The wretched Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has proved himself the accomplice of death in Brazil. Tens of millions of Brazilians are facing hunger or food insecurity as the country’s Covid-19 crisis drags on, killing thousands of people every day. The bourgeoisie in Brazil has now reluctantly understood that it may have to jettison Bolsonaro, but Brazil must expel the entire gang that supported him.
Many children have been out of school for over a year, entire families huddle in terraced cardboard encampments on pavements, begging for baby formula, biscuits, anything. Some 19 million people have fallen into hunger over the past year, twice the number of 2018. By the end of 2020, about 117 million people, roughly 55% of the country’s population, faced food insecurity, a jump from 85 million in 2018.
On 13 May thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo to protest against racism and police brutality after 28 people – many unarmed – were killed in an anti-drug raid in a Rio favela the week before. ‘In Brazil there is no death penalty, only in the favelas!’ said David Miranda, federal deputy of the Socialism and Liberty Party, who led the mostly Afro-Brazilian demonstrators through the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Some 80% of people killed in Brazilian police raids are Afro-Brazilians. Bolsonaro congratulated the police, who imposed a five-year censorship on its records of this carnage.
Bolsonaro’s contempt for the masses
Bolsonaro’s government continues to dismiss Covid-19 and treats with contempt the struggle to fight the infection across the country. He rejects vaccines. From 2014 the economic situation in Brazil worsened, so Bolsonaro’s aim from the start of the pandemic was to prevent further interruption to profitable market activity. This was a desperate, irrational, fascistic attempt to prevent an anarchic and failing capitalism from being further discredited. ‘People have to have freedom, the right to work, Bolsonaro said in April, labelling as ‘dictatorship’ the quarantine measures imposed by local governments. With 454,623 deaths (27 May), including 1,300 children under five 5 years old, the country has the second highest number of deaths after the US, and certainly an undercount of the true number.
Congress belatedly reacted, against Bolsonaro’s wishes, to create a Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry (CPI) into the regime’s response to Covid-19. Here politicians and officials who have held, or occupy, important positions, are lying, telling improbable stories, obtaining preventive habeas corpus orders to stay silent, and so laughing at less informed people. The Brazilian criminal lawyer Antonio Carlos Kakay has said of the testimonies given so far, we see ‘a bunch of uneducated idiots spewing untruths with an air of false intelligence, of pretended intellectuality. It is absolutely scary’ (Ultimo Segundo 17 May). Pfizer has told the CPI, that it made at least three proposals for the sale of 70 million vaccine doses in 2020, which were ignored. Eventually, by 13 May, more than 56 million vaccinations had been completed, 45 million were covered by the Chinese drug Coronavac, and ten million by AstraZeneca. Bizarrely, on 5 May, Bolsonaro suggested that China created the Sars-CoV-2 virus as a form of ‘chemical and bacteriological warfare’ to favour itself economically. Economy minister Paulo Guedes added that Chinese vaccines were not of a very good quality. The Chinese ambassador reminded Guedes that about 85% of the immunizers and supplies used in Brazil are made in China. Supplies of 10,000 litres of the Active Pharmacological Input from China, to create 18 million doses of Coronavac in Brazil, were then suspended by China. Sao Paulo Governor Doria blamed Bolsonaro for the crisis.
On 20 May, Bolsonaro again extolled his government’s agrarian ‘reform’ project, the disastrous deforestation of the Amazon, already catastrophic for the biosphere. He then announced his aim to block resources to NGOs that support movements, such as the MST, Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, which fight against forest clearance and attacks on indigenous forest peoples. Days earlier, he handed out further land title deeds in Mato Grosso do Sul, a state where forest have been devastated by corrupt politicians and officials.
Bolsonaro’s prospects in the October 2022 elections get slimmer by the hour, no wonder then that he is already finding an excuse: ‘only God will remove me from the presidency’ and demanding a law to bring back printed ballots instead of the electronic system, used since the nineties, so he might lay claim to manipulated election results. On 29 May trade unions organised large ‘Bolsonaro Out!’ impeachment demonstrations in 75 cities across Brazil. Ex-President Lula is now well ahead in the opinion polls.
Alvaro Michaels
