seven years ago, it was a nation on the rise: the poster child of an emerging market poised to become a global power.  Today, the largest country in Latin America is in an historic recession with a government in disarray over allegations of corruption. The New York Times quoted a Brazilian politician and writer as saying the country is in “economic, political and moral disaster.” Now we consider how things went so wrong for Brazil and what the future might hold.  Politics of Protest Guest: David S. Meyer, PhD, Professor of Sociology and Political Science at UC Irvine, Author of “The Politics of Protest: Social Movements in America,” Blogs at https://politicsoutdoors.com The national party conventions Republicans and Democrats hold every four years are like the Super Bowl for protesters because of the high-ranking public officials, celebrities and wall-to-wall media coverage they attract. Marches, sit-ins, rallies and spontaneous street closures fill virtually every hour of every day the convention runs. You’ll typically find just about every issue represented, too, from abortion access to religious freedom to immigration reform and gun rights.  According to reports this year, the DNC featured a lot more protesting than the RNC. And we even saw the protest work its ways inside the convention arena where Bernie Sanders supporters shouted down speakers and staged walk outs against Hillary Clinton’s Democratic nomination.