Jan Rocha is a former correspondent for the BBC and the Guardian and lives in São Paulo, Brazil. She is the author of a number of LAB books, and contributes this regular column for LAB, known for its incisive analysis of current Brazilian politics.
All over the world leaders have celebrated the beginning of vaccination in their countries, some of them taking the first jab themselves. But when the first vaccines were administered in São Paulo on Sunday, Jair Bolsonaro sulked in silence in his palace.
Bolsonaro and his brand of extreme right wing politics have emerged as the big losers in Brazil’s recent local elections, but established left wing parties have not done so well either. Jan Rocha reports.
President Bolsonaro is the new 'Jim Jones', says Jan Rocha, comparing the Brazilian president to the cult leader who led his followers in a mass suicide in Guayana in 1978.
April 23 2020. I'm not a gravedigger’ said President Jair Bolsonaro scornfully, when a reporter tried to question him about the number of coronavirus...
Watching the Brazilian political scene is a
bit like watching an old disaster movie, where a suicidal maniac has taken over
the plane’s controls and put...
Brazil faces two disasters: the pandemic of coronavirus,
and the pandemonium of the Bolsonaro government. The first is invisible and
highly contagious but should only last...