On 13 July the Brazilian bishops’ conference published an open letter to the Brazilian Congress calling on members to overturn the vetoes applied by President Jair Bolsonaro to a 7 July law providing for emergency resources to combat Covid-19 among Brazil’s traditional communities (indigenous, Afro-Brazilians, artisanal fishing communities).
The vetoes removed the obligation to supply drinking water, hygiene materials, hospital beds, ventilators, and food. The bishops said they "rejected with anger" the presidential measure, which, they said, “violated the right to life”. The original measure was the result of pressure from the communities and civil society.
On 8 July President Bolsonaro applied 16 vetoes to the law passed by Congress, making it the most vetoed law in the history of Brazil. The bishops said that the vetoes were “ethically unjustifiable and inhuman because they deny rights and guarantees fundamental to the life of the traditional peoples, such as access to safe drinking water,” and quote Pope Francis’s statement safe drinking water “is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights” ( Laudato Si´, 30).
The bishops also argue that the vetoes violate the Brazilian constitution, which proclaims respect for the dignity of the human person, for the right to life and health, and the right of the indigenous peoples to live in their territories in accordance with their cultures and traditions.
The demands for action to protect indigenous communities were supported on 8 July by a judge of the Brazilian supreme court, who granted an injunction to the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil and a group of left-wing parties to ensure that adequate services were provided. Judge Roberto Barroso also called for the government to confine intruders into indigenous territories to avoid contact with the communities that could spread the disease. He also called for the creation of a “situation room” to centralise the flow of information and coordinate responses. In the course of his judgment Barroso noted that “great resistance has been seen on the part of the government to making the rights of indigenous peoples effective”, and quoted press reports of remarks by Bolsonaro such as “If I take office, there will not be another square centimetre for indigenous land”. Jair Bolsonaro has notoriously dismissed Covid-19 as “a touch of flu”, and sought out crowds with no attempt at social distancing. On 7 July he announced that he had tested positive for Covid-19.
On 16 July Brazil passed the two million mark for cases of Covid-19, with almost 77,000 deaths. The daily average of new cases detected has been over 1,000 for the last week, and even so these figures are believed to be an underestimate. The high daily rate of infections shows, specialists say, that the pandemic is far from being under control. Brazil has the second highest COVID-19 totals in the world, after the United States.
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