By Cliff Welch, São Paulo, Brazil 20/04/2020
With the Covid-19 pandemic, most days’ news reminds me of Marx’s phrase about history repeating itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. As I regularly consume news about the United States, the tragedy plays out daily in the magnitude of the disease’s spread, the runaway death count and the ineffective, egocentric responses of President Donald Trump. In contrast, news about governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo and California’s Gavin Newsom, stimulate hope. But, here in Brazil, hope is presented as a horizon sublimely blind to facts learned the hard way in globe’s far flung corners. President Jair Bolsonaro tells people to go back to work. He characterizes Covid-19 as a “little flu” and spectacularly defies prohibitions on social isolation and distancing. On April 19, he addressed a rally in front of the Brazilian Army headquarters in Brazil’s capital city. Defying social distancing guidelines, Bolsonaro’s supporters called on the Army to intervene by shutting down the congress and supreme court. “We don’t want to negotiate anything,” Bolsonaro told the crowd. “Count on your president…to guarantee…our freedom.” Two days earlier, he fired his health minister for advocating policies established by the World Health Organization (WHO). On many occasions, Bolsonaro’s stance has aped that of Trump’s. It would be farcical, if the potential consequences were not so terribly tragic.
In the 20th century, U.S. foreign policy sought to demonstrate to the world the benefits of the “American Way of Life.” In the 21st century, Trump has bragged about the greatness of the U.S. model in dealing with the novel coronavirus, even though the country is overwhelmed by the highest number of infections and deaths in the world. Fortunately, few countries seem to take Trump seriously; unfortunately, Brazil is not one of them.
So far, the impact of the disease on Brazil, has been milder than that experienced by many northern hemisphere countries. Studies are underway to determine if warmer weather impedes the spread of the virus. But Winter is only weeks away and the capital of São Paulo state has already experienced unseasonably low temperatures. Some 24 million people live in or around this megacity. Well within the tropics, Brazil ranks as Latin America’s most affected country, with thousands more cases confirmed and death rate over 5 percent in São Paulo. Like New York in the U.S., São Paulo is responsible for more than a third of Brazil’s cases and deaths. The state’s governor, João Doria, like the leaders of a few other populous states, has ignored Bolsonaro and maintained social isolation policies, including the imposition of school and commerce closings and stay at home guidelines since mid-March. Unfortunately, only 37 percent of the population is estimated to abide by these norms, according to a study conducted in April. Bolsonaro and his supporters want to be free of these sorts of rules, rules that arguably have origins in international organizations rather than national ones.
Mixed messages about best practices and the politicization of the disease in Brazil have created an alarming situation for dealing with the pandemic. As Bolsonaro spends his Sundays physically embracing supporters and encouraging them to mount car and truck-honking caravans of protest against local officials like Doria, uncounted victims of Covid-19 die daily in nearly every city of Brazil. In just over a month, the number of official victims has quickly grown from one to more than 200 a day. But, The Intercept recently released emails communication between São Paulo officials who were anxiously seeking a means to reduce the count. One way was by testing as few cases as possible; another suggested sending the sick home from emergency rooms to die. In mid-April, officially there were more than 39,000 infected people and nearly 2,500 Covid-19 deaths. Considering reports of extraordinary numbers of illnesses and deaths related to respiratory problems, these statistics should probably be double.
Most deaths occur in peripheral neighborhood, where the poor are concentrated. While race and poverty are closely correlated in the U.S., studies in Brazil suggest that social class is a more telling factor. On the margins of São Paulo, far away from many public services, sick black, white and brown people have been turned away from local clinics, told to go home, where a lack of space, soap, food and information serve only the virus, which anxiously seeks to reproduce itself. In these communities, women between the ages of 30 and 50 – mothers in many cases – have been the disease’s most fertile field, as they are the most numerous among those infected by Covid-19.
The false economy of turning away sick people has been used to prevent an extreme overload on the resources of the public health system, a public health system crippled by years of neoliberal austerity measures, including a 2017 constitutional amendment that reduced annual expenditures on public health to the equivalent of $5.20 per capita. While in the U.S., the number of ventilators is debated with urgency, in Brazil the debate is focused on respirators, a designation that includes protective masks like the N-95 and mechanical respirators. At the end of March, reports estimated the number of ventilators in Brazil at 46,000. That’s far fewer than some U.S. states have, and Brazil is larger than the continental U.S. and has two-thirds its population.
While Brazil’s mainstream media display middle-class mothers struggling to make the best use their time cloistered at home, tending their home office, health and children’s education, women on the periphery are caught in a daily struggle for survival. When schools were closed in mid-March, working class families lost essential supplemental help in the form of mandatory school breakfasts, lunches and dinners. São Paulo schools on the periphery have been sequestered by the public health system, some for beds, others to serve as cafeterias for health care personnel. Children at home also make it difficult for women to work outside the home, as many do, cleaning middle class condominiums. Social isolation policies also shut them out of these sources of income.
A few weeks ago, following similar actions by the U.S. government, Brazil’s congress made a gesture at emergency payouts to workers. Given certain criteria, each unemployed worker was allotted the equivalent of $120 a month for three months. But accepting these funds also meant giving up another source of income, the “family grants” of about $20 a month. In an attempt at compensation, São Paulo loaded a family benefit card with an additional $10 per month. São Paulo food prices are equivalent to those found in discount U.S. grocery stores. Thus, these families, though sick, must turn to the streets to make money in the informal economy and search for food in the waste bins of the better off. At the start of April, more than half of Brazil’s adult population left some of their March bills unpaid.
As Noam Chomsky has observed, Trump’s inconsistency is an agile strategy intended to shield him from criticism. Bolsonaro looks to Trump for orders, like he turned to generals for direction as an army captain. But he was an insubordinate captain, selectively following orders until forced out. So, he salutes Trumpisms he likes. In February, Trump stated that the “cure couldn’t be worse than the disease,” saying that coronavirus was no worse than the annual flu. Later, Trump argued that Covid-19 was being used by his enemies to undermine his government. He re-tweeted deep-stater messages aimed at removing the much respected epidemiologist Dr. Anthony Fauci, due to his subtle corrections of Trump’s enthusiasms, such as the scientifically unfounded curative properties of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.
With a Brazilian twist, Bolsonaro imitated these trumpisms. He latched onto the line about the cure not being worse than the problem like a mantra. With a surgical mask hanging from his left ear, he recommended “vertical isolation” in order to get the economy going. Vertical, as opposed to horizontal isolation means socially isolating the most vulnerable groups, like the elderly, while everyone else operates normally. Based on WHO analysis, his so-to-be-fired health minister rejected the notion. Bolsonaro copied his U.S. counterpart again in trumpeting the chloroquine drugs as therapeutic for curing Covid-19. This time, the health minister did not stand in the way. Fortunately, Brazilian doctors decided to test of the drugs’ effectiveness and contributed one more study demonstrating that the malaria drugs cause more problems than they cure.
Like Trump, Bolsonaro has suggested that Covid-19 is part of plots designed to undermine his government’s efforts to revive an economy that was already on life-support. Along with threes of his sons, who are also politicians, the Bolsonaro clan – like the Trump-Kushner clan - has also put forward an argument that China is behind the pandemic. In a Great Power rivalry with the U.S. and its allies, the theory states, China infected Brazil and the U.S. in order to weaken Western Civilization. It does not seem to matter that China was the disease’s first victim, that the Chinese quickly released to the world the novel coronavirus genetic code or that a traveler from Italy brought Brazil its first Covid-19 infections.
The only time that Bolsonaro placed human life above the economy came at the end of March, just three days after Trump, shocked by modelling that showed U.S. death rates climbing to more than 100,000 people, extended social distancing guidelines by a month. Shortly thereafter, of course, Trump became impatient with his own guidelines. In the meantime, Bolsonaro continued to do almost everything possible to sabotage mitigation efforts. Much was made of a Central Bank report that emphasized projections of how the economic curve of recession only worsened with more effective mitigation efforts. In other words, as wellness improves, the economy sickens. Shortly thereafter, Bolsonaro fired his health minister, replacing him with someone who appeared ready to march in step with the president and undermine Brazil’s efforts to adhere to the WHO strategy. Here, again, farce followed tragedy.
In the race to return to normalcy, it is difficult to say which of these authoritarian populists is the copycat. Bolsonaro has been physically courting his followers consistently, whereas Trump has merely tweeted. In mid-March, confused by social distancing concerns, Bolsonaro called off national rallies planned to intimidate congress, but some of his fans defied his orders. Since then, his supporters have hosted caravans in luxury cars and pickup trucks. Supporters among evangelicals have also held regular Sunday services (while Catholic priests have faithfully practiced social distancing guidelines by performing mass over Facebook). Now we see Trump stimulating caravans, rallies and other actions by his supporters to “liberate” the nation from mitigation strategies designed to slow the spread of Covid-19. The “liberation” concept appeared of few days later in Bolsonaro’s speech to the pró-dictatorship rally in Brasília. Whoever gets the credit for defying public health advisories, both should be held responsible for the unecessary illness and death that will surely follow. They are the virus.
Marx interpreted as tragic the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte and as farce the rise of Luis Bonaparte. I see tragedy in Trump’s performance, as his ego-centric response to warnings about Covid-19 caused him to ignore and downplay the threat, permitting the rampant spread of the virus in the country. Bolsonaro’s infatuation with Trump and all things “American” make a parody of his actions. By imitating Trump’s ineffectual responses in a country with so few resources to deal with the pandemic, Bolsonaro has created an extremely dangerous situation for the entire population. Where the incredible resources of the U.S. have allowed Trump to partially compensate for his foibles by spending trillions of dollars, Bolsonaro’s ignorant response has left Brazil disarmed in the face of rapacious virus. Feeding the frenzied demands of a middle class tired of cleaning its own toilets, Bolsonaro has taken decisions that may already have condemned the country to tragic ends. Let’s hope history proves me wrong.
