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“The only thing that is being talked about these days is the pandemic. We need to stop that,” Bolsonaro said during the speech, which was apparently about tourism.
FILE: Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro gestures during a press conference on the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic at the Planalto Palace, Brasilia. Image: AFP
BRASILIA – President Jair Bolsonaro received criticism Tuesday for telling Brazilians not to treat Covid-19 as “a country of fags,” the far-right leader’s latest controversial outburst over the pandemic.
Bolsonaro, who has consistently downplayed the virus even as it has killed 163,000 people in Brazil, the second-highest death toll worldwide, after the United States, made the comment during a meandering speech at the presidential palace in which he also appeared to threaten the president-elect of the United States, Joe Biden.
“What is being talked about these days is the pandemic. We have to stop that,” Bolsonaro said during the speech, apparently on tourism.
“I’m sorry for the deaths. I really do. But we’re all going to die one day. There’s no use running away from reality. We have to stop being a fag country … We have to face it and fight. I hate these fag things.” .
It was the latest in a long list of controversial statements about the pandemic by Bolsonaro, who condemned the “hysteria” around Covid-19, compared the new coronavirus to a “little flu” and claimed that the Brazilian immune system was so strong that he could swim in raw sewage and “catch nothing”.
The president also sparked controversy with a veiled blow to Biden, who has angered Bolsonaro by urging his administration to better protect the Amazon rainforest.
Bolsonaro, a fervent supporter of President Donald Trump, is among the few world leaders who have not congratulated Biden on his electoral victory, which Trump has not accepted.
“Recently, a leading presidential candidate said that if he did not put out the forest fires in the Amazon he would impose trade sanctions on Brazil,” Bolsonaro said, apparently referring to a comment Biden made during his first debate with Trump in September.
“How do you deal with that kind of thing? Diplomacy alone doesn’t work … You have to have gunpowder. You don’t have to use it. But they have to know you have it.”
His comments drew an immediate outcry from critics.
“Between ‘gunpowder’ and ‘fags’ we have more than 160,000 deaths in the country,” tweeted the president of the lower house of Congress, Rodrigo Maia.
“Our solidarity to all the friends and relatives of the victims of Covid-19.”
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