Brazil: Half Blind in the Coronavirus Crisis

By José Maurício Domingues, September 2020 Introduction T he coronavirus hit like a tsunami over the planet. International organizations and national states definitely knew that the risk of a devasting pandemic was high – the World Health Organization (WHO), in particular, had warned of this possibility, even likelihood, but global preparedness lagged. When, at the beginning of 2020, the looming risk became a concrete threat to the lives of individuals and the wellbeing of collectives, it left to the WHO and national states to cope with its brutal impact. The coronavirus – SARS-2 – and its related Covid-19 disease elicited similar responses across the world, but there are far-reaching differences in the way they were dealt with, even though epidemiological knowledge, the coordinating role of the WHO and similar state capabilities have featured in all of them. Lockdowns, quarantines, ‘social distancing’; the same medicines and treatment techniques came to the fore, allowing each national state to show their strength. Brazil, though, is certainly an outlier. Its President, the extreme-right politician and former army captain Jair Bolsonaro, tried to imitate the United States’ President, Donald Trump. He behaved as a negationist and made the same mistakes, even more aggressively and callously. He initially based his overall public position (discourse) on the need to keep the economy open and avoid recession, assuming, as he put it, that people die of different things anyway – with the fit ones surviving what he classified as a ‘little cold’ – and that in war some soldiers become casualties. This was a harsh mix of military mentality and natural (beyond social) Darwinism. Yet, Brazil is a large country and neither the governors of the 26 Brazilian states and 1 federal district (where the capital, Brasilia, is located), nor the majority of mayors of the country’s cities followed him down this road. There are many deaths in Brazil – more than 120,000 in late August and pr