Jair Bolsonaro should be charged with crimes against humanity and jailed for his “macabre” reaction to a Covid outbreak that has killed more than 600,000 Brazilians, including a disproportionate number of Indigenous citizens, a congressional inquiry has found.
Two of the most dramatic accusations against the Brazilian president – murder and genocide of the country’s Indigenous populations – were removed from a previous draft of the report on Tuesday night after talks between opposition senators serving on the inquiry.
But the final draft suggests the committee will recommend Brazil’s populist president be charged with nine separate offenses including charlatanism, incitement to commit crimes, the propagation of pathogenic germs, and crimes against humanity.
The investigation, which Bolsonaro’s political rivals hope will wreck his chances of re-election, was set up in April and is scheduled to conclude next Tuesday when senators vote on its final report.
That 1,180-page document – which savages the Bolsonaro administration’s anti-scientific and “slovenly” pandemic response – will make profoundly uncomfortable reading for Brazil’s far-right leader and dozens of allies, against whom charges are also recommended.
“[We must] never forget what happened in this country or the innocent people who lost their lives as a result of the government’s reckless handling of the pandemic,” says the final draft of the report, seen by the Guardian on Wednesday.
“The president committed many crimes and he will pay for them,” the inquiry’s president, senator Omar Aziz, told a hearing in the capital Brasília on Wednesday before the document’s official presentation.
Senator Randolfe Rodrigues, the inquiry’s vice-president, told reporters the alleged crimes meant Bolsonaro’s future should lie behind bars. “The report assigns more than 100 years in prison to the president of the republic. That is what the collection of suggested crimes points to,” Rodrigues said.
The accusation of crimes against humanity – which the report says will be referred to the international criminal court in The Hague – relates to what the report calls the Bolsonaro administration’s “deliberate neglect” of Indigenous people as Covid tore across the South American country and into their supposedly protected territories. “The federal government found in the virus an ally to strike the indigenous,” the document claims, highlighting Bolsonaro’s well-documented hostility to the original inhabitants of the lands that became Brazil after Portuguese colonizers arrived in 1500.
“There is a clear causal link between the anti-indigenous posture of [Brazil’s] top leader and the harm suffered by indigenous people, even if he might not have directly killed anyone,” the report alleges.
“Even before the pandemic, president Jair Bolsonaro commanded an anti-indigenous policy that deliberately exposed native peoples to a lack of assistance, harassment, land invasions and violence, with these acts of outright hostility intensifying … after the arrival of the virus.”
“By allowing the virus to proceed … he caused death and suffering remotely. The constant harassment and deliberate neglect, combined with the pandemic, were worse than weapons.”
The report is also scathing about Bolsonaro’s broader pandemic response, including his attempts to undermine vaccination and containment measures such as the use of face masks and social distancing.
“The consequences of this macabre strategy were measured by science,” the report says. “Had non-pharmaceutical interventions been systematically implemented, transmission rates could have been reduced by about 40%, which means 120,000 lives could have been saved by the end of March 2021.”
Eduardo Girão, a pro-Bolsonaro senator who is serving on the 11-member inquiry, said he rejected the report and claimed the investigation had become “an instrument of political persecution” designed to help the president’s enemies reclaim power. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” Girão said, quoting Martin Luther King Jr.
The president is not the only member of the Bolsonaro clan cited in the Covid report, which is expected to be approved by senators next Tuesday. Three of his politician sons – Carlos, Eduardo and Flavio Bolsonaro – are denounced over their alleged role in commanding a fake news network that flooded social media with disinformation about the pandemic.
The Bolsonaros reject such claims. Asked for his father’s reaction to the allegations on Wednesday, senator Flavio Bolsonaro told reporters: “I think this is how he took it – you know that laugh of his: ‘Hahahahahaha’.”