Fmr. President Dilma Rousseff: "We Have No Government" As Brazil's Daily COVID Deaths Surpass 4,000
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“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.
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Brazil’s breakdown was also an international threat. “The absence of an effective fight against the pandemic [in Brazil] leads to something extremely serious: the emergence of the so-called new variants, which are highly infectious and have increased the number of deaths in neighbouring countries,” Rousseff said, pointing to how South American neighbours were closing their borders for fear of the more contagious P1 variant linked to Brazil’s Amazon.
Many critics now argue Bolsonaro’s actions amount to “genocide” – and Rousseff said she was among them. “I use that word. What characterizes the act of genocide is when you play a deliberate role in the death of a population on a massive scale,” the 73-year-old said from her home in Porto Alegre, one of many cities where hospitals have been overwhelmed and doctors forced to play God. “It’s not the word [genocide] that interests me – it’s the concept. And the concept is this: responsibility for deaths that could have been avoided.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/10/brazil-bolsonaro-dilma-rousseff-coronavirus-crisis
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