The COVID-19 pandemic has had a knack for stripping politics to their basics. While many leaders have been ill prepared for the crisis, and made errors of judgment about how best to protect their populations, a handful of leaders have shown an admirable degree of statesmanship: Jacinda Ardern, in New Zealand; Sanna Marin, in Finland; and Angela Merkel, in Germany, come to mind. Elsewhere, leaders with authoritarian streaks have felt unleashed; this group includes Rodrigo Duterte, of the Philippines; Alexander Lukashenko, of Belarus; and Viktor Orbán, of Hungary.
In this hemisphere, Donald Trump has alternated between public displays of foul temper and misinformation; this week he claimed that it is a “badge of honor” that the United States has the most COVID-19 cases in the world, because it means that the nation has done a lot of testing. The first couple of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, early on in the pandemic, organized rallies called “Love in the Time of COVID-19,” and the government appears to have underreported the number of cases—so far, they claim just twenty-five, with eight deaths—and to have orchestrated “express burials” of suspected victims of the coronavirus. Nayib Bukele, the young President of El Salvador, has asserted emergency powers in defiance of the Supreme Court, and deployed soldiers to enforce the strict quarantine measures he has imposed, which include thirty days’ confinement in “containment centers” for violators and for citizens and residents returning to El Salvador from abroad.
But this misconduct pales in comparison with the comportment of Brazil’s President, Jair Bolsonaro, who is behaving with absolute and deterministic irresponsibility. From the onset of the pandemic, he has dismissed COVID-19 as a “little flu,” and has insisted on holding rallies and personally greeting supporters, pointing out that “We will all die one day.” Perhaps taking a cue from Trump, whom Bolsonaro admires, he has attended protests held by anti-shutdown supporters and encouraged uprisings against state governors who support quarantine measures. In some gatherings, he has been seen coughing repeatedly, though he now wears a mask in public; he was tested twice for COVID-19 after an outbreak among his senior staff, but has refused to release the results.
Each day brings a new Bolsonaro-instigated outrage. In mid-April, he fired the respected health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, after weeks of feuding publicly with him over measures to protect the public. The President later explained his action by saying, “Mandetta’s vision was that of health, of life. Mine is more than life, it includes the economy, jobs.” A week later, on the same day that Brazil’s death toll from confirmed coronavirus cases exceeded five thousand, he asked a reporter, “So what? I’m sorry, but what do you want me to do about it?” Bolsonaro is not only not doing anything about it; he has actively campaigned against efforts to control the pandemic, arguing that quarantining people and stopping economic activity will turn Brazil into an impoverished “African” nation. In fact, Brazil’s social and economic inequalities were well advanced before COVID-19, and redressing them was not a top priority of Bolsonaro’s government.
On May 9th, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet published an editorial calling Bolsonaro the “biggest threat” to public health in Brazil, and concluding that “he needs to drastically change course or must be the next to go.” By way of a response, Bolsonaro tweeted a taunting message that he planned to throw a barbecue for “thousands” at the Presidential palace. In the end, he went for a spin on a Jet Ski on a lake in Brasilia instead.
In the weeks since, Brazil’s daily death rate has climbed rapidly. Late last week, it passed eight hundred, and on Sunday the official total death toll reached more than sixteen thousand, making the country’s COVID-19 mortality rate the sixth worst in the world. The numbers of new infections and confirmed cases in Brazil exceeded those of Italy and Spain. By Thursday, there had been more than eighteen thousand COVID-19 deaths in Brazil, and the over-all number of cases had surpassed the United Kingdom’s. Within a few days, it will likely pass Russia’s, as well, leaving only the United States with more cases. Based on current trends, the predictions are that more than eighty thousand Brazilians could die from COVID-19 by August. On Wednesday, even Donald Trump, a staunch Bolsonaro ally, acknowledged that Brazil was “having some trouble,” and that a travel ban might have to be instituted.
Despite all this, Bolsonaro has pushed to reopen the country’s economy, and last week he took the first steps to do so, apparently without consulting his medical experts. Last week, his new health minister, Nelson Teich, appeared dumbfounded when a reporter asked him about Bolsonaro’s decision to reopen hairdressing shops and gyms as “essential economic activities.” On Friday, after less than a month on the job, Teich announced that he was quitting. Last month, in a separate scandal, Bolsonaro fired his federal police chief—the equivalent of the F.B.I. director—prompting the resignation of the popular justice minister, Sérgio Moro. Moro seemed to imply that Bolsonaro fired the chief because of investigations involving some of the President’s allies. (The inquiries reportedly include two of his sons, who are both politicians. The Bolsonaros deny any wrongdoing.) Brazil’s Supreme Court, which is still independent, has authorized an investigation, and, in the National Congress, calls for Bolsonaro’s impeachment are growing stronger. (In recent days, Brazil’s media has published leaked sections of a videotape of a Cabinet meeting that appears to confirm Moro’s allegations, in which Bolsonaro is quoted as saying that he wants to fire the police chief because he wasn’t going to wait for the Federal Police “to fuck my family and friends.” Brazil’s Supreme Court, which has possession of the video, is deciding whether to release it publicly, over the government’s strenuous opposition.)
Amid the turmoil, the pandemic has reached the indigenous communities of Brazil’s Amazon region, who have historically been susceptible to contagion, and have little access to health care. In recent weeks, the state of Amazonas has emerged as one of the region’s most heavily affected by COVID-19, with at least twelve hundred deaths. Its capital, Manaus, is a national flashpoint; Brazilians have been horrified by images that show bulldozers digging mass graves in the city’s cemetery. The hospitals are also overwhelmed, and the mayor has made several public pleas for international help. Many deaths from the coronavirus are likely going unreported, because of the lack of testing. The city’s health system has collapsed. The official death toll in Manaus is more than five hundred, but the real number, according to public-health experts and estimates of the city’s spike in mortality rates, is feared to be much greater. (A study conducted by health researchers at a number of Brazilian universities concluded last month that, because of the lack of testing, the real number of the country’s coronavirus cases could be as many as twelve times those officially reported; researchers at the University of São Paulo say it could be sixteen times greater.)
Last Friday, members of the Kokama community mourned Messias Kokama, a beloved chief, who had died of the coronavirus the previous day. Earlier in the week, Feliciano Lana, a renowned traditional artist of the Dessana people, died in his home village, on the Upper Rio Negro. On May 12th, Beto Marubo, a representative of the Indigenous Peoples’ Association of the Javari Valley, at the western end of Amazonas state, home to seven indigenous groups, published an appeal, on the environmental Web site Mongabay, saying, “We’re sending out an S.O.S. to all those who will listen—and especially to those who are in a position to put pressure on our government to protect Brazil’s original inhabitants from this novel threat. We don’t usually ask for outside help. But in this time of coronavirus, we won’t survive without it.”
On May 15th, the Brazilian Peoples’ Indigenous Association said that COVID-19 had reached thirty-eight indigenous communities, and warned of widespread contagion. The Lancet editorial emphasized that the main threat to Brazil’s indigenous people during the pandemic came from the Bolsonaro government itself, by “ignoring or even encouraging illegal mining and logging in the Amazon rainforest. These loggers and miners now risk bringing COVID-19 to remote populations.” Indeed, Bolsonaro has undermined the efforts of Brazil’s agencies tasked with policing those groups, by cutting their funding and firing key personnel. Earlier in the year, he presented the congress with a controversial draft bill that calls for the opening up of Brazil’s reserves to mining, logging, agribusiness, and hydroelectric projects. He has met frequently with settlers and miners, called garimpeiros, to champion their “rights to the land,” and disparaged indigenous people as good-for-nothings who have “too much land,” while vilifying the N.G.O.s and the activists who defend them as “cultural Marxists.”
Bolsonaro’s radical anti-environmentalism has emboldened the loggers, ranchers, and garimpeiros. Brazil’s space-research agency, which uses satellite tracking to monitor burning by loggers and ranchers in the Amazon’s forests, has calculated that, in April, burning increased by sixty-four per cent compared with the same month last year, and that, in the first four months of 2020, forest destruction rose by fifty-four per cent, totalling some four hundred and sixty-four square miles of wilderness. (During last summer’s forest fires, Bolsonaro accused N.G.O.s and Leonardo DiCaprio, who supports greater Amazonian conservation efforts, of setting the fires to make him “look bad.”)
As Brazil’s situation has unravelled, I have been in regular contact with friends there. Last weekend, one who lives in Rio de Janeiro sent me a particularly despairing message. “It’s been really hard to keep spirits high,” she wrote. “I’ve kind of given up any hope really. It’s one outrageous event after another. I’m not sure our democracy will survive.”
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- Twenty-four hours at the epicenter of the pandemic: nearly fifty New Yorker writers and photographers fanned out to document life in New York City on April 15th.
- Seattle leaders let scientists take the lead in responding to the coronavirus. New York leaders did not.
- Can survivors help cure the disease and rescue the economy?
- What the coronavirus has revealed about American medicine.
- Can we trace the spread of COVID-19 and protect privacy at the same time?
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available.
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people.
- What to read, watch, cook, and listen to under quarantine.
