By SIMON ROMERO and WILLIAM NEUMAN
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — With cities across the nation heaving in the biggest protests in decades, President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil convened an emergency meeting of top aides on Friday and announced that she would pursue measures touching on some of the grievances stirring the unrest, including a national transportation overhaul and the use of all oil royalties for education.
But she has floated her ambitious proposal before — to use oil revenues to improve the beleaguered public schools — only to run up against stiff resistance from state governors who rely on the money to meet their budgets, leaving her ability to enact it in doubt.
Her pledge came as the government put forward other small measures as well, like injecting new money to bolster transportation and pledging to better scrutinize financial corruption within its ranks.
“Brazil fought a lot to become a democratic country, and it is fighting a lot to become a country that it is more just,” Ms. Rousseff said.
In a show of resolve, Ms. Rousseff and other authorities also lashed out at the growing violence among some of the protesters, denouncing recent attacks on government buildings, acknowledging their concerns about security ahead of a visit by the pope and, in at least one case, threatening to deploy the army to the streets if the demonstrations continued to intensify.
“I assure you, we will maintain order,” Ms. Rousseff said.
More than a million people protested in scores of cities across the country on Thursday night to excoriate the government on a broad array of issues, including political corruption, the high cost of living and the billions of dollars being devoted to building stadiums for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics in a country where poverty is pervasive and public education is often in shambles.
But while most of the protesters have vented their frustrations peacefully — even joyfully at times, singing and celebrating what they call a mass awakening across the country — a violent subset has stormed public buildings, set fires and smashed storefronts, bus shelters, traffic lights and some A.T.M.’s.
In Rio de Janeiro, José Mariano Beltrame, the official in charge of security policies, said that if the unrest intensified, the army could be asked to increase patrols in various parts of the city to “protect the integrity of people and of public and private and public property.”
The concern over the violent turn among protesters was enough that Gilberto Carvalho, a top aide to Ms. Rousseff, acknowledged it could affect the visit of Pope Francis to Brazil, which is scheduled for July.
“We have a series of complications and concerns,” Mr. Carvalho told reporters in the capital, Brasília. “The situation is evolving so fast that we can’t predict what will happen.”
Protests continued to shake cities around Brazil on Friday. In São Paulo, the nation’s largest city, protesters blocked roads leading to the airport and thousands rallied at a downtown plaza to protest a measure backed by conservative legislators, known as the gay cure, that would allow psychologists to treat homosexuality as a form of mental illness.
The protests continued even though one of the main groups that had been behind the original demonstrations here said that it would not call for any more marches in São Paulo. The group indicated that it had won the concessions on bus fares it had demanded and that it was concerned that some members of allied groups, like left-wing political parties or social movements, had been singled out and beaten up at the demonstrations.
“We won the fight, so we are going to take time to think about what to do next,” said Rafael Siqueira, a member of the group, Passe Livre, which had pushed for the rollback of a bus fare increase.
In Ribeirão Preto, 1,000 people attended the funeral of Marcos Delefrate, an 18-year-old who died after being struck by a car on Thursday. Military police officers escorted the mourners, and the cavalry positioned itself in front of the cemetery.
The protests claimed a second victim on Friday, Cleonice Vieira, 51, a street cleaner in the city of Belém in the Amazon. Brazilian news organizations reported that she had died of a heart attack after a tear-gas canister exploded nearby.
As the protests continued, the national development bank, known as BNDES, announced that it had approved more than $1 billion in loans to expand the metro system in São Paulo, the city where the bus fare increase set off the initial protests. And in Brasília, the Finance Ministry said it had created an inspector to review allegations of corruption, one of the main issues that has driven countless thousands to the streets in recent days.
But many protesters said the measures fell far short of what was needed.
“They have been promising lots of things for many years, but it doesn’t go beyond that,” said Jeniffer Novaez, 18, a physical therapist. “I don’t know if they understand what is really happening here, but it’s been many years and we are thirsty. We want everything, and we want it now.”
Another protester, Bruna Santana, 22, a student, said the government was not serious in its response. “They only want to shut us up,” she said.
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