What it feels like to be Brazilian during this pandemic
I remember the exact feeling of hugging one of my best friends and copiously crying in despair after the results of the presidential election in 2018. Bolsonaro had been elected and some of the people I loved the most were partially responsible for that nightmare. We obviously knew that things were going to get tough, but we had no idea how horrifyingly revolting they could be.
I am a woman, a teacher and a lesbian, so I took a lot of the dreadful things Bolsonaro said during his campaign very personally. What hurt the most during the whole election process was that he didn’t try to hide who he was and what his thoughts on minorities were at any moment. Whoever decided to vote for him, did so knowing exactly how grim it was for the black community, women, the LGBTQ+ and poor people in general to see him as head of state. But they did it anyway! They chose hate over tolerance, ‘the economy’ over humanity, imperialism over national sovereignty and ‘the good old days’ (in which white straight men held all the power) over basic human rights for all.
Ok, but what does all of that have to do with the pandemic? For us Brazilians, everything! In Bolsonaro’s words, this was nothing but a little flu, and we couldn’t stop the country and harm the economy over a few hundred deaths. A lot of politicians didn’t take this crisis seriously at first, but it’s 2021, over 300.000 deaths later, more than 3.500 casualties a day and my country is the worst place to be in at this moment. We don’t have a consistent vaccination program because, besides being directly responsible for anti-vax manifestations, the government refused to take efficient steps towards buying enough vaccines from the very beginning. We also had zero actual lockdowns, which led to the development of a much more dangerous virus strain, and not only does it appear to be more contagious, but also more deadly. The panic is constant, we don’t have a day in which we don’t fear for our lives and for our democracy, considering that our very own mass murderer is constantly attempting against the other two constitutional powers: the legislative and the judiciary.
Our constitution was born in the same year as I was, 1988, three years after the end of a 21-year-long military dictatorship that murdered hundreds of Brazilians and tortured thousands more under the claim that there was a communist threat going on. We’ve had our president and some of his followers paying their respects to men who were responsible for the persecution and torture of people such as our former president, Dilma Rousseff, during the military regime. Dilma went through a painful process of being called all sorts of mysoginistic names and suffering all kinds of threats during a period which many of us sensed was leading to a coup to impeach her after what the opposition insisted was ‘dodgy accounting’. In 2016 she was removed from her position and the opportunist Michel Temer took over. The same (not my) president, who two years later beneffited from that absurdly illegal impeachment and praised the tortures inflicted under a dictatorship, is directly connected to people arrested for the death of councilwoman and activist Marielle Franco, a black, lesbian mother from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro who was assassinated in 2018. Marielle was a passionate advocate for the rights of many minorities, especially the ones living at the literal margins of society. Her death was convenient for the Bolsonaro family in many different ways, and nothing is being done by him or any of his strangely rich heirs to clarify his weird connections to the militia behind this murder.
We are suffocating in a country where the irrational and old school fear of a communist system insists on hurting our very fragile democracy. And under this fascist government we continue to cry over thousands of daily deaths that could have been avoided if our friends and family hadn’t cast their votes for a militiaman who has always been quite honest when it came to his beliefs about human rights and basic principles of respect. This, I’ll have you rightist Brazilians know, is not only on him. This is on all of you! May you think thrice before giving power to a monster next time you get the chance to exercise your right to vote.
