Organizers of fair where Dilma was booed broke agreement.
"The government believes that the President of the Republic was the victim of a trap set up so that the booing would occur in front of the entire press," says Eduardo Guimarães, from the Blog da Cidadania.
By Eduardo Guimarães, from Citizenship Blog
Feicom Batimat is a trade fair focused on the civil construction sector that has been held annually for 21 years at the Anhembi exhibition pavilion in São Paulo. The pavilion is managed by São Paulo Turismo.
This company is the result of a joint venture between the world's largest trade fair organizer, Reed Exhibitions, present in Brazil since 1997, and the largest trade fair organizer in Latin America, Alcantara Machado Feiras de Negócios, founded in 1956, whose first events included the Feira da Mecânica (Mechanical Fair) in 1959 and the Salão do Automóvel (Auto Show) in 1960.
It was with these organizers of the 21st edition of Feicom Batimat that the Planalto Palace negotiated the presence of President Dilma Rousseff at the opening of that event last Tuesday (10).
The blog sought information from the government regarding the reason why the team from the Presidency of the Republic responsible for the president's participation in the event exposed her to a group of only a few dozen people from the sales and administration areas of the exhibiting companies, and even to the visiting public who, strangely, were admitted to the venue.
This blogger, due to his commercial activities, which run parallel to his work on this page, has been participating in trade fairs at Anhembi for about 30 years. All of them are opened by high-ranking officials, such as the Governor of São Paulo or the President of the Republic. Since the beginning, the exhibition hall has been open to those working at the fair stands and to the visiting public only after the speeches by the authorities to the exhibiting companies. However, for some reason, the area through which the President of the Republic would pass to reach the auditorium where she would speak was open to employees of the exhibiting companies and to the public.
To put it simply: those people who booed the President of the Republic shouldn't have been there. Not only because it's standard practice for exhibitors' staff and the public to only have access to the pavilion after the event has been opened by authorities, but also because there was a negotiation between the Presidential Palace and the organizers of the Fair, and it was agreed that the pavilion would be empty when the President arrived.
The agreement was broken, but this breach does not appear to have been accidental. In addition to the gates being opened prematurely to the public, people arriving were not allowed to cross a cordon isolating the area through which the president would pass upon arrival, which was not stipulated in the negotiations with the Presidential Palace.
They let people in and kept them standing behind the cordon for about two hours, which caused a lot of irritation. Before Dilma arrived, there was a general outcry from the staff and the visiting public who were already arriving.
Not that the people who booed Dilma like her, but they probably wouldn't have gotten so angry as to boo her if they hadn't been confined for hours a few steps past the entrance gates by that isolation cordon – actually, containment barriers.
The most serious issue, however, was the organizers' failure to comply with the agreement signed with the Presidential Palace. As of Thursday afternoon, the government had not been informed why people were allowed into the pavilion and then trapped behind the security cordon.
In summary: the government believes that the President of the Republic was the victim of a trap set up so that the booing would occur in front of the entire press.