By June 21, this confrontational approach had overtaken the demonstrations. On Avenida Paulista, São Paulo’s main thoroughfare, I saw burly protesters violently expelling the young leftists who had made up a huge part of the original marches. As they forced them out, the large men chanted “sem partido,” or “no parties.” They insisted their demands were neither left-wing or right-wing—they were simply Brazilian.

As these new protesters joined the fray, coverage of the events by Brazil’s major media outlets—none of which is left-wing—changed. Before the 13th, papers like O Estado de S. Paulo described the events as “a carnival of vandalism.” On social media, some of the original demonstrators debated over whether the movement had been co-opted by the mass media and drained of its radical intent, or if broadening the message was the best way to bring normal people—left, right, and center—out into the streets.

Today, the splits between the leftists of June 13 and the more conservative, antipolitical crowds that came after, are painfully familiar to all Brazilians. After Rousseff began her second term in 2015, new groups calling for her impeachment stepped into the space created in the public consciousness by the MPL-led demonstrations. The most famous of those groups is the Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL). Founded in 2014 after the June 2013 protests had died down, it espoused free-market ideology and supported rolling back the state. Unlike the organizers of the original demonstrations, who refused to adopt any goals beyond winning free public transportation, the MBL emerged as a slick organization with a clear conservative agenda and an apparent obsession with destroying the PT. Because it flooded the streets and used online organizing, it seemed spontaneous and antiestablishment. Meanwhile, it shared goals with powerful business groups and its leaders posed for photos with famously corrupt politicians like Eduardo Cunha.

Groups like the MBL essentially used the same tactics of mass street protest and online organization as the original protests, but for an entirely different purpose: to bring down the PT. For many of the original protestors, this was horrifying. “There’s no such thing as a political vacuum. Someone always steps in to take over, and that’s what happened after the MPL declined to direct the protests in any way,” the journalist Piero Locatelli, the person who was arrested in 2013 for carrying vinegar, told me. “The media wanted leaders, someone who could ‘speak for the protesters,’ and the MBL youth provided them with just that.”

Before June 2013, 65 percent of Brazilians said that Rousseff, a former left-wing guerrilla, was doing a “great” job (27 percent said her performance was “regular” and only 7 percent called her “bad”). But by the end of the month, her “great” rating had plummeted by 35 points. Perhaps the most significant thing the government did in response to the demonstrations was sign a law that allowed for the expanded use of plea bargains. Under this law, federal authorities began offering deals to witnesses in exchange for testimony implicating more serious offenders, eventually helping the Lava Jato investigators bring down much of the country’s political and economic elite. Rousseff’s numbers rebounded enough by the end of 2014 for her to win reelection, but Lava Jato would eventually eviscerate her government.