A report that accuses President Jair Bolsonaro of “crimes against humanity” and other crimes for his erratic management of the COVID-19 pandemic was approved this Tuesday by a parliamentary commission and will now be referred to Justice.
The document, approved by seven votes to four, describes in 1,287 pages the result of the investigation carried out by a commission of eleven senators on the Government’s actions in the face of a pandemic that it has already killed more than 606,000 people in the country.
The commission said it had found very serious irregularities, which led her to file nine charges against Bolsonaro and various charges against four ministers, three of the president’s sons, government advisers and parliamentarians, included in a total of 80 defendants, including two companies in the medical area.
In the case of the far-right leader, he is accused of crimes against humanity, violation of sanitary measures, medical quackery, incitement to crime, falsification of documents, irregular use of public money, prevarication, epidemic resulting in death and attacks against the dignity of the office.
The accusations will soon be presented to the ordinary courts and, in what concerns Bolsonaro, to the General Prosecutor’s Office, the Supreme Court and the International Criminal Court of The Hague, in the latter case due to the alleged crimes against humanity.
In the documents that will be sent to court, a request was included for Bolsonaro is “suspended” indefinitely from social networks, in which it has a feverish activity and that it has used to spread massive false information about the pandemic.
The last one, last week, when hinted in a live broadcast that those who take both doses of the vaccines are at higher risk of contracting AIDS, which led Facebook and Instagram to withdraw that video and YouTube to suspend the president’s account for seven days.
Throughout its work, the commission held 69 hearings in which it questioned almost a hundred people and discovered from evidence of alleged fraud in negotiations for the purchase of vaccines, to a structure for the dissemination of false news and an alleged “strategy” of the Government to accelerate infections.
According to the final report, Bolsonaro himself “repeatedly encouraged the population to breach social distancing, he opposed the use of masks, promoted crowds and tried to disqualify vaccines. “
But all of that, the commission concluded, actually hid “a strategy based on the idea that natural contagion would induce herd immunity” and that it was the “consequence” of a “political decision that aimed exclusively at a rapid resumption of economic activities.”
In its conclusions, the report includes the decision to create, at the headquarters of the Senate itself, a memorial in memory of those who died from COVID in Brazil. “So that we never forget what happened in this country and the innocents who paid with their lives for the irresponsible conduct of the Government in the conduct of the pandemic. We will never forget,” says the report, which also “compromises” the members of the commission to “monitor” the procedures that will now follow in the courts.
In addition, the report proposes that a pension equivalent to a minimum wage be granted to “covid orphans”, as children who have lost their father, mother or both are known and that, according to a recent report published in the Lancet magazine, it is believed to be about 113,000. The last minute of the parliamentary commission, after nearly a hundred hours of hearings, was silence, in memory of the victims.
Mario Twitchell is an accomplished author and journalist, known for his insightful and thought-provoking writing on a wide range of topics including general and opinion. He currently works as a writer at 247 news agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
