https://vimeo.com/437678658

President Bolsonaro, after taking a Trump like stance minimizing the pandemic in spite of the soaring rate of infections, is now infected himself. His polling numbers are down but the opposition is fragmented says Lorena Barberia on theAnalysis.news podcast with Paul Jay.

Paul JayHi, I'm Paul Jay and this is theAnalysis.news podcast. This episode is produced in cooperation with Other News, Voices Against the Tide.

I've always thought that one country that could decide the fate of the world is Brazil. It's the eighth largest economy in the world. And in terms of physical size, a population of 210 million people, natural resources, an advanced industrial economy, a politicized working-class, extreme wealth inequality, a democratic mass movement, and hard geographically to push around by the big powers. Brazil could have, and maybe still will give rise to a progressive popular government that could shake not only South America but the world.

I always thought that Lula and Dilma Rousseff, PT, would fall. That had compromised, more than necessary, with international finance capital, and that while life did get better for the poor, the transformation was not as dramatic as people had hoped for or expected.

Then came the extreme right-wing president and religious fanatic Bolsonaro, an ally of Trump and Steve Bannon, and who, like Trump, was a pandemic denier. Brazil is one of the worst hotspots for COVID in the world after Bolsonaro refused to take it seriously. Well, President Bolsonaro was just diagnosed as having contracted COVID-19 and is reported to be drinking hydroxyl chloroquine, which most doctors say won't help and might kill him.

What happens in Brazil matters to the whole world, and not only because the Amazon is the lungs of the earth, the further destruction Bolsonaro's government to the Amazon is adding to the coming climate catastrophe.

Now joining us from San Paolo, Brazil, is Lorena Barberia. She's a professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of San Pablo, and she's been an associate researcher at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. She's now also the scientific coordinator of the Solidarity Research Network for public policies in society, an inter-faculty initiative to study the covered pandemic and save lives in Brazil.

Thank you for joining me.

Lorena BarberiaThank you, thank you very much.

Paul JaySo, Lorena, give us a quick update on where things are at with COVID. Is it as out of control as it seemed to have been the last few weeks?

Lorena BarberiaYes, unfortunately, yes. We had the first cases diagnosed in February and we had the first deaths in early March. And since then, we've seen growing, growing escalation and spread of COVID cases throughout the country. We have the second highest deaths, only second to the United States and also the second highest amount of infections in the world, so the situation is very critical.

Paul JayNow, we know that Bolsonaro, as I said in the introduction, was more or less a Trump-like climate and pandemic denier, perhaps, even more, a pandemic denier than Trump. Now that he's been diagnosed with COVID, how is that affected public perception of him and the whole issue?

Lorena BarberiaWell, I think right now we're still trying to see what's going to happen with him, correct because he was only diagnosed yesterday and he claims that he has just minor symptoms. And so I think kind of, unfortunately, that part of the problem is throughout the pandemic including this most recent couple o...