Student Shot in Brazil: Spark for Anti-Dictatorship

A single bullet over the price of student meals brought 50,000 Brazilians into the streets of Rio de Janeiro. On March 28, 1968, military police shot and killed Edson Luis de Lima Souto, an 18-year-old high school student, during a protest over the quality and cost of food at the Calabouco restaurant, a subsidized cafeteria serving low-income students in downtown Rio. His death transformed a student grievance into a national uprising against Brazil's four-year-old military dictatorship. Brazil's military had seized power in a 1964 coup, overthrowing the democratically elected government of Joao Goulart. By 1968, the regime had suppressed political parties, censored the press, and purged universities of left-leaning professors. Student movements were among the few organized opposition groups still active. The Calabouco restaurant had become a gathering point for student activists, and police had been monitoring it for weeks before the confrontation. Edson Luis was shot in the chest during a clash between students and military police outside the restaurant. Students carried his body to the state legislature, where it lay in state as thousands filed past. His funeral the following day drew 50,000 mourners who marched through Rio's streets in what became the largest anti-government demonstration since the coup. Protests erupted in cities across Brazil over the following months, culminating in the Passeata dos Cem Mil (March of the One Hundred Thousand) in June 1968. The military regime's response was to get harder, not softer. In December 1968, General Costa e Silva issued Institutional Act Number Five, which dissolved Congress, suspended habeas corpus, and gave the government unlimited power to persecute opponents. The act inaugurated the dictatorship's most repressive period, the "years of lead," during which hundreds of dissidents were tortured, killed, or disappeared. Brazil did not return to civilian democratic rule until 1985.