Did Brazil lose the bearings?

topic:	Health and Sanitation
located:	Brazil
editor:	Ellen Nemitz

Imagine a country with more than a million and a half coronavirus cases (and an upward curve) without a Health Minister for seven weeks. What if this nation, amid an unprecedented educational crisis due to social isolation measures, had no Education Minister after the fiasco of a false curriculum owner who lasted five days in charge? In addition, the country maintains a man whose statements against the environment came out weeks ago while running the Environment Ministry. It seems impossible, dystopian maybe, but this is the reality for the political situation in Brazil.

FairPlanet covered the dismiss of former Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta in the very beginning of pandemic in Brazil, replaced by the physician Nelson Teich, who remained in charge for just one month. Both were not perfect or best ministers at all, but no one could imagine what would happen next: one of the most important offices is under the temporary administration, for almost two months now, of Eduardo Pazuello, a military persona, not a doctor, with no experience in the field of health.

If the curriculum is not a barrier for Pazuello, it was the centre of the embarrassing situation involving the quasi-minister Carlos Alberto Decotelli. After Abraham Weintraub left Education Ministry on June 18, surrounded by polemics, such as insulting the Supreme Court, and without a clear projection of how to deal with the consequences of COVID-19, the department remains empty (until the day this article was written) except for five days in which Decotelli’s nomination was put in doubt after two universities, from Argentina and Germany, had claimed his alleged degrees were false. He was also accused of plagiarism, among other inconsistencies.

The Environment Ministry, in its turn, has a well-established name in charge. And that’s the problem. Ricardo Salles has been responsible for terrible environment management policies, but his completely destructive position is not only observed but proved since a video recorded in April, release one month later, showed him saying to take advantage of the public “distraction” during the pandemic to loosen the environmental regulations. Meanwhile, deforestation, Amazon fires, mining and land appropriation keep breaking records.

Instead of appropriately dealing with the pandemic, assuring equal education conditions to everyone and strengthening the nature protection, the government plans to use a millionaire budget in advertising and media relation to improve its image and approval – that is increasingly bad, both inside and outside of the country. For the population, what remains is uncertainty. If once it was possible to rely on governors and mayors' strict measures of social distancing, now the rule is the lack of rules: yo-yo quarantines and the victory of capitalism, with open malls and crowded bars.

Maybe the former president of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, best defined many Brazilian’s feeling in an article titled 'Confusing times', published by the El Pais: “Government that has no bearing in the main social areas will hardly find the magic lantern to take us to good port. It is not only about badly chosen people. It is the lack of projects, of hope, that suffocates us.”

Image by Alexandre FUKUGAVA

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