After inaction, sanctions. After six months of investigation and 50 witness hearings, the Brazilian Senate committee tasked with shedding light on the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in that country is preparing to recommend laying charges of mass murder against the current president Jair Bolsonaro.
According to this group of senators, the populist would have deliberately favored the spread of the virus which has killed more than 600,000 people in Brazil since the start of the health crisis, the heaviest global toll in the world after the United States, where the pandemic spread at very high speed in 2020 under the presidency of another populist, Donald Trump.
“The President of the Republic, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, has not respected his legal obligation to prevent the death of thousands of Brazilians during the COVID-19 pandemic, has committed, by his conduct […] intentional homicide, given its deliberate decision not to acquire available vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 between July 2020 and January 2021 ”, we can read in the report cited on Tuesday by the Brazilian newspaper O Globo.
The 1,200-page document, which is due to be released on Wednesday, also calls for the indictment of 69 other people, including the president’s three sons, as well as current and past members of the government and civil service.
While holding Bolsonaro directly responsible for 300,000 deaths, or half of the total toll, the Senate committee urges judicial authorities to arrest and imprison the current president on a total of nine charges, including “crime against humanity And “falsification of documents”.
“Many of these deaths were preventable,” said Renan Calheiros, a Brazilian centrist senator and lead author of the report, in an interview with New York Times, who read the Senate report upstream. “I am personally convinced that he is responsible for the aggravation of this massacre. “
Suspicion of corruption
Broadly speaking, the report written by 11 senators, seven of whom are opponents of the populist, accuses Jair Bolsonaro of “genocide” against indigenous communities in the Amazon where the virus decimated thousands of people last year due to serious oxygen supply problems in area hospitals.
The populist is also singled out for promoting fancy treatments, such as hydroxychloroquine, long after they proved ineffective in treating COVID-19, but also for ignoring more than 100 calls from Pfizer for the country’s vaccine supply.
The country then preferred another supplier, the Indian Bharat Biotech and its Covaxin, yet not approved by the WHO. The contract was subsequently canceled due to strong suspicions of corruption and bribery.
Like Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro entered the COVID-19 pandemic with a strong sense of distrust of his country’s scientific, medical and political institutions, but also by minimizing the lethal consequences of the disease, which he described from the outset as a “little flu”.
The president has never ceased to oppose sanitary measures aimed at reducing the spread of the virus, even after contracting the disease himself in July 2020. Even last week, he indicated that he would to be the last Brazilian to be vaccinated, refusing this protection on the pretext of having “more antibodies than those who are vaccinated”, according to him.
“We continue to live with this official speech of Bolsonaro, who does not believe in vaccination,” said in an interview to the To have to pulmonologist Margareth Dalcolmo, professor at the National School of Public Health of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz). “Brazil is capable of vaccinating two million people a day, but we have not reached this level, because the health network has been dismantled by the regime in place which, in addition, has brought us into this pandemic without central coordination. “
Currently, nearly 50% of Brazilians are properly vaccinated against COVID-19, a level still insufficient to emerge from the health crisis.
Last week, Jair Bolsonaro was refused entry to a soccer stadium in São Paulo, unable to present a vaccination passport, as imposed by the Santos team who met that of Grêmio there, several Brazilian media reported. .
Political division
The Senate committee report is due to be voted on by senators next week. If approved, the Attorney General of Brazil will then have 30 days to decide whether or not to prosecute the president, a more than unlikely outcome, however, since the holder of this function is close to Bolsonaro and the lower house is predominantly controlled by his supporters.
On Tuesday, the populist mocked the conclusions of this committee by calling its main author “dirty” in front of a group of admirers and having fun having been “charged with murder today”, CNN reported. Brazil. The Senate committee could also turn to the Supreme Court of Brazil and the International Criminal Court in The Hague to convict the current president.
Almost a year from the next presidential election, Jair Bolsonaro maintains divisions in his country, while his popularity is in free fall and his management of the pandemic is severely judged by a very large majority of Brazilians , thus mortgaging his ambitions to win a second term.