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Covid: the global political impact

‘New wave of volatility’: Covid stirs up

grievances in Latin America
by Tom Phillips in Fortaleza, Ed Augustin in Havana and Dan
Collyns in Lima
People take part in a protest against the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s handling of the Covid pandemic in São Paulo.
Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Fri 6 Aug 2021 13.51 BST

For Filipe da Silva, hitting the streets was about staying alive.

“Unfortunately, Brazil elected a murderer,” the 28-year-old declared as he and

thousands of fellow protesters streamed through the seaside city of Fortaleza last
month to decry the president’s bungling of a Covid epidemic that has killed more
than half a million people.

For Eduardo Ramos, joining the largest protests in Cuba’s post-revolution history
was about demanding political freedom and voicing anger at the hardships created
by the pandemic.

“Millions of people like me have lost their youth,” complained the 18-year-old
Cuban, who scrapes by hawking avocados and mangoes after Covid robbed him of
his $20-a-week (£14) job collecting bus fares.

Silva and Ramos were marching against systems of different stripes: Jair Bolsonaro’s
far-right administration in Brazil and the communist dictatorship of Cuba.

But both are expressions of what many suspect is a new wave of Covid-fuelled social
and political turbulence that is starting to sweep the region in response to the
ravages of a pandemic that has officially killed nearly 1.4 million people in Latin
America and the Caribbean.

“People are pissed and they don’t have a lot of options,” said Christopher Sabatini, a
senior fellow for Latin America at the Chatham House thinktank. “As people’s
quality of life deteriorates, political stability also deteriorates.”

Sylvia Colombo, a Brazilian correspondent who covers the region from Argentina for
the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, said she was steeling herself for
“transformations and new tensions” in the coming months.
Funeral workers carry out burials of Covid victims at Inhaúma cemetery in Rio de Janeiro. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty
Images

During last year’s lockdown in Buenos Aires, Colombo wrote a book about the
atypical upheaval that had gripped the region on the eve of the pandemic, from
Venezuela and Bolivia to Chile. She called 2019 Latin America’s “year of wrath”.

Covid, which first struck Latin America in February 2020, largely smothered that
indignation, as countries went into shutdown and protesters into retreat. But now it
is back, with demonstrations also erupting in Paraguay, Guatemala and Colombia,
where at least 44 protesters have been killed since the start of unrest in April.

“Everything suggests there’s going to be a new wave [of volatility]. We’re already
seeing some ripples,” said Colombo, who believed Covid had exposed “Latin
America’s pre-existing conditions” – including weak health and welfare systems,
profound inequality and a huge and vulnerable informal workforce.

“If on one hand the pandemic forced people off the streets, on other hand it
exacerbated all of these problems,” Colombo said of a region that has 8.4% of the
global population but has suffered 32% of Covid deaths.

So far the most unexpected convulsion has come in Cuba, where thousands took to
the streets on 11 July for what were the most widespread protests since Fidel
Castro’s 1959 revolution. The dissenters, who mobilised in every city and every
province, had a mishmash of grievances, including the lack of political freedoms
under one-party rule. But many were in part driven by the human impact of Cuba’s
worst economic slump since the early 1990s, when the disintegration of the Soviet
Union plunged it into a “special period” of hunger and deprivation.

Thousands join rare anti-government protests in Cuba as economy struggles

02:04

Thousands join rare anti-government protests in Cuba – video

When Cuba confirmed its first coronavirus cases in March last year, the Caribbean
island was already reeling from Donald Trump’s decision to reverse Barack Obama’s
easing of the trade embargo and ratchet up sanctions. Coupled with Covid, which
has decimated the local tourism industry, those supercharged sanctions caused the
economy to contract 11% last year and have cost the state billions of dollars of
annual revenue. The fall in imports created by this cash crunch has led to realities
unimaginable a few years ago: last weekend Ramos spent five hours queueing for
two packs of hotdogs. Queueing for hours or even days is now part of life for
millions of Cubans. “Things were better before because food wasn’t scarce, and the
queues weren’t like this,” Ramos said.

In Brazil, there is also widespread anger over the Covid-battered economy, the
estimated 8m jobs lost during the pandemic and the resurgence of hunger. “This is a
humanitarian crisis,” said Júlio Lancellotti, a Catholic priest who has been battling
to feed malnourished citizens on the streets of the country’s richest city, São Paulo.

Public indignation has been amplified by the scale of the death toll, second only to
that of the US, allegations of vaccine-related corruption, and the denialist response
of a president who has refused to be vaccinated and called coronavirus a “little flu”.

“He’s indecent. He’s immoral. He is incompatible with civilisation. He is an

outrage,” seethed Alfredo Marques, a 62-year-old lawyer who joined the recent anti-
Bolsonaro rally in Fortaleza, ripping off his face mask to lambast his country’s far-
right leader.

It remains unclear what, if any, the long-term political consequences of this

fledgling outbreak of dissent will be.

Hundreds of Cuban objectors have reportedly been detained, as the government

battles to prevent repeat protests and retain control. In Brazil, Bolsonaro’s ratings
have plummeted and hundreds of thousands have repeatedly taken to the streets
since late May. But the country is not due to choose its next leader until October
2022, by which time the political and economic landscape may have shifted
dramatically.

The pandemic’s most tangible political impact has come in Peru, which has been
deeply traumatised by coronavirus and has suffered by far the world’s highest
recorded death rate per capita.

The epidemic compounded an already profound political crisis in Peru and fuelled a
dramatic increase of poverty as a strict lockdown made millions jobless, forcing
thousands in the coastal capital to migrate, some by foot, to their home towns and
villages in the Andes and Amazon. As Covid ravaged the country, claiming nearly
200,000 lives, some citizens were forced to buy overpriced oxygen tanks for
suffocating relatives as the chronically underfunded health system, worsened by
corruption, was swamped.

As elections approached this year, grief-stricken and angry Peruvians disappointed

by their incumbent centrist leaders opted, sometimes out of desperation, for
candidates with more extreme, anti-systemic messages, in a fragmented political
field. In June, Pedro Castillo, a leftist teacher who had never held public office, was
elected president – a political earthquake many suspect would not have occurred
without Covid.
Protesters in Lima, Peru, demonstrate against the election of Pedro Castillo. Photograph: Kevin Limbher Vega Tinta/Medialys
Images/Rex/Shutterstock

“All the [past] presidents made promises and in the end they just got rich
themselves and they took Peru’s wealth to sell it to other countries,” said Elizabeth
Altamirano Campos, one of the rural voters who helped catapult Castillo into office.

Javier Torres, the editor of Noticias Ser news website, said the pandemic had
aggravated Peru’s underlying political crisis and deep inequality, paving the way for
the shock election.

“Castillo is a product of that,” Torres said, adding that the far right could also easily
have prevailed as voters rebelled. “The pitch we’ve been playing on is not fit for
purpose any more,” Torres said. “People are looking for something different – on the
extremes.”

Filipe da Silva, an artist and LGBTQ+ activist from Brazil’s Unified Black Movement,
said he was unsure what his country’s future held. He worried the “complicity” of
many congresspeople meant the main demand of protesters – Bolsonaro’s
impeachment – was far from guaranteed.

But as protesters across Latin America geared up for their next mobilisation, the
civil rights activist vowed to stay on the streets battling a health emergency that has
disproportionately affected black Brazilians.

“We’ve lost so many people. It’s heartbreaking,” Silva said. “This project of death
must be stopped.”
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