Ipanema, Brazil
Another Sunday night, yet another episode of Game of Thrones drowned out by pot-banging and angry folk yelling into the night. In my quiet corner of Ipanema, a slanging match takes place as middle-class tenants of a high-rise apartment start slandering their neighbours in the favela below. The words ‘cow’ and ‘communist’, among others, are shouted by darkened figures hanging out of windows. The comebacks are meted out with equal ferocity. Things are tense in this town at the moment.
Pot-banging, or panelaço, is an established form of protest in South America. In Brazil it has been happening in many cities for several months now as the middle classes voice their exasperation with Dilma Rousseff, the country’s first woman president — now impeached on charges of using tricksy accounting to conceal the true size of the deficit.
