Throughout the pandemic, Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, downplayed the threat posed by COVID-19. In March 2020, he publicly stated that the virus’s effects were like that of “a minor cold” and asserted that he was not concerned about contracting it because of his “athletic physique”. A month later, Bolsonaro callously brushed off criticism from the press about Brazil’s spike in coronavirus deaths, answering: “So what’? My name is Messiah [a reference to his middle name], but I cannot work miracles.”
In the same month, April 2020, Brazil’s foreign affairs minister, Ernesto Araujo, published an article in Metapolitica, an anti-globalization blog, titled “Here comes the communist virus”. In it, he declared that “the coronavirus wakes us up again to the communist nightmare”, adding that, “the virus appears, in fact, as an immense opportunity to accelerate the globalist project. It was already being carried out through climaticism or climatic alarmism, gender ideology, politically correct dogmatism, immigration, racialism or reorganization of society by principle of race, antinationalism, scientism.”
By giving the pandemic an ideological spin, the Bolsonaro administration compromised Brazil’s response to the crisis. With more than 230,000 COVID-19-related deaths, Brazil has the world’s second highest toll, behind only the US. Such crises breed sinister opportunities, and Brazil’s has created a political environment of chaos, allowing Bolsonaro’s authoritarian project to thrive. With the nation’s COVID cases seemingly still rising, could impeachment efforts finally be successful?
