Brazil’s Image Abroad in Tatters after Bolsonaro’s Botched Covid-19 Reaction

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – American Vincent Bevins, a former Los Angeles Times correspondent in Brazil, was in São Paulo in transit when the pandemic numbers exploded.

He was going to start a tour promoting his book on dictatorships, “The Jakarta Method” (PublicAffairs), but everything stopped. “I was supposed to be traveling around the world,” he laments, as he is now confined to the República Square in São Paulo.

Then something unusual happened. “Relatives in the USA and friends of mine in Asia,” where he had been for the past few years as a correspondent, “started to get in touch, asking if I am safe, if the President is endangering me”.

Ex-Minister Rubens Ricupero describes Brazil’s image abroad today as “the place people fear”. Or even, in his first answer when asked about the issue: “Would it be the case to ask ‘what image’? As something positive, it’s over”.

His government colleague under the late former President Itamar Franco, ex-chancellor Celso Amorim, has the same opinion. “There is no more image. It’s the caricature of Brazil abroad. Only the caricature was drawn here. And it has a face.”

It’s the face of President Jair Bolsonaro. According to Ricupero, “it was already poor at the start of his government, but with the pandemic, this has grown, all the time, everywhere.”

He says he was approached on Thursday, May 28th, by a political analysis publication from Brussels and on Friday, May 29th, to talk on a Buenos Aires radio station about the attacks on the environment and the threats to democracy.

“In short, there was nothing left of what Brazil had before if we compare it with that famous cover of Christ the Redeemer taking off in the Economist in 2009”. Only “the degree of international attention to Brazil, which has greatly increased” has remained, but today with an opposite tone.

In addition to the repeated magazine covers with pictures of mass graves, over the past month and a half, there have been alarmed editorials about the country in prominent newspapers, such as the Washington Post, Le Monde, Financial Times, El País and The Guardian. In all of them, the President is the villain.

In the Washington Post’s headline, “Bolsonaro is the worst” in facing the pandemic. The Spaniard El País highlighted the “serious risks” to democracy, for his support for “coup speeches” and for “empowering the military”.

The British daily The Guardian contrasted his “macho image ” with the reality of the “weakest reaction” to Covid-19.

For the American journalist Brian Winter, vice-president of the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, an organization focused on US foreign policy, however, the crisis in Brazil’s image started earlier.

“I believe that Brazil is admired internationally when it is prosperous,” says the editor of the AS/COA magazine. “This has not been the case since at least 2013. Therefore, its declining image precedes Bolsonaro by several years”.

On the other hand, Winter states that “there is no doubt that the reputation suffered an additional blow in 2019 with the Amazon fires”. “And now the spotlight is back on the country due to Bolsonaro’s handling of the pandemic.”

Brazilian journalist Daniel Buarque, the author of “Brazil, a Country of the Present: The International Image of the ‘Country of the Future'” (Alameda, 2013), assesses that today “the image of Brazil is negative, but the image of the Bolsonaro government is particularly negative”.

With regard to the pandemic, “everything is charged to him, and Brazil is even pointed out as a victim”. Buarque, who is preparing his doctorate on the subject at King’s College London, says that in his contacts with academics focused on the country, it is common to differentiate Brazil from its President.

“If nothing radical happens by 2022, someone else may win and start all over again,” he says. “It’s an image that can be cleaned up, reset to zero.”

Winter believes that change can come sooner. “The ‘good news’ is that memories are short, particularly in the social media age. Reputations can be quickly fixed if the circumstances change.”

Karina Mariano, professor of international relations at UNESP (São Paulo State University), is not so optimistic. “One thing’s for sure, Brazil’s role over the past five years has been diminishing greatly,” she says.

“If we look at the first decade of the 2000s, it was a country aiming for future international leadership. Now that’s gone. Now the notion is that we’re reversing.”

Vincent Bevins agrees and goes further. “The reputation of an undemocratic country, governed by violent dictators, has never completely faded”, he says. “In large part, the image is that Brazil is back to what it was, a country ruled by dangerous and dumb soldiers.”

Celso Amorim and Brian Winter agree on the likely Chinese reaction to the intermittent news of attacks on the country made by Jair Bolsonaro, his Ministers and sons.

“They’re pragmatists, they’re not going to dump the market,” says the ex-chancellor. “My guess is that China understands that this is a government that talks tough, but is a willing partner in trade,” says the American journalist.

However, Amorim cautions that from now on, “they will not go the extra mile when you need it”. He mentions as an example of an advantage wasted by Brazil, the way the country ended up “in the mass grave” during the global competition for Chinese equipment against Covid-19.

“It was a country with a strategic partnership, it was in the BRICS, so it was top of the list,” he says. “But we lost our ventilators to the US, which came by plane and paid more.”

He recalls that the establishment of the strategic partnership between the two countries was “on their initiative” during the Chinese leader Jiang Zemin’s visit to Brazil in 1993. On the other hand, the ex-chancellor concedes that it is difficult to distinguish how the attacks are affecting Brazil’s image in Chinese public opinion.

To this end, three Brazilians with training in Chinese universities, Júlia Rosa, now in a Beijing startup, Lívia Machado Costa, who worked at DiDi, owner of the 99 app in Brazil, and Jordy Pasa, have created the Shumian website to serve as a bridge between the two countries.

“Chinese public opinion is, to the surprise of many, diverse and colorful,” Costa describes. “There is the positioning of the Communist Party elite, often translated into private newspapers, and there is also what is discussed on platforms like WeChat and Weibo, sometimes criticizing the government.”

Among newspapers, Rosa adds, “even the state-owned ones differ from each other, in terms of editorial line.” The Global Times or Huanqiu, in Chinese, adopts a “notoriously harder and more nationalistic line,” while Xin Jing Bao is “considered a very independent newspaper”. This is how the commotion over the death of doctor Li Wenliang, one of the first to report coronavirus cases in Wuhan, partly spread.

In the WeChat and Weibo apps, Pasa reports not having noticed “any activity in reaction to the recent tensions in Sino-Brazilian relations”.

In the press, Costa points out that the Global Times reported Bolosnarism’s mounting provocations to China this week, but only when it came to the issue of Taiwan, an island considered a rebellious province by China. Recently, the President’s supporters have used flags of the island in live broadcasts and Twitter profiles.

“The newspaper stressed that the ‘one China’ policy is vital to healthy relations between the Asian country and any nation in the world,” she said. More extensive and significant is the critical coverage of Covid-19 in Brazil.

“When analyzing the position on Brazil in the top ten in circulation in China, newspapers like Nanfang Zhoumo focus on the disturbing way the country has dealt with the pandemic,” Costa says.

“They show the rush to reopen trade, the lack of alignment between federal and state governments and the pressure to use chloroquine”.

From the perspective of economic relations, Rosa adds that “food security was marked as one of the priorities” at the National People’s Congress held last week.

Source: Folha