In Brazil, a committee of inquiry is incriminating President Jair Bolsonaro, sometimes heavily. The allegations range from charlatanism to crimes against humanity.
In Brazil, a parliamentary committee of inquiry into the government’s corona policy has made serious allegations against President Jair Bolsonaro and recommended charges.
The government acted negligently and “deliberately exposed the population to the concrete risk of mass infection” in order to achieve herd immunity, said Senator Renan Calheiros when reading the final report in Brasília on Wednesday.
With this behavior, the government, which has demonstrably taken advice from a parallel cabinet, approved the deaths of Brazilians. The committee of inquiry found “the fingerprints” of the president in thousands of Covid-19 dead, said Calheiros, the author of the report. Bolsonaro is charged with nine crimes, some of them serious, during the corona pandemic.
In total, according to the recommendation, in addition to Bolsonaro, another 65 people, including three sons of the president, and business people, as well as two companies, should be held accountable. For the time being, it remains completely unclear what consequences the report will have.
The allegations against Bolsonaro range from charlatanism to inciting criminal offenses to crimes against humanity. Two of the most serious crimes, indigenous genocide and murder, had been removed from the list of allegations by a group of seven independent or anti-Bolsonaro senators.
The committee of inquiry consists of eleven members, seven of whom belong to the opposition or are considered independent. The committee is expected to vote on the final report in the coming week. A majority is needed to pass the report. Then it can be sent to institutions like the Attorney General’s Office.
It remains unclear to commentators whether the recommendations will also lead to charges – or whether the committee of inquiry ends after almost six months of work with more than 50 statements in samba or pizza, as it is said in Brazil, if something fizzles out.
The application for impeachment proceedings, for the initiation of which the report could serve as a basis, is also questionable. The opening of such a procedure depends on the President of the Chamber of Deputies – who is considered an ally of the Bolsonaro government.
The committee of inquiry had started its work at the height of an out-of-control corona pandemic in April. His mandate was to shed light on the actions and omissions of the government of right-wing populist Bolsonaro in the pandemic and to review the possible misappropriation of federal funds in the fight against the coronavirus.
The Brazilians followed the committee like a telenovela at times. Even if they didn’t always learn anything new, the extent of what they already knew became clear. For example, the government left more than 50 emails from the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, which wanted to deliver corona vaccines to Brazil, unanswered.
The deliberate delay in obtaining vaccines was the government’s most serious neglect for the author of the final report. “It was a factor that contributed significantly to the high rate of new cases and mortality in the country,” said Renan Calheiros as he read the report.
After the USA and India, Brazil has the most corona infections with almost 22 million cases. Most recently, the largest country in Latin America exceeded the mark of 600,000 corona deaths. The health system collapsed in many places in March and April.
Bolsonaro has played down the coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic and rejects protective measures and restrictions. He also doubts the point of vaccinations. The President has stressed several times that he himself has not yet been vaccinated against the corona virus. He is accused of having turned down the purchase of corona vaccines and dragged them off.
Since the start of the nationwide vaccination campaign in January, a total of more than 261 million vaccine doses have been administered, and more than 100 million Brazilians have been completely vaccinated against the coronavirus. The acceleration is one of the successes that the President of the Committee of Inquiry, Senator Omar Aziz, writes on the flag.
On the other hand, the approval of Bolsonaro’s administration has continued to decline in the course of the corona pandemic. 53 percent of those surveyed rejected the president’s policy in a survey by the polling institute Datafolha in September. That was the worst result for Bolsonaro since he took office in 2019.
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