The meeting reported here took place on Friday (18) in the morning. The matter was security in the FEA building complex, in whose parking facility a student was murdered last May. Officially this crime was handled as a common robbery attempt, but even common people realized it was indeed a planned murder. The victimized 24-year-old, even though from a modest family, had started to drive an armoured car six months before the crime.Mr. Reinaldo Guerreiro, director of the college for a little more than a year, was a triple failure in the meeting: (1) his authoritarian profile dominated overtly, contrarily to his efforts of looking democratic; (2) he failed to engage the good willing students, since he had all ready and called them just for the sake of 'hearing', thus letting them down, and (3) his speech proved an ocean of contradictions and poor planning... right there, a top-ranking college of management and economics.
A source (a clerk, whom, of course, I will not identify) told me the director had all set to place gate barriers (catracas) by the entrances of the main FEA building over the end-of-the-year recess, when students would be away. Questioned about this during the meeting, he exploded: 'I would never do such a fucking thing.' Not impressed or carried over by that, the student replied, 'So I can go on vaccation reassured?' The director did not answer and looked angry.
Soon after his presentation, he got visibly upset, impatient and unskilled as a leader, while students progressed with their points in so mature a way that surprised me favorably. Although Mr. Guerreiro - an accountant actually, who is also a member of the University Council - even rudely defied his pupils, 'You, do you understand anything about violence, hum?' and 'Tell me, then, what is the solution!', the students never lost their temper, neither gave up forwarding opposing views to the matter.
Those youths are pure jewelry - an extremely tiny portion of highly educated citizens in Brazil - and it was really disgraceful to see who lead them and how. Virtually all of them will be corrupted eventually and 'join the system'. I talked to one of them after the meeting: 'I will not give up my plans of starting militancy next year.' He was among those who openly challenged the weak reasons of Mr. Guerreiro, being also aware that his activism would seriously jeopardize his other plans of being granted a scholarship from the university to study abroad.
Mr. Guerreiro clearly had taken for granted his students would promptly adhere to his decision, after just a couple of anecdotal statements such as 'an American visiting professor was startled to see he was not identified on entering the building' (which was refuted by a student who claimed he has visited the main American campi recently with never being asked for identification). He is also likely to have counted on the press that has brainwashed that 'only a minority is against the police overtaking the security actions at the campus'. And such minority was to find elsewhere, not in his unit.
This proved all wrong. The whole group not only declared to be 'against', but grounded their arguments and proposed alternatives the director had never been willing to take into account. For instance, the young man I mentioned before, when accused by the director of not being an expert in the matter, replied naming a center of the very USP exclusively in charge of violence studies. 'Why not engaging this center?' The director showed anger and silenced.
His own security guy - I call him a jagunço, someone disliked by every student I come across - stayed with his walk-talk in position all the time during the meeting. Another employee took photos of every student, especially of those who made a point (all in all, against the project). And it was clear that the director was not the least concern about the consequences of all that to the environment.
Under so much questioning, he let go he has just been concerned about his ever being implicated by the Ministério Público (justice prosecutor) for damage or losses. 'Once we have the barriers, my hint is that the crooks will go and attack other colleges in the campus', Mr. Guerreiro awfully declared. Of course, students questioned him on this lousy statement as well, keeping respect and moderation all the time.
The director drowned steadily till he gave up answering at all, just voicing an 'ok' in face of further comments. Then it was the turn of a short student who showed size is irrelevant indeed. He pointed out, 'We have come here because we hoped we would be heard and our views taken into account. Are you [addressing the director] really going to take that into account, or 'ok' and microphone-down-on-the-table is what this all is getting to?'
My eyebrows instantaneously rose in heavenly admiration.
Mr. Guerreiro early in the meeting roughly demanded me to stay 'in silence'. He, by then, still assumed I was the only 'problem'.
There is a major campaign - where main media are key players - to disqualify the student activism that has already broken out in the whole campus. Pundits who write for main papers, Folha de S.Paulo and Estado de S.Paulo, have all insisted that just a minority of students are engaged and, anyhow, they do not even have a cause at all. Nothing could be more distant from reality.
There is a military police force taking orders to provoke the students - nothing was fortuitous; it was, rather, a plan which led to the arrest of three students for just smoking marijuana, all of them good students, healthy family background, not even heavy-users.
The very USP top-rank wanted the campus on fire. Why? They needed to show more 'evidence' that police force - one of the most corrupted and deadly in the world - is essential in the campus. That is, in the area where the gold minds and hearts of the Brazilian people go to every weekday. Young people that, despite the early age, proved in that Friday meeting to feature all the characteristics authoritarian systems must smash in order to survive.
Last but not least, with gate barriers in place, Mr. Guerreiro also wants to ensure people (like I myself) that influence those young students contrarily to his and USP's vested interests are kept outside.
GOING BEYOND:
1. What the eyes don't see, the mouth cannot testify to
Despite, we know people talk assuringly about what they really don't know about, among them 'pundits'. To gain some keen perspective about what did not happen and what may have really happened concerning the murder of the student, click(English) or click here (Portuguese).
2. 'Problems' with public tender
Roughly 200 cameras were bought for FEA alone. (Too) Many - very likely not all of them, though, for the amount was in excess in the first place - are already in place. However, there is no monitoring of the images; tapes are kept in store just in case, disclosed Mr. Guerreiro after vaguely referring to 'problems' in the tender that delayed the delivery of equipment.
3. Too much for too little
There is a gang of security guards (outsourcing) that has been preventing students from staying in classrooms during breaks and from paying teachers a visit. Why can't just two of them rather take turns and keep an eye on the cameras images?
4. Ignoring serious occurances with outsourced security
As I have already reported here, this security staff have recently blocked, in a rude and aggressive fashion, my entrance to a seminar which I had enrolled, leaving all else behind just to carry out that 'megaoperation', threatening me in many ways, including calling the police. Yes, it is just as I say. Read the post on that. I managed to voice this 'incident' in the meeting, to which the director responded with a face showing urge to stop me from proceeding, while failing to say anything other than, 'I will give the word to others for you are already from home.' (were all those students not?) 'So I am from home... Thank you!', I retorted. Next time I voiced something, he demanded me to keep in silence.
5. Disqualifying students as 'romantic, poetic folks'
Mr. Guerreiro first strategy before student's comments was to dub them as 'poetic' and their argumentation as 'ideology'. His pathetic reasoning was: Barriers is the right thing. Else is obviously 'ideological'.
Students' argumentation addressed priorities, efficacy, alternatives, operational details of the project commissioned. The director admitted he had any. And got upset when it was suggested that the group meet again to discuss those details or when the director had thought about them.
6. My solution cannot be matched
One of the students pointed out the university should look for innovative solutions to old problems, rather than adopting whatever is commonplace. The director then made the point the project he had developed away from students' scrutiny is the most innovative one.
7. Imbalance of democracy
The project the director aimed to implement very soon (during holidays) was conceived, he stated, by a commission of nine people: three students, three professors, and three clerks. This small group reflects his view of representativeness... on his side of the story. The quorum is dramatically different when it comes to the weak side. As students in block did not take the project for, to the least, no operational detail was provided, the director increasingly got distressed, 'If this project is not to be implemented... eventually... It will not be implement if, and only if, there is a majority, a majority (of students in favor of the 'ideological' solution, as he called the views against the barriers, just for the sake of barries, deprived of operational details).
The list of contradicitons in the director's speech is to be displayed in a post of its own.
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