RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Jair Bolsonaro seemingly established more than a partnership with the American president – it is more like a hero-worship; however, based on recent events, the feeling is not reciprocal, despite both agreeing on foreign policy.
“If you look at Brazil, they are going through a very difficult time. By the way, they’re following Sweden’s example. Sweden is going through a terrible time. If we had done that, we would have lost a million, 1.5 million, maybe even 2.5 million lives,” Trump said in a press conference in the White House gardens.
Jair Bolsonaro has mentioned Sweden in his speeches as an example to follow for not closing its economy to fight the coronavirus. But reality has proved the opposite: The number of deaths in the country is proportionally higher than in its Scandinavian neighbors, and it is also facing a recession.
On Wednesday, June 3rd, Anders Tegnell, the epidemiologist in charge of the smooth Swedish strategy, conceded in an interview that they made a mistake. In other words, not even Sweden agrees with Bolsonaro about Sweden.
Trump is being pragmatic and objective. A few months away from his attempt at reelection, he wants to show that his action was responsible for saving lives and jobs.
However much he avoids direct criticism of Bolsonaro, he must avoid being tarred by the image of a politician who is unanimously pointed out by the American press, whether progressive or conservative, as one of the most disturbing vectors of the coronavirus, rather than as a leader amid the pandemic, someone who publicly treats the disease as minor “flu” or “cold”, a “fantasy” and “hysteria”.
Bolsonaro, in Trump’s view, may even contaminate US citizens with his irresponsibility. As a result of the high number of cases here, Trump has blocked access to people who are not US citizens and have been in Brazil.
It is no coincidence that the first three places in the world in the number of deaths by Covid-19 are of politicians who initially underestimated the pandemic – Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Jair Bolsonaro.
When Trump saw a tsunami of cases in his country, which has no public health system, he corrected his course and accepted the need for social isolation – even though his behavior remained erratic and he pushed for the economy to come back ahead of time.
The British Prime Minister, who was slow to take action, believing that being on an island would protect Britain, almost died of Covid – which, along with thousands of deaths, helped to change his point of view.
However, Bolsonaro continued to embrace scientific denialism, saying that death is part of life and advocating chloroquine as the “magic elixir”. He was even given by Trump a shipment of two million pills that have no proven efficacy for the treatment of the disease. Social isolation, which he campaigns against, has been shown to be effective.
Miguel Nicolelis, a doctor and neuroscientist, a professor of medicine at Duke University in the United States, said in an interview on Friday morning, June 5th, that the image of the Brazilian government in the scientific community is in the gutter. “I am 59 years old. I’ve been traveling around the world for 30 years non-stop. I’ve never seen Brazil sink to such low levels of criticism.”
Nicolelis said Brazil should pass the United Kingdom in death toll soon, and there is a good chance of reaching 125,000 deaths by August, joining the United States (which today counts 110,000 deaths) – a nation with 110 million more people and no public health system.
Bolsonaro is likely to say he disagrees with Trump’s assessment, but that he has the right to say whatever he wants or that he didn’t say what he actually said.
However, Bolsonaro’s heartache over his idol’s “betrayal” is nothing compared to the anguish felt by more than 34,000 Brazilians in the days before their death. Brazil has had at least one victim of Covid-19 per minute over the past 24 hours.
“We mourn all the dead, but it’s everybody’s fate,” Bolsonaro said. These dead could perhaps be alive if the country relied on a President who took his own motto seriously: “Brazil above all else”.
Source: UOL