RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Wednesday (27) called a Senate committee’s report accusing him of crimes against humanity and eight other offenses over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic “clownesque.”
“It’s a joke,” he said in an interview with radio station Jovem Pan, in which he admitted that such a report “causes a lot of problems.”
Bolsonaro asserted that he was not worried about his future because the parliamentary committee’s report was “not worth anything,” but acknowledged that “Brazil’s image to the outside world is terrible” and is even affecting the country’s economy.
“Some people think that we have a dictatorship here, that I put journalists in jail, that I limit freedom of expression, that I killed people in the pandemic, and that affects people who want to invest in Brazil and then don’t invest,” he explained.
All this affects the stock market, the dollar exchange rate, and inflation, hurts everyone and is driven only by the “political interests of seven senators,” the President said, referring to the number of parliamentarians who approved the report of the 11-member committee.
The document, passed by a 7-4 vote, contains in 1,287 pages the results of the investigation conducted by a committee of 11 senators into the government’s actions to tackle a pandemic that has killed over 606,000 people, or 2.872 per million in the country.
With this figure, Brazil is in the 6th worst place in the world, according to German Statista, behind Peru, Bosnia, Northern Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Hungary. In none of these countries are Presidents charged with crimes against humanity. However, no presidential elections will be held in these nations soon either.
ACCUSATIONS
The Senate parliamentary inquiry committee (CPI), comprising a majority of the political opposition, said it had found severe irregularities that led it to file nine charges against Bolsonaro and various accusations against 4 Ministers, 3 of the President’s sons, government advisers, and deputies, among the total of 80 accused, including two companies from the medical sector.
The conservative leader is accused of crimes against humanity, violations of health regulations, medical quackery, incitement to crime, forgery, unlawful use of public funds, deception, epidemics resulting in death, and dereliction of duty.
The charges will soon be submitted to the ordinary courts for most of the accused and, in the case of Bolsonaro, to the Federal Prosecutor General’s Office, the Supreme Court, and the International Criminal Court in The Hague, in the latter case for the alleged crimes against humanity.
Among the documents to be sent to the court is a request to “suspend” Bolsonaro indefinitely from social media. He has posted information whose content does not conform to the mainstream narrative, as well as the false claim that vaccination increases the risk of contracting AIDS.
THE PROBLEM
The reasons for the storm raised in Brazil against the sitting President with the creation of the Covid CPI are twofold. First, Brazil’s presidential elections will take place in the fall of 2022. A powerful alliance consisting of opposition parties, state governors, NGOs, and the country’s largest media conglomerates wanted to make sure that Bolsonaro’s reputation was damaged as much as possible.
Second, the Brazilian President is one of the very few state leaders in the world who openly questions the mainstream narrative regarding Covid-19.
He questions the utility of face masks, lockdowns, and isolation measures supporting alternative therapies regarding Covid-19 and is vehemently opposed to forced vaccinations and vaccine passports. He places citizens’ freedom of choice first.
This challenge of the mainstream narrative is now being interpreted by the alliance mentioned above as a “crime against humanity” because, according to the official reading, it has led to more people dying from Covid-19 in Brazil.