Brazil, between chaos and tragedy | Opinion

From Rio de Janeiro. Between the 14th and the 20th of this month at least 78 people have been literally suffocated to death in the northern Brazilian states of Amazonas and Pará: oxygen deficit in intensive care units. Almost a thousand more have died in the region thanks to collapse of hospitals.

Scenes of doctors desperately trying to help their patients breathe coincided with the flight of dozens of inmates who chose to die at home rather than continue to suffer the agony of seeing people suffocating next to them. .

Six days before, January 8, General Eduardo Pazuello, installed by the extreme rightJair Bolsonaro as President of the Minister of Health and supposedly specialized in logistics, he was urgently informed that in Manaus, the state capital, the oxygen intended for internees was collapsing.

AND has done nothing.

Warnings from highly qualified doctors and researchers abound: the tragedy experienced in Manaus can spread throughout the country. Hospitals, public and private, in several Brazilian states, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, the three main ones, have collapsed or are on the verge of collapse.

The isolation measures so hard fought by Bolsonaro are half decreed by governors and mayors, and rigorously ignored by a large part of the population.

I say “half” because the control is minimal, and the irresponsibility of the people, infinite.

Among the countries with a certain weight on the world stage, Brazil is the only one to have been drastically unable to seek coordination to deal with the deadliest pandemic for at least a hundred years.

Now concrete data is starting to emerge indicating that beyond ineptitude, the militarized government led by Bolsonaro has acted directly to sabotage measures that could alleviate the tragedy.

In April last year, Brazil was officially invited to join a global vaccine alliance, which aimed to bring together 155 countries to ensure vaccination against Covid-19.

It was the “Covax”, and according to the group’s rules, the country could order more than 200 million vaccines, enough for half of its population. (considering two doses for each inhabitant).

Thanks to the number of its inhabitants, Brazil would be among the first five to receive vaccines.

Bolsonaro refused to join the group.

In August, Pfizer contacted its government with a offer of 70 million doses of its vaccine, which would be available in December.

There has never been an official response from the Ministry of Health led by an active Army General, whose only visible role is to blindly obey a retired captain.

The sequence of absurdities is long, long. And deadly, murderer. Genocide.

Bolsonaro boasts of having successfully imported two million doses of vaccine from India. He forgets two things.

The first one: continues to deny the effectiveness of getting vaccinated, continues to spread ridiculously absurd information.

The second: two million doses is nothing in a country of just over 210 million people.

Ah yes, a third thing: it took so long to move, that Brazil paid for each dose of this vaccine just over double what much richer European countries paid, but which were careful to order the vaccine in the middle of last year..

Brazilian law defines what are “crimes of responsibility,” enough to catapult irresponsible leaders.

Jair Bolsonaro has committed at least four dozen.

In recent days, the pressures have increased, in a palpable way, both for Congress, in particular the Chamber of Deputies, and for the higher authorities of justice to transmit a withered judgment to the genocidal president.

Yesterday, Saturday, there were demonstrations in almost all of the Brazilian provinces. In response to the call for left movements, lines of cars marched – only in Brasilia there were around 500 – shouting “with Bolsonaro”. St.Paul (Photo) and Rio were other capitals with sound “cars”.

For today, car parades are planned, this time called by the right, who supported Bolsonaro until he began to show clear signs not only of ineffectiveness but of a radical psychological imbalance.

Opinion polls show his government’s approval is melting away like a lollipop in the sun. If it was already a minority for a long time, now it’s minimal.

But the chaos continues, the tragedy continues, the worst president in the history of the Brazilian republic continues, worse than the dictators who succeeded one another in power between 1964 and 1985 so admired by him, with their bloodthirsty executioners, but who failed to produce such devastation as that which Bolsonaro imposed and imposes on this poor country.