Brazil in the Time of Coronavirus

Abstract

This essay outlines and analyses the spread of the coronavirus in Brazil. In doing so it explores how the pandemic, whilst initially brought into the country by the wealthy elite, has predominantly affected the country’s poor, revealing structural inequalities that encompass class, race and ethnic differences, in which the poor are not afforded the right to live. It additionally examines the response to COVID-19 by the country’s far right president, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, looking at how his laissez faire reaction to the virus builds on a history of violence against the marginalized, especially to the country’s indigenous peoples, that has not just excluded them from the nation state but at times actively and violently eradicated them.