On June 25th, a Democracy Now aired an interview with Marcia Castro, a brazilian professor at Harvard. Here some of Marcia Castro’s disturbing statements :
So, I just want to start by saying that the frustrating thing about this story is that Brazil could be teaching a lesson to the entire world on how to respond to a pandemic by leveraging its history, its network of primary care, which is one of the largest in the world, and by using its universal healthcare system. And yet, what we see in the country is a reflection of the leadership that we have, so a leadership that has and continues to downplay the importance of the virus, that neglects science — and that’s an important point, as well (…)
And it also is a failure because we could have our community health agents — and we have almost 300,000 of those — being the backbone of the response. And yet, the primary care and the community health agents are not being used as part of the response. So, Brazil is not testing enough, as you said. Well, we are not doing contact tracing, either. So, the community health agents could be doing the contact tracing. They could be identifying the elderly, the people that are more vulnerable. They could identify those people that don’t have water at home.
That’s the other thing. So, Brazil is a country with lots of inequalities. We cannot expect that you’re just going to take whatever countries in Europe or high-income countries have done, and implement in Brazil and it’s going to work. It really has to be adapted to those inequalities of informal labor, people that can’t stop working; people that live in very high-density households, so there is no way they can do self-isolation; and people that don’t have access to water. And we keep going with inequalities — the number of hospital beds and physicians per population. Those numbers are worse in the states in the Amazon region. It’s not by chance that we see the regional pattern of deaths in cases in Brazil that we are observing.
(…)
Overall in the Amazon region, 43% of the population don’t have access to water. But in some states, it’s even higher than that. Then there is a completely separate healthcare for the Indigenous populations, and those have lost a lot of the physicians in the past few years when a large program that existed in Brazil that brought foreigner physicians to work in those underserved areas was completely dismantled. So, again, you keep adding those layers, right?
So, since this new president took term, there is not a lot of attention in terms of preserving the environment. In fact, last year, we saw rampant deforestation, a horrible fire season. And this year, we already overpassed the deforestation from last year, and we still have about a month and a half to go of the cutting season. So, whenever you have this deforestation, you have contacts of those people that want to exploit the land with Indigenous areas. We see that it’s exactly in the Indigenous reserves where we are seeing most of the damage. And those areas are supposed to be preserved, and then they used to be. So, you have Indigenous people dying because of this encounter, but, on top of this, now they are being infected because those — the people that come into the area may bring the virus, as well. They can bring any pathogen. And it’s not just deforestation, we have to remember. There’s also mining, which is another activity that exposed Indigenous people to that.
(…)
Overall in the Amazon region, 43% of the population don’t have access to water. But in some states, it’s even higher than that. Then there is a completely separate healthcare for the Indigenous populations, and those have lost a lot of the physicians in the past few years when a large program that existed in Brazil that brought foreigner physicians to work in those underserved areas was completely dismantled. So, again, you keep adding those layers, right?
So, since this new president took term, there is not a lot of attention in terms of preserving the environment. In fact, last year, we saw rampant deforestation, a horrible fire season. And this year, we already overpassed the deforestation from last year, and we still have about a month and a half to go of the cutting season. So, whenever you have this deforestation, you have contacts of those people that want to exploit the land with Indigenous areas. We see that it’s exactly in the Indigenous reserves where we are seeing most of the damage. And those areas are supposed to be preserved, and then they used to be. So, you have Indigenous people dying because of this encounter, but, on top of this, now they are being infected because those — the people that come into the area may bring the virus, as well. They can bring any pathogen. And it’s not just deforestation, we have to remember. There’s also mining, which is another activity that exposed Indigenous people to that.
(…)
Now, I also want to make a point that the fire season is about to start in about a month or so. And if we had this high level of deforestation, the fires will come, because that’s usually the process. The wood now is on the floor. Whatever they couldn’t sell, they are going to burn. And whenever we have the fire season, we have an increase in respiratory conditions. We have an increase in the demand for hospitalizations because of respiratory conditions. And we have an increase in the mortality of children under the age of 10. Now, this is a very — it’s a horrible combination. Increasing respiratory conditions may make people more susceptible to a severe COVID-19 infection.
(…)
when you see what’s being done in the Amazon now, we’re basically losing about 20 years of achievements, of really being able to make protected reserve forests, protected Indigenous areas. We had a forest code that was really a model. We were able to reduce deforestation to the lowest levels and maintain them there. And we are losing this. We are losing this at rampant rates. That’s bringing a lot of deaths. A lot of the deaths of local leaders, Indigenous peoples or people that are just trying to protect the forest are not even advertised.
So, the situation is very complicated, because those are big business people. They are making money by clearing the forest. And the local producers, the local communities, it’s very hard for them to fight against those people, especially when they are backed up by the government.
