I am the way.
Oh, hello.
Welcome to System Fail,
the show where the real criminals wear suits and ties.
Chico Rodrigues, the Brazilian senator, was caught hiding money
during a police raid into the diversion of public funds for fighting the coronavirus.
$3,200 in hard cash
was reportedly discovered in Rodrigues’ underwear,
between the crack of his buttocks.
Whoa!
Rodrigues later issued a statement saying he had done absolutely nothing wrong.
Uhh.. I think – do you have any other money?
I am your host, Dee Dos,
and it’s been almost one year
since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.
It’s serious... but I’m not concerned about it.
A big nothingburger.
I think everyone just needs to calm down.
During this time, the SARS-2 Coronavirus has made life more difficult for billions of humans.
Pizza Hut’s closed too.
I’m so sorry.
Yet few places have had it worse than Brazil.
The situation in Brazil is grim.
Its healthcare system has been decimated.
Brazil has now overtaken the US as the country with the most daily COVID-19 cases,
and deaths, in the world.
Things are so bad here, they’re dependent on Venezuela.
The roots of Brazil’s severe and ongoing crisis
lie in the violent incompetence of the country's President, Jair Bolsonaro.
Whoa!
Bolsonaro is a notorious COVID-19 skeptic,
who has continued to downplay and dismiss the pandemic,
even as its victims have overwhelmed the country’s
hospitals, morgues and cemeteries.
This arrogant display of tone-deaf machismo
has resonated with reactionary segments of Brazilian society
that celebrate callous indifference for other people’s feelings as a masculine,
hetero-normative virtue,
and condemn public displays of empathy as feminine, or gay.
How touching.
And so, like a sociopathic gym teacher shouting at his students to stop crying...
I don’t tolerate losers in my gymanisum.
Are you gonna be a loser?
No sir.
Bolsonaro has mocked his political opponents for overreacting,
and denounced those who have succumbed to the disease as weak.
This strong-man act is not a matter of ignorance,
or scientific illiteracy.
Instead, Bolsonaro has cynically used the COVID-19 crisis
to deepen the polarization of Brazilian society,
ramping up social and political tensions
to agitate his base and consolidate his support.
Instead of fighting the outbreak of COVID-19, the president is exploiting it.
The results have not been pretty.
Brazil recently reached two grim COVID-19 milestones,
surpassing 10 million confirmed cases, and 250,000 deaths.
The so-called ‘second wave’ of the pandemic has resembled a long plateau,
with average mortality rates hovering near or above 1000 per day
for the past two months.
Although the virus was first introduced to the country
by globetrotting business and political elites,
it has been impoverished Black and Indigenous residents
who have paid the highest price.
Brazil’s stark racial and class inequalities
have manifested in shockingly high mortality rates
among the country’s Black and mixed race populations.
One study calculated that low-income Black Brazilians were four times more likely to
die after contracting COVID, than their middle-class white counterparts
based largely on the effects of poverty
and lack of adequate access to health care.
There’s also been a growing disparity in transmission rates.
While most middle-class Brazilians have been able to avoid infection by sheltering in place
and working from home,
the virus has spread rapidly through the crowded favelas of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo,
and other major cities.
Here, many residents are forced to commute on overcrowded buses and subways to dangerous
front-line jobs in the service, hospitality and cleaning sectors, before returning home
to neighbourhoods that lack running water and proper sewage systems.
The results have been entirely predictable.
Brazil’s indigenous populations have also been ravaged by COVID-19,
adding to the existential threats they already faced from ecological destruction
and trigger-happy paramilitary groups tied to the logging, mining and ranching industries.
Back in July, Bolsonaro vetoed legislation aimed at providing emergency medical services
to Indigenous communities.
On February 17th, Aruká Juma, the last male member of the Juma people, died of COVID-19.
In the state of Amazonas, the region’s healthcare system has collapsed.
In Parintins, hospitals ran out of sedative, and healthcare workers were forced
to resort to tying patients down with makeshift restraints
to intubate them.
Manaus, a jungle metropolis of 2.2 million people
located inside the so-called ‘lungs of the world’,
has faced an acute and deadly shortage of oxygen.
In January, local hospitals stopped receiving most new COVID patients,
leaving thousands of people to asphyxiate to death
at home in their beds.
Brazil’s Ministry of Health recently announced that a shipment of vaccines for Amazonas
was accidentally sent to the wrong state.
The outbreak in Manaus has also spawned a new coronavirus mutation,
which has since spread to more than a dozen other countries around the world.
The P.1 variant is more contagious than the original SARS-2 Coronavirus strain,
and capable of bypassing existing antibodies,
meaning that it could potentially render current vaccines ineffective,
and trigger new waves of infections among COVID-19 survivors.
It’s continuing to mutate.
So it may grow something on top of the Brazilian mutation,
and give us something where the vaccines are no longer really effective.
Despite all this chaos, Bolsonaro’s grip on power is stronger than ever.
He recently managed to buy enough votes to install his allies
into important congressional positions,
which will effectively block the 60 impeachment requests that have been lodged against him.
While his overall level of popular support has dropped,
he maintains a loyal and fanatical core group of supporters,
and recent polls have suggested that if presidential elections were held today,
he would win.
Bolsonaro also enjoys strong support among the country’s police forces,
as well as the paramilitary death squads and criminal cartels of Rio de Janeiro
- groups that are themselves largely comprised
of former and active duty police officers,
such as those who assassinated Marielle Franco in 2018.
He has bolstered this support by intervening to pardon killer cops,
and by proposing legislation that would grant police blanket immunity
for any and all actions carried out in the line of duty.
This is a rather terrifying prospect,
given that Brazilian police murdered 6,160 people last year,
or nearly 17 people per day – more than any other country in the world.
Bolsonaro has recently expressed his intention to bring state military and civil police,
including highly-trained tactical teams like Rio de Janeiro’s BOPE squad,
under federal jurisdiction.
These moves, combined with claims that his political opponents
are planning to steal the elections in 2022,
lend some credence to those who have long expressed concerns
that he plans to stay in power, no matter what.
Yet rather than resigning themselves to this bleak situation,
Brazilians have opted to resist.
In areas abandoned by the Brazilian state,
self-organized mutual aid networks have stepped up to fill the vacuum.
In Belo Horizonte, anarchists involved with Kasa Invisível
have transformed the squatted community center into the base of operations
for a network supporting the city’s homeless population.
Across the favelas of Rio, autonomous grassroots initiatives
have coordinated the distribution of food, clothing and PPE,
and Community Disinfection Teams have been established
to sanitize workplaces, homes and common areas.
In the São Paolo favela of Paraisópolis,
a network of 60 community health stations has been set up,
and 240 residents have been trained as voluntary emergency first responders.
Amidst widespread layoffs, and the collapse of the informal economy,
Brazil has also seen an organized pushback from front-line workers,
including a large strike by motorcycle drivers working for UberEats
and other delivery apps.
Out of this struggle has come a new workers-owned delivery co-op
called Despatronados,
launched by a multi-city network called the Antifascist Couriers.
And finally, the country has seen a number of militant protests and clashes,
such as those that followed the murder of 15 year old Guilherme Silva Guedes,
in São Paolo, on June 15th.
And in November, a wave of rioting and looting spread to multiple cities across the country
following the murder of João Alberto Freitas in Porto Alegre.
As social and political tensions continue to increase,
amidst a context of generalized corruption,
widespread trauma
and multiple overlapping crises,
the spectre of conflict looms high.
To learn more about the situation in Brazil, I recently caught up with anarchist author,
researcher and Professor of International Relations
at The Federal University of São Paulo, Acácio Augusto.
Hey Acácio, how’s it going?
Trust me, the worst is yet to come.
We haven’t even outfitted you humans with your RFID implants yet.
Ever since Bolsonaro took office, there have been concerns on the Left that he would revert
Brazil back to a military dictatorship.
Do you see his recent efforts to consolidate authority over the nation’s police services
as a step in this direction?
In the past, you have characterized the Bolsonaro regime as having tapped into pre-existing
reactonary elements of Brazilian culture.
Could you please elaborate a bit on this?
Last November, a number of Brazilian cities erupted into rioting
in response to the murder of João Alberto Freitas in a Carrefour shopping center.
What impact did this have on Brazilian society, and how have the ruling classes responded?
Thanks, Acácio
We’ve now reached the end of this episode of System Fail.
You can catch the full interview with Acácio on the Portuguese-language Fagulha Podcast,
available at kolektiva.media, and on their website: fagulhacast.noblogs.org.
This episode was a collaboration between my human producers at subMedia,
and their Brazilian counterparts at Antimidia.
To see more of Antimidia’s videos about the ongoing social war in Brazil,
or to support their work, go to antimidia.noblogs.org
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Godspeed, humans.