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Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic caused massive human suffering just as much as it heightened pre-existing socio-economic and political issues. Brazil, where over 700,000 people perished, offers one of the starkest cases as Black and Indigenous lives were particularly neglected through a hands-off approach. While commonly characterized as mismanagement, we argue that the Bolsonaro administration’s strategy instead represents a case of malgovernance—where deliberate (in)action rather than technical inaptitude accounts for the policies adopted. We draw from detailed account-taking of the government’s actions (and calculated inactions) throughout 2020 to 2022 to offer an elaborate analysis of Brazil’s case through the lens of necropolitics and gore capitalism. We expose how a libertarian self-reliance ethic, with racist undertones, joined together with boundless capital accumulation to create a social Darwinist approach to the handling of COVID-19 in Brazil. The malgovernance of the pandemic thus reveals deeper issues that in time may become manifest in newer, grimmer forms.

Keywords

Health COVID-19 Governance Racism Brazil

Much has been said about the “mismanagement” of the COVID-19 pandemic in different countries (Ruiu, 2020; Guharoy and Krenzelok, 2021; Kapucu and Moynihan, 2021). Communication is said to have been truncated and weak in Italy (Ruiu, 2020); testing capacity and epidemiological surveillance were deemed insufficient in the United States (Guharoy and Krenzelok, 2021), while Trump may not have displayed the “leadership qualities needed” (Kapucu and Moynihan, 2021). Typically underlying such assessments, however, is a technical understanding of politics as management. That decision-makers see the situation as a “problem” and should try to effectively address it is somehow taken for granted, as if governments necessarily embodied a problem-solving attitude unencumbered by political leanings or ideological biases. Yet governance scholarship demonstrates that governing is far from straightforward—policies, decisions and non-decisions are very much guided by actor perceptions, political preferences, principles, and norms (North, 1990; Kooiman and Jentoft, 2009; Rosenau, 2009). The COVID-19 pandemic, though exceptional, does not escape such grips.

Brazil is a case in point when it comes to governmental stance in the face of the pandemic under the Bolsonaro administration. Ortega and Orsini (2020) characterized Brazil’s notorious lack of initiative and disregard for the epidemiological situation as a case of “COVID-19 without government,” which could be interpreted as a form of non-governance of the pandemic. We, however, maintain that Brazil’s federal government did indeed take actions in addition to calculated inactions as part of a strategy in the face of the pandemic. Rather than a case of non-governance or even misgovernance (or mismanagement), we posit that Brazil offers an example of malgovernance: when transgressions are not by accident or mere technical incompetence, but out of deliberate intentions not aligned with the principles of an issue-area (see Bastos Lima and Da Costa, 2022). Akin to malfeasance or intentional crime at the individual level (see Hatchard, 2012), malgovernance runs deeper as a political or ethical issue (Mukhopadhyay, 2013). Indeed, that showed to be the case of Amazon deforestation under the Bolsonaro government in Brazil, deliberately pursued by the country’s own environmental ministry at the time (Bastos Lima and Da Costa, 2022).

In this article, we analyze Brazil’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic through a critical analytical lens, utilizing the concepts of necropolitics and gore capitalism to identify its underlying social and politico-economic approach, which we argue are more persistent problems than the pandemic itself. Gore capitalism refers to brutal forms of exploitative profit-making that not only disregard human suffering but are enacted on the basis of it (Valencia, 2018). Necropolitics, in turn, refers to death itself as an acceptable part—or indeed an objective—of a deliberate policy (Mbembe, 2003). It presumes awareness and, to an extent, purposeful behavior that goes beyond mere omission.

Our assessment engages with the findings of a congressional panel: Brazil’s Parliamentary Inquiry Commission (Comissão Parlamentar de Inquérito, CPI) and its 2021 investigation into the federal government’s management of the pandemic. The CPI was created in April 2021 following a Supreme Court decision with the aim to examine the government’s “actions and inactions” in handling the pandemic. Among the most important conclusions of the investigation was that the federal government, and President Bolsonaro in particular, adopted a strategy that opted to favor the free circulation of the coronavirus with the aim of attaining “herd immunity” through contagion. This decision was based on a sharp distinction between public health and the economy (Hatzikidi, 2020). Aiming to preserve the national economy at all costs, the federal government engaged in a series of discursive and normative practices to encourage Brazilians to return to their previous daily activities. Brazil’s case unfolded in ways that also revealed organized profiteering sustaining the federal government’s choices (e.g., on the choices of vaccine purchases). Gore capitalism became manifest in a market economic logic espoused by deaths, brutality, and a characteristic element of nonchalance to it (see Valencia, 2018: 158)—continuously broadcast through Bolsonaro’s attitude toward sickness and the sick.

The article is structured as follows. In the next section, we elaborate on the concept of necropolitics as an extreme case of malgovernance and its relationship with gore capitalism. Then, we draw from a thorough empirical account of governmental actions and inactions—recorded from media sources throughout 2020-2022—to provide a critical analysis of the Brazilian government’s stance in the face of COVID-19. We then analyze both the politics and the business of letting die, which leads to a multifaceted explanation of what occurred that goes beyond (and deeper) than simple mismanagement. We end with conclusions on the relevance of these findings, some thoughts on the interface between gore capitalism and necropolitics, and recommendations for further research.

When Malgovernance Leads To (Profitable) Deaths: On Necropolitics And Gore Capitalism

Malgovernance is commonly associated with political corruption (Pillay, 2004; Mukhopadhyay, 2013), fraud, other deliberate economic crimes (Sobhan, 2004; Nwabuoku, 2020), or other forms of intentional betrayal of established norms and principles with regard to governance (Bastos Lima and Da Costa, 2022). It differs from non-governance, which may come from a lack of established principles for a new issue-area (Dimitrov et al., 2007; Bastos Lima and Gupta, 2013), and it distinguishes itself from misgovernance inasmuch as transgressions in malgovernance cases happen deliberately. They stem out of perverse intentions—dissonant with socially agreed norms—rather than because of accidental mismanagement or pure technical inability (Bastos Lima and Da Costa, 2022). Malgovernance may at first appear to be a mostly legal or political concern, yet its consequences can be very tangible and may bring about severe negative consequences. Some authors have examined, for example, how the deliberate pursuit of Amazon deforestation by vested economic and political interests in Brazil has created not only environmental destruction or “ecocide” but also dispossession and death for local Indigenous populations and others (Raftopoulos and Morley, 2020; Russo Lopes and Bastos Lima, 2020). Death indeed is not an unusual consequence of malgovernance (see also Sobhan, 2004; Nwabuoku, 2020).

To better understand organized action that knowingly results in deaths, the concept of necropolitics is illuminating. Mbembe (2003) defines it as the ultimate expression of sovereignty and political power: the authority to determine who may live or not, and whose deaths are (to be) socially acceptable. He builds on Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, as the political control over others’ biological expressions, and posits that “the notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of the subjugation of life to the power of death” (Mbembe, 2003: 92).

Most of Mbembe’s work has examined colonial forms of oppression. That includes early examples of American or African natives being racialized, their lives disregarded as animal-like, as well as more recent cases of colonialism such as South Africa’s apartheid regime (Mbembe, 2003: 77-78). Mbembe (2003: 38) argues that “To a large extent, racism is the driver of the necropolitical principle insofar as it stands for organized destruction, for a sacrificial economy, the functioning of which requires, on the one hand, a generalized cheapening of the price of life and, on the other, a habituation to loss.” “Habituation to loss” became a mainstay of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet various authors have raised attention to the fact that such losses were not even: they happened disproportionately among non-whites due to differences in healthcare access and governments’ policy choices, as we shall see in detail in Brazil’s case (see also Hooper, Nápoles, and Pérez-Stable, 2020; Russo Lopes and Bastos Lima, 2020; Mackey et al., 2021).

While acknowledging the racist undertones of Brazil’s and other countries’ responses to COVID-19 (see Yaya et al., 2020), we seek to expand the understanding of necropolitics by demonstrating that it may also have additional motivations and mindsets other than racism. For one, it would appear that social Darwinism, as a gross understanding of “survival of the fittest” intimately linked to contemporary neoliberalism, may also have provided a powerful rationale for necropolitical malgovernance of the pandemic. Iterations of Darwin’s ideas on natural evolution transposed to social contexts to (supposedly) explain and justify economic discrepancies have been commonplace since the 19^th century (Hofstadter, 1944). Leyva (2009), among others, demonstrates how neoliberalism’s emphasis on the self-reliant individual, social competition, and ideas of meritocracy (including one’s own exclusive responsibility for failure or underachievement) has essentially re-enacted the same principles of earlier laissez-faire political economy (see also George, 1999; Singh and Cowden, 2015). These are notions that have come once again to the fore since the 1980s in much of the Western world (including Latin America) and occasionally surface with particular strength in certain policies (Tienken, 2013; Mioto and Dal Prá, 2015). If one indeed bears exclusive responsibility for success or failure, and eventually for one’s own poverty (Kim, Carvalho, and Davis, 2010), why not then for one’s own death? Such naturalized deaths, deemed as acceptable as part of society’s and indeed nature’s inherent dynamic, fall under Mbembe’s explanation of necropolitics as the political concoction of deaths “to which nobody feels any obligation to respond” or “even bears the slightest feelings of responsibility or justice toward” (2003: 38).

In the context of neoliberal capitalism and its continual neglected deaths in the Third World, Valencia (2018: 16) identifies an “episteme of violence” whereby even such extreme consequences of economic activity are normalized. She discusses in depth the violence of drug markets and contracted killings that pervade a widespread underworld of the global economy. Yet Butler (2009) reminds us also of the violence of systematically “letting die”—which becomes even more salient in a pandemic context of easier and accelerated dying. As Moore (2017: 185) puts it, “violence is fundamental to Cheap Nature – revealing capitalism’s greatest ‘inefficiency:’ its destruction and waste of life.” Capital accumulation thrives on the cheapening of resources, including human resources and human life itself (Patel and Moore, 2017). Ultimately, such disregard has led to capitalism in the form of gore, which sees no boundaries with grotesque and even a “parodic element” to it (Valencia, 2018: 19)—as seen, for instance, in Bolsonaro’s supposedly comical impersonation of a COVID-19 patient gasping for air (UOL, 2021).

The Governance Of “Live And Let Die” In Brazil

Malgovernance, in the sense defined above, did not begin with the pandemic. Calculated inactions, obstructive actions, and deliberate mismanagement informed the Bolsonaro government’s policies since its inauguration in January 2019. From disinformation campaigns designed to cast doubt on the reliability of the electoral system (Ruediger et al., 2022) to environmental policies that dismantled protection mechanisms (Bastos Lima and Da Costa, 2022), malgovernance became a key feature of the federal administration. Originating in the same politico-economic approach, its response to the COVID-19 pandemic was no different.

True to its libertarian and social Darwinist colors, the federal government adopted a strategy that favored the free circulation of the coronavirus with the aim to attain “herd immunity” through contagion (Senado Federal, 2021; see also CEPEDISA and USP, 2021; and Reale Júnior et al., 2021). The decision to adopt such a strategy stemmed from a sharp distinction between the economy and public health, as if the welfare of both were unachievable. Fearing devastating consequences on the country’s economy and financial markets (with its concomitant effects on the government’s popularity and strategic alliances) if non-pharmaceutical interventions were to be implemented, the Brazilian government decided to openly oppose them and actively encourage a “return to normality.” This strategy was put into effect through the employment of different discursive and performative practices, as well as discretionary actions (such as presidential decrees).

The initial response to the pandemic outbreak was denial. With cases rising fast, however, President Bolsonaro admitted the virus was out there, but dismissed its gravity by describing COVID-19 as a “little flu” (gripezin ha, resfriadinho) and affirming that it did not justify “scorched-earth policies” such as lockdowns (BBC, 2020). In order to achieve herd immunity through contagion, the government sought ways to convey a feeling of normality instead of alerting the public of a growing global health emergency, so that more people would feel comfortable being outside and going about their businesses as usual (Hatzikidi, 2025). In this regard, the so-called early treatment (tratamento precoce) was essential. Comprised of drugs whose efficacy against COVID-19 was unproven and rather anecdotal (Furlan and Caramelli, 2021: 2), the “early treatment” was advocated as an accessible cure, encouraging the population not to fear exposure to the virus. As soon as March 2020, Bolsonaro posted a video where he announced the promising “discovery” of a “potential cure” for COVID-19 patients, ordering the Armed Forces’ laboratory to increase their production of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine. Other “magic bullets,” such as a nasal spray for which a diplomatic mission was dispatched to Israel to negotiate its acquisition, were also touted as available coronavirus treatments and helped encourage Brazilians to resume their daily activities as before the pandemic.

To defend their opposition to restrictions on mobility and to protective measures such as social distancing or the use of face masks, the Brazilian president and members of his cabinet presented such restrictions as infringements of the citizens’ rights to free circulation. Libertarian discourses of freedom and self-reliance became omnipresent to underscore the approach taken. “Totalitarian social control is not the remedy for any crisis. Let’s not make democracy and freedom one more victim of COVID-19,” then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ernesto Araújo, known for peddling “The Great Reset” conspiracy theory (Slobodian, 2020), said at a UN Special Session on the pandemic in December 2020 (Ministério das Relações Exteriores - Brasil, 2020; Hatzikidi 2023). In this light, the issue was not to preserve public health but to uphold freedom: “This is not a dictatorship, this is a democracy,” Bolsonaro declared in a nationally broadcast interview that mayors and governors who imposed protective measures may be acting undemocratically (Lindner and Turtelli, 2020). On that same occasion, he also insisted on each citizen’s individual responsibility for protecting their own health and taking care of those in their families who fall ill (“those responsible for my 92-year-old mother are her half a dozen children”), repudiating the state’s public healthcare responsibilities. “Unfortunately, there will be some deaths. Patience,” he concluded (Lindner and Turtelli, 2020).

In the spirit of “staying positive” in the hope that the virus would disappear on its own, the president optimistically predicted the end of the pandemic on several occasions (“the worst is over,” in May 2020; “Brazil is edging the very end of the pandemic,” in December 2020), while cases were soaring and the country would register half a million deaths from COVID-19 by June 2021. In a rather desperate attempt to convince the Brazilian population that things were improving when they were not, the Ministry of Health stopped publishing a running total of coronavirus infections and deaths in June 2020, showing instead only the number of patients who had recovered. It was “for the country’s best,” Bolsonaro affirmed (Machado et al., 2020), before a Supreme Court decision forced the government to resume the dissemination of the tally.

When optimism did not seem to yield results and the pandemic was still considered a public health emergency by most Brazilians, President Bolsonaro would switch to a more aggressive tone: “Afraid of what? Face it!,” he said at a gathering with supporters in Rio Grande do Sul State. “Death is everyone’s destiny,” he would declare, “this virus is like rain – it will get you.” Though sometimes reluctant or simply blasé when acknowledging the inevitability of deaths as something natural, other times, social Darwinist preaching would become overt. During a visit to Mato Grosso State, Bolsonaro scolded those who insisted on social isolation arguing that this was “talk of the weak” (UOL, 2020). In Gore Capitalism, Valencia (2018: 34) recognizes macho masculinity as a characteristic trait of Mexican—and, we would argue, broader Latin American—sociocultural background to necropolitical practices, quoting Monsiváis (1981: 9) on how machismo came to include a posture of “indifference when faced with death.” Along similar lines, the theme of virility was frequently mobilized by the Brazilian president in his attempts to mock or intimidate those who resisted a “return to normality:” “We need to stop being a country of sissies,” Bolsonaro notoriously said in November 2020 (O Globo, 2020).

Finally, pandemic malgovernance involved discrediting, and even delaying, the acquisition of vaccines and the national immunization program (Gaspar, 2021). According to the congressional panel’s investigations, the federal government ignored or rejected initial vaccine offers made by the Pfizer pharmaceutical company (Senado Federal, 2021). Indeed, while insisting on his unwillingness to politicize the pandemic, the president spread disinformation about the safety and efficacy of vaccines—especially of the CoronaVac, developed in a collaboration between the Chinese Sinovac Biotech pharmaceutical and Brazil’s Butantan Institute. Bolsonaro dismissively called it “Doria’s Chinese vaccine,” in an attack against São Paulo’s then-governor and political rival João Doria. Bolsonaro repeatedly affirmed he would not get vaccinated (while decreeing secrecy on his vaccination card) and instilled fear and mistrust among the population by spreading conspiracy rumors about vaccination side-effects, which included transforming into an alligator, contracting AIDS or cancer, and having DNA alterations that could change one’s gender. Meanwhile, negotiations for the acquisition of the Indian Covaxin vaccine were strikingly expeditious even though the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency (Anvisa) had not yet approved it. Each of its doses would cost USD 5 more than Pfizer’s, and the agreement would involve the intermediation of a private Brazilian enterprise suspected of involvement in corruption schemes in the past (Senado Federal, 2021: 211; 238-241; 283-383).

A Racist Sacrificial Economy

In his testimony before Brazil’s congressional panel, epidemiologist Pedro Hallal argued that four in every five deaths that occurred in Brazil would have been avoided if the country were at the global average mortality rate. According to his estimate, more than 400,000 lives could have been saved (Senado Federal, 2021: 639, 968-968). As the investigations brought to light, much could have been done differently to minimize rather than exacerbate the coronavirus’s impact on public health in one of the hardest-hit countries.

Such excess deaths were not evenly spread across the Brazilian population. Vulnerable groups that are food-insecure, live in shantytowns, or do not have adequate access to healthcare such as many Black and Indigenous Brazilians suffered disproportionately from governmental neglect (Russo Lopes and Bastos Lima, 2020; Arruti et al., 2021). Even in Brazil’s richest city, São Paulo, the mortality rate among blacks was twice as high as that of whites (Rede Nossa São Paulo, 2021). Dos Santos et al. (2023) found significant racial disparities in COVID-19 statistics across Brazil, with white Brazilians experiencing 40-50% fewer excess deaths per 100,000 people than their Black or Indigenous counterparts in much of the country. It is their lives, therefore, that disproportionately become “disposable” for a “sacrificial economy,” to use Mbembe’s (2003) terminology.

Besides structural racism, we must also consider financial gain and (gore) capital accumulation as a malgovernance drive. This is where denialism (negacionismo) met what became known in Brazil as negocionismo (from the Portuguese word for business, negócio). As the congressional panel investigations revealed, support of the government’s pandemic strategy by the different stakeholders more often than not carried an element of monetization. Many social media and digital influencers, for example, received large sums of money to disseminate conspiracy theories and disinformation about the pandemic (Fleck and Martins, 2021). At the same time, sales from hydroxychloroquine, chloroquine, and ivermectin—three of the drugs included in the “early treatment”—saw an astronomical percentage increase in 2020 compared to 2019 (Senado Federal, 2021: 122). Some of the companies that distributed such drugs, such as Vitamedic, were also sponsoring medical associations and individual doctors who recommended and helped disseminate the “early treatment” (Senado Federal, 2021: 115-119). Of course, the network of parasitic economies that benefited and profited from the pandemic does not stop there; land invaders, illegal miners, and loggers also greatly benefited as the incentive to invade environmental reserves and Indigenous or Afro-Brazilian quilombola territories, alongside the deliberate negligence of the federal government to protect and attend to those traditional populations, made trespassers and the coronavirus spread in tandem, producing devastating effects (Senado Federal, 2021: 526).

It is thus critical to see how in contexts of widespread racial and socioeconomic inequalities the neoliberal politics of “live and let die” becomes a machine that the pandemic fueled but did not create. If capital accumulation already incurs the cheapening of nature and of human lives (Moore, 2017; Patel and Moore, 2017), in its gore form we witness an ever-expanding “episteme of violence” that becomes pervasive in a society habituated to death (Valencia, 2018: 22). The laissez-faire ideology with emphasis on the self-reliant individual thus becomes one of laissez-mourir [let die], with tints of social Darwinism that purports to give it all an air of naturalness and inevitability. Conversely, it is intervention in any form— such as social distancing efforts—that in turn becomes branded as unwarranted, authoritarian or immoral for restricting (business) freedom. There are to be no impediments to money making, neither institutional nor ethical, which is precisely how neoliberalism (with its emphasis on a minimal state limited to the protection of private property [Bockman, 2013]) thrives in an increasingly desensitized society. The parodic element of gore capitalism contributes to the latter by making its violence, suffering and death appear “anecdotal” or even “comical” (Valencia, 2018: 19, 158), as regularly seen through Bolsonaro’s performance during the pandemic.

Notwithstanding that, it is important to acknowledge that Brazil’s malgovernance of COVID-19 faced strong resistance and contestation from citizens, politicians, civil society and state organizations, as well as from sectors in the judiciary and legislative branches of power. Such efforts often succeeded in curtailing the president’s discretionary powers and compelling him to comply with measures taken to tackle the health crisis. For example, the Supreme Court decided that local governments have the autonomy to determine non-pharmaceutical interventions during the pandemic; Congress overruled Bolsonaro’s veto against the compulsory use of masks in schools, churches, and commerce and it pressured him to sanction a decision in favor of an emergency aid payment addressed to specific socio-economic groups; and the majority of mayors and governors ignored a presidential decree which included hair salons, barber shops, gyms, and churches among the “essential services” that were to remain open during the pandemic. The president was also repeatedly fined for flouting local health regulations and received staunch resistance from national health agencies and research institutes such as Butantan and Anvisa.

Therefore, what we witness is political tension between an advancing capitalist logic (that increasingly does not shy away from its gore expressions and attempts to normalize necropolitics) and some level of institutional and societal resistance to it. We show that gore capitalism need not be specific to a sector (e.g., drug cartels or organ trafficking), nor does necropolitics depend on a pro-active state apparatus creating death-worlds for racialized populations in either colonial or apartheid settings (see Mbembe, 2003). Rather, we posit that capitalism in unequal societies ridden with structural racism such as Brazil’s (Almeida, 2019) per se creates necropolitical death-worlds where vulnerable non-whites perish—if not from illness, then from food, violence, and other crises. Social Darwinist self-reliance, dominant in the neoliberal ethic, then comes as a cruel touch to assign blame to the victims themselves, by inculcating libertarian values to obfuscate the structural reasons for inequality, muffle resistance, naturalize death, and try to make society antagonize state actions to address or redress such inequalities.

Conclusion

This paper has offered a critical account of the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil by the Bolsonaro government. Drawing upon the concepts of necropolitics and gore capitalism, we argue that it was a clear case of malgovernance—that is, not simply a result of mismanagement, but of harm done with intent due to ethical and political choices not in line with health promotion or the protection of human lives. Through a detailed analysis of the Bolsonaro government’s stance and its calculated (in)actions in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak, we have exposed how the continual drive of capital accumulation and a policy of letting (the most vulnerable) die underscored Brazil’s excessive mortality rate, leading to the staggering figure of more than 700,000 deaths by April 2023, most of which could have been avoided.

Underlying such a hands-off approach have been vested interests and a neoliberal ideology of self-reliance and no state interference (in the name of individual freedom), with elements of social Darwinism becoming explicit. As capitalism advances knowing ever fewer ethical boundaries in a context of the cheapening of human life, we show that it is the lives of the most economically vulnerable, particularly Black and Indigenous people, that become treated as disposable—with their fate viewed as a fault of their own. A campaign of denying the seriousness of the disease and the spreading of disinformation on treatments and vaccines were all part of the far-right playbook of performative politics. Ultimately, however, we argue that the nonchalant stance of “get back to work” and “stop complaining” in the face of thousands of daily deaths not only constitutes a mass-murderous necropolitics—it also exposes the cruel ethic of boundless capital accumulation. Laissez-faire thus acquired the contours of gore capitalism, where dying becomes part and parcel of money making, and human suffering is mocked rather than addressed. The COVID-19 pandemic, therefore, may have been just an occasion for the heightened manifestation of pre-established chronic social and economic problems, which lie in waiting for the next crisis.

Footnotes

Mairon G. Bastos Lima is a Senior Research Fellow at SEI (Stockholm Environment Institute). Katerina Hatzikidi is a Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Tübingen. Karen da Costa is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Global Studies at Gothenburg University.

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Gore Capitalism and Necropolitics in Brazil’s Malgovernance of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Keywords

When Malgovernance Leads To (Profitable) Deaths: On Necropolitics And Gore Capitalism

The Governance Of “Live And Let Die” In Brazil

A Racist Sacrificial Economy

Conclusion

Footnotes

References