How Jair Bolsonaro and the Coronavirus Put Brazil’s Systemic Racism on Display
By Anakwa Dwamenaore
President Jair Bolsonaro tested positive for covid-19, the pandemic was ravaging the country’s poor neighborhoods and prisons.two per cent
Several months before the coronavirus first
arrived in Brazil, this spring, a series of man-made tragedies befell Maria
Marques Martins dos Santos. On November 12, 2019, dos Santos, a
thirty-eight-year-old mother of three, whose five-foot frame is crowned by
curly brown hair, was at her home, in Favela do Amor, in São Paulo. Just after
midnight, her fourteen-year-old son, Lucas, went out to buy soda and cookies
and never returned. Three days later, his drowned body was found in a nearby
lake, after what witnesses said was an encounter with military police. Four
days later, when dos Santos went to the police station to try to identify which
officers had attacked her son, the police detained her, telling her that there
was an outstanding warrant for her arrest. Eleven days later, on November 30th,
in handcuffs and jail clothes, she looked on in pain as her son’s decayed body
was buried in a sealed coffin.
Over the next four months, with dos Santos in jail, the
coronavirus arrived in Brazil, first afflicting the wealthy and then spreading
to poorer neighborhoods and prisons. São Paulo’s penitentiaries, which hold
about forty per cent of Brazil’s total incarcerated population, are notorious
for their lack of health care. Dos Santos’s family feared that she had
effectively been given a death sentence. All over the world, the coronavirus
pandemic has exposed and exacerbated class and racial inequalities. In Brazil,
where the six richest men hold the
same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the population, the crisis’s
disproportionate burden on poor Black and brown people has challenged the
country’s popular, deep-seated illusion of being an equal, raceless society.
Largely by incarcerating Black and brown people, Brazil has, in the past
decade, become home to the world’s third-largest prison and jail population,
overtaking Russia. In that time, the country’s prison population has doubled. Brazil’s
prisons are breeding grounds for sicknesses: water is rationed; a lack of
on-site medical care means that sick people are constantly shuttled back and
forth between public hospitals and prisons; and overcrowding is endemic—on
average, prisons in Brazil exceed their capacity by sixty-six per cent. For dos
Santos and Brazil’s seven hundred thousand other inmates, social
Amazingly, a full thirty per cent of the people incarcerated in Brazil have
not been convicted of a crime. About a third of the country’s prisoners are
behind bars on drug charges, and the majority of them are Black mothers like
dos Santos. Recognizing the threat of the pandemic, the National Justice Council,
a government judicial-oversight board, recommended in March that judges release
prisoners who have not committed violent crimes and who are members of at-risk
groups: pregnant women, nursing mothers, and mothers or legal guardians of
children up to twelve years old. “In São Paulo alone, there are 11,284 people
with no history of criminality that have a right to reduced sentences under
this guidance,” Marcelo Novaes, dos Santos’s lawyer, told me. But judges, who
are the only officials who can lower sentences, have been reluctant to do so:
under the guidelines issued by the National Justice Council, thirty-five
thousand prisoners are
eligible for release, and of the twenty-five thousand who have applied
for it judges have
released only seven hundred thus far. As the coronavirus has spread in
Brazil, the country has experienced the second-highest number of infections and
deaths of any nation in the world, behind only the United States. In its jails
and prisons, some inmates are preëmptively
writing goodbye letters to their families.
“What we are trying to avoid is a massacre,” Luciana
Zaffalon, a Brazilian criminal-justice-reform advocate, told me. Zaffalon leads
the Brazilian Platform for Drug Policy, one of several groups pressing
judges to release vulnerable prisoners. In 2006, a law passed that
allowed leniency toward users and instituted harsher measures on dealers. In
response, prosecutors and judges shifted to charging people with small amounts
of cocaine or crack as dealers, which carry sentences of between five and fifteen
years. Advocates for criminal-justice reform say that judges also began
charging poor, often Black women as dealers, because few of them can afford
costly private defense lawyers and are therefore easier to convict than wealthy
defendants. As a result, between 2000 and 2016, the population of women in
prison rose
nearly seven hundred per cent, to roughly forty-four thousand inmates.
Zaffalon, who is the former ombudsman general of São Paulo state’s public
defender’s office, blamed the government’s resistance to releasing people on a
tough-on-crime mentality among judges which has disproportionately affected
poor Black and brown people. “Almost all criminal cases are from Black and poor
people who don’t have money to hire a private lawyer to appeal their cases,”
she said.
Corruption has long plagued Brazil’s court system. Most
of the judiciary budget goes to the salaries of judges, many of whom are older,
white men who graduated from the country’s élite universities. The Justa Project, an organization fighting for
increased judicial transparency, found that a hundred per cent of those who
become judges end up in the top 0.08-per-cent wealthiest segment of the
population, which the group contends is a clear sign of systemic racism and
corruption.
Since March, a visitation
ban at prisons has prevented families from bringing food to the
incarcerated—a common practice in a country where many inmates, owing to the
gross underfunding of the prison system, are underfed. Andrelina Amélia Ferreira,
who leads the movement Mães do Cárcere (Mothers of the Incarcerated), told me
that she has heard stories of inmates eating toothpaste out of desperation and
hunger. “Even if they get sick,” Ferreira said, “it is their right to die with
their family and not alone in prison.” For the past eighteen years, Ferreira
has used her home as her headquarters, and counselled twenty to thirty women a
day there. She told me she fears for the lives of prisoners in a way that she
never has before. “I am a woman who grew up in a simple community, inside the
periphery, and I can say that I have never been so afraid as I am right now,”
she told me. “We do not know who will stay alive, who won’t.”
On Tuesday, after mocking the risk of coronavirus
infection for months, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro announced
that he had tested positive for the virus. Since the arrival of the pandemic in
Brazil, Bolsonaro has single-handedly created chaos: he has
belittled its severity, despite overwhelming evidence of its danger; publicly
defied social-isolation measures by walking among crowds and shaking hands, and
encouraging others to do so; fought with and fired a health minister, and
undermined the efforts of the rest of the country’s leaders. Asked about the
rising number of cases in São Paulo, in an interview on March 27th, Bolsonaro
replied, “I’m sorry—some people will die. They will die. That’s life. You
can’t stop a car factory because of traffic deaths.”
As infection rates have risen in Brazil, a clearer
picture has emerged of which lives the President apparently deems disposable.
In the beginning of the outbreak, the largest number of cases were in wealthy
neighborhoods—the only places with access to tests. Over time, workers at the
Vila Formosa necropolis, the largest cemetery in Latin America, noticed an acceleration in deaths
among people on the
peripheries of the city. Now the rate in favelas and peripheries is
officially ten
times higher than the average in the rest of the country. More than
half of Brazil’s cases are in its southeastern region, where roughly ten
million people live in homes not
connected to sewerage networks, and about seven million have no access
to running water. The inequality in Brazil’s health system is extreme, as well.
Sixty per cent of the I.C.U. beds in the state of São Paulo are in three
of its wealthiest regions, and only twenty-five per cent of the population
nationally has private health insurance or can afford it. The resulting
disparity by race in coronavirus-related death rates is glaring: Blacks in São
Paulo are sixty-two per cent more
likely to die from covid-19 than whites.
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