Paper short abstract:

The rise of bus torchings in brazil is best understood in relation to public violence, police violence, and political violence.

Paper long abstract:

Automobiles have recently emerged as both the instrument of, and a canvas for, political violence in Brazil. A recent picture showing a man lighting his cigarette on a torched bus shows that bus arson in Brazil has finally become an everyday phenomenon. Recent videos showing police corralling and running over protesters can neither be explained by Althusser's trope of interpolation, nor Ranciere's idea of circulation. Rather, this practice illustrates dialectic of confinement and pursuit in policing public spaces. This tactic, used in traffic control and in kettling protesters, helps explain the rise of bus torchings in Brazil. The battle of narrative that surrounds bus torchings is a key to understanding the larger political disputes as to what counts as evidence in recognizing democracy, violence, and public will.

Bus torchings in Brazil are considered a quebra-quebra—the destruction of icons and infrastructure of the state—which has taken on myriad meanings at various historical and political junctures. Social movements have long argued that burned buses are evidence of failing infrastructure and police violence since bus torchings are retaliations against two forms of preventable death: police assassinations and hit-and-runs. In the last couple decades the media has presented bus torchings as either unfortunate cases of the lower class biting the hand that feeds them or indexical signs of an upcoming war with the drug cartels. Police, the least ambiguous of all, see bus torchings as acts of terrorism that demand further police repression, notably, in forms of confinement and pursuit.