The government of Jair Bolsonaro, a global threat …

From Brasilia.

Bolsonaro will land in Buenos Aires in three weeks, on March 26, when Brazil is at the border of thes two thousand or up to three thousand daily deaths caused by the coronavirus according to the forecasts made by the teacher Miguel Nicolellis, of University of San Pablo, in an interview with The Guardian. This British newspaper and the American one The Washington Post They published articles on Friday in which Brazil is described as a “global threat” given the speed with which the strain discovered in the Amazon two months ago (it was detected by Japanese scientists) and the inability of the government to stop it has spread.

The lack of interstate border controls and the few tests carried out (the government hid five million of them in a warehouse at San Pablo airport) made it easier for the virus to infect people in virtually every province. , from the populated population of San Pablo and Rio de Janeiro, to the south and wealthy Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, whose hospitals are overwhelmed.

Brazil ends the week with an average of 1,300 deaths per day, while accumulating 263,000 deaths and 10.8 million infected since the start of the pandemic in February last year.

The Amazon strain, or P1, is likely to mutate into even more contagious and possibly more deadly ones, causing the Latin American giant to become “the largest biological reservoir of the coronavirus in the world,” predicts Nicolellis, also a professor at the American Duke University, whose credibility no one doubts: practically all of the projections made by this scientist have come true.

The world is beginning to realize that the Brazilian militarized head of state (whose main ministries have been entrusted to generals, including Health, commanded by the non-doctor Eduardo Pazuello) will lead his country to a bacteriological pandemonium that can extend over its 17,000 kilometers of borders with the countries of South America, of which just under 1,300 are shared with Argentina. And as with the original virus detected in China, Potential Brazilian super-bacteria could spread to the rest of the world. A possible debate arises here: can a president, invoking reasons of national sovereignty, adopt measures that threaten global public health? This question is similar to the question whether the international community should stand firm when Bolsonaro pushes to devastate the Amazon as if it were his own, and the consequences will not affect the planet.

The incendiary speeches of former soldiers at the United Nations on the Amazon in 2019 and 2020, triggered an alert on a possible “ecocide” of global impact. Bolsonaro’s three speeches on the pandemic on Thursday put him back on the international news agenda, echoing both Russian agency Suptnik and Britain’s BBC network.

The treacherous style of this emulator of Donald Trump and nostalgic for Augusto Pinochet, was revealed Thursday in two speeches given in the provinces of Minas Gerais and Goias during the day, and later during the night communication through the social networks of the Alvorada palace, the official residence in Brasilia.

Bolsonaro asked “How long are they going to keep crying?” those who defend social isolation as an instrument to curb contagion and reduce deaths. “Where will Brazil go if we stop?”

His argument is that any kind of lockdown affects economic activity, causing the unemployed to commit suicide or sink into depression. It hides that in order to remedy the situation of the poorest population, their obligation is to pay a subsidy or a universal income like other countries do. Last year, the Brazilian government distributed emergency aid of just over $ 100 which ceased to flow in December.

In the sumun of demagoguery, and acting as a pastor, he taught, “the Bible itself says in 365 passages that there is no need to fear” for which, he deduced, you have to go out into the streets without being dragged into “panic” at Covid-19. In one of the most uncontrolled moments, emotional or psychiatric, he began to shout with a group of followers: “There is idiots telling me to go buy vaccines. Go buy vaccines from your mother. “

It often happens that Bolsonaro shouts louder, feigning vehemence or security, to mention the issues that bother him the most. The vaccine is one of the most indefensible aspects of its management since to date some 7.7 million Brazilians have been vaccinated, less than 4% of the population, and most of it has been done with the Chinese immunizer. , Coronavac, imported and manufactured for the State of San Pablo.

The Governor of São Paulo Joao doria, of the conservative Brazilian Social Democratic Party, This week, it received a shipment of 8.2 thousand liters of active pharmacological supply from China to manufacture 14 million doses of Coronavac which it will deliver to the national government at the end of March. Doria, a former Bolsonarist, is at the head of the opposition made up of governors who have decided to intensify social isolation in order to avoid the debacle of their hospitals.

This Saturday at midnight the entire state of São Paulo enters the “red phase” of distancing which includes the closure of shops, bars and restaurants and the ban on driving between 8 and 6 hours. Similar steps have been taken by the governors of Brasilia, Bahia and Rio Grande do Sul, as well as by the city government of Rio de Janeiro. Announcing the virtual nighttime “curfew” which begins this Saturday, Doria said: “It is a tragedy to have a denialist president who despises life.”

WITH OR WITHOUT MASK

Bolsonaro will arrive in Buenos Aires to participate in a commemorative summit for the 30 years since the signing of the Acts of Asunción of Paraguay, the founding document of Mercosur. At the top will also be the President of Uruguay, Luis Alberto Lacalle Pou and his Paraguayan colleague, Mario Abdo Benitez.

It will be the first time that the Brazilian has a personal meeting with his colleague Alberto Fernández, whom he frequently offends and against whom he was a member of the 2019 presidential campaign when he expressed his support for the re-election of Mauricio Macri. A bet as unsuccessful as that of supporting Trump’s candidacy in November of last year.

We will have to wait to know if in Buenos Aires he will do the same thing as in Brasilia, where the mask is not placed and where his ministers are under pressure so that they do not do it in official acts. Last week, he assured that the mask had side effects such as harming “the perception of happiness”.

This obsession led him to veto a law making it mandatory and last month he got angry when he saw that the chairman of Petrobras, Roberto Castelho Branco, he went to a meeting at the Palacio del Planalto while covering himself with his chin strap. Of course, in Buenos Aires, the Brazilian president will not be able to impose his whims on other heads of state.