Racism is Fueling Brazil s COVID-19 Crisis | Opinion Jasmine Mitchell
, Associate Professor, State University of New York-Old Westbury On 5/4/21 at 7:30 AM EDT
Brazil is now ground zero for COVID-19 mortality rates. With over 400,000 deaths, it surpassed the U.S. death toll. The country s over 3,000 daily deaths collapsed the health care system. Twenty-four hour funerals are the norm. Highly contagious variants continue to spread unchecked and mutate. Despite all this, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro continues to oppose public health advice and upend local efforts to contain the virus.
Like the U.S., COVID-19 is exacerbating racial disparities in Brazil. Afro-Brazilians are 38 percent more likely to die of COVID-19 than white Brazilians. Pregnant and postpartum Afro-Brazilian women die from COVID-19 at twice the rate of white women. And the mortality rate of Indigenous populations in the Amazon due to COVID is 32 percent higher than the general population.
Covid-19 caused one in three deaths in Brazil so far this year
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Brazil’s Bolsonaro vowed to work with Indigenous people. Now he’s investigating them
by Mongabay.com on 4 May 2021
At least two top Indigenous leaders in Brazil, Sônia Guajajara and Almir Suruí, were recently summoned for questioning by the federal police over allegations of slander against the government of President Jair Bolsonaro.
Both probes were prompted by complaints filed by Funai, the federal agency for Indigenous affairs, just a week after Bolsonaro pledged at a global leaders’ climate summit to work together with Indigenous peoples to tackle deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon.
The NGO Human Rights Watch said it’s “deeply concerned” about the government’s moves and called any retaliation against Indigenous peoples a “flagrant abuse of power,” while APIB, Brazil’s main Indigenous association, called the government’s approach a “clear attempt to curtail freedom of expression.”
Powerful photos highlight fight for press freedom dw.com 2 hrs ago © Provided by dw.com
Princess Leia about to go into battle against Darth Vader s troops: With a little imagination, this could be a scene from a
Star Wars film. But this is not Alderaan, it s Belarus. In 2020, tens of thousands of people protested peacefully against the country s longtime ruler, Alexander Lukashenko, with many of the female demonstrators wearing white dresses. Lukashenko ordered the protests to be put down by force. The woman in this photo wore a wedding dress as a symbol against the violence. The contrast could hardly be greater.
Right-wing nationalists failed during the pandemic. But they weren’t the only ones. Ishaan Tharoor
, including news from around the globe, interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday. © Samuel Rajkumar/Reuters Volunteers stand next to burning pyres of people who died due to covid-19 in Bangalore, India.
Were some political systems better positioned to beat the pandemic than others? “This covid epidemic may actually lance the boil of populism,” Francis Fukuyama, the acclaimed political philosopher, told the BBC last year. “I don’t think there’s any correlation between being a democracy and doing well or poorly [in dealing with the coronavirus]. But there’s definitely a correlation between being a populist leader and doing badly.”
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