Bolsonaro's 'genocidal' Covid response has led to Brazilian catastrophe, Dilma Rousseff says

[Judi Lynn]

Former president tells Guardian Brazil faces perhaps gravest moment in its history and is ‘adrift on an ocean of hunger and disease’

Tom Phillips
Sat 10 Apr 2021 05.00 EDT

Jair Bolsonaro’s perverse and “genocidal” response to one of the world’s deadliest Covid outbreaks has left Brazil “adrift on an ocean of hunger and disease”, the country’s former president Dilma Rousseff has claimed.

Speaking to the Guardian this week – as Brazil’s coronavirus death toll hit devastating new heights, with more than 12,000 deaths in the last three days – Rousseff said her country faced perhaps the gravest moment in its history.

“We are living through an extremely dramatic situation in Brazil because we have no government, no stewardship of the crisis,” said Rousseff, a former leftist guerrilla who was president for just over five years until her controversial 2016 impeachment.

“We are seeing 4,200 deaths per day now and everything suggests that if nothing changes we’ll reach 5,000 … Yet there is an absolutely repulsive normalization of this reality under way. How can you normalize the 4,211 deaths registered [on Tuesday]?” Rousseff asked as Brazil’s official death toll rose to over 345,000, second only to the US.

Brazil’s first female president, like a growing number of citizens, believes much of the blame lay with Bolsonaro, a far-right populist whose anti-scientific response to what he calls a “little flu” has made him an international bogeyman. Opinion polls and pot-banging protests suggest growing public anger at the Trump-admiring politician who was elected in 2018 after Rousseff’s mentor, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was jailed and prevented from running by a judge who later joined Bolsonaro’s cabinet.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/10/brazil-bolsonaro-dilma-rousseff-coronavirus-crisis

[brush]

1. They've got big troubles and no prospects. At least we were finally able to ditch trump.

At the death rate they are experiencing they will catch up with trump's numbers in the not too far off future.

[PortTack]

2. Sad...very sad

[dutch777]

3. It amazes me that Bolsonaro still has substantial grass roots support and there aren't massive

protests. The hospitals in Brazil were never robust and first world, this must not only be killing Covid patients but also patients with more routine conditions like heart disease and cancer but now can't get adequate treatment in a medical system stretched beyond capacity. Truly a human tragedy.