Brazil’s war on COVID-19: Crisis,not conflict—Doctors,not generals

Abstract

This commentary first documents the ways in which President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration has evoked securitized discursive strategies that frame Brazil’s national response to COVID-19 as a matter of defense instead of public health. We then ask: What does it mean to talk about the virus and the ways to address it through war-framings? We argue that the Bolsonaro administration has framed the COVID-19 pandemic as an extra-territorial threat in an effort to create internal stability while failing to handle the matter effectively. Such politically motivated spatial framings inhibit an effective response in Brazil and pose a severe threat to public health. Once COVID-19 becomes securitized, the response is framed by the military bureaucracy rather than public health authorities, resulting in dangerous consequences.

It is remarkable how in their actions of screening, containment, and control, the health authority was practically indissociable from the police authority.

—Nicolau Sevcenko (1984)

Introduction

In this commentary, we present our deconstructions of the Bolsonaro administration’s evolving COVID-19 public agenda through an analysis of political discourse and recent COVID-19 media coverage. Klotz and Lynch (2014: 95) argue that: ‘Public discourse…may provide better evidence for the articulation of interests because it reveals normative rationales for policy…it necessarily conceptualizes language as actions, not simply as evidence’. Our conceptual contribution lies in demonstrating how security discourse mobilizes different perceptions of threat—known and unknown—to constitute a shared national identity and prioritize military responses. Put differently, military jargon shapes spatial security imaginaries in order to depict the COVID-19 pandemic as war abroad to project a sense of internal stability at home.

First deny: Mishandling the COVID-19 outbreak

Bolsonaro’s initial response to COVID-19 consisted of downplaying the outbreak to reduce potential economic fallout, which led to a delay in effective response in Brazil. Days before the World Health Organization categorized COVID-19 as a pandemic on 11 March, Bolsonaro mocked the virus. The president announced that concerns ‘were being overstated’ and that ‘other flu have killed more’. Then, a day later, amidst speculation that Bolsonaro himself was infected, the president addressed the country in a live stream while wearing a mask since he had come in contact with multiple staffers that tested positive.

Bolsonaro’s inconsistent position on, and confused handling of, the 15 March pro-government demonstrations further exemplifies the extent to which COVID-19 has been mishandled in Brazil. To begin with, the president shared a video calling for demonstrations against Congress and the Supreme Court in favor of the Military, and later even summoned supporters through official state outlets. Bolsonaro then stated that demonstrations needed to be reconsidered, but he failed to establish concrete measures. On 15 March, while supporters assembled across Brazil against public health guidelines, including those of Bolsonaro’s health minister (who was later fired), the president, who was still suspected to be infected, went out to embrace pro-government demonstrators in Brasilia. When facing backlash, Bolsonaro insisted that he had stated demonstrators should stay home and lied about the video’s date. Mishandling grew as the president minimized the symptoms of high-ranking officials with COVID-19 and continued to call the virus a ‘little flu’.

Then securitize: Mismanaging the COVID-19 pandemic

With time, Bolsonaro’s administration began to manage the pandemic through the lens of friend-or-foe (Fidler, 2014). Bolsonaro’s cabinet, one-third of which are military officials, openly stated in a COVID-19 press release that Brazil is at ‘war’ and must ‘combat’ an ‘invisible enemy’ (TV BrasilGov, 2020). War-framings position ‘friends’ like healthcare workers and hospital staff as ‘soldiers going to the battlefront’ against named and unnamed ‘foes’ (TV BrasilGov, 2020).

Military framings have directed the Bolsonaro administration’s messaging and response to COVID-19 from the beginning. As the defense minister put it: ‘this is a war…with an invisible enemy…and when there is a war, Brazil and Brazilians can rely on the Armed Forces’ (Record News, 2020). He went on to claim: ‘the first operation concerning the coronavirus was the rescue of our Brazilians who were in Wuhan, and the Armed Forces, along with other ministries, was present’ (Record News, 2020). Herein, Brazil’s opening response to COVID-19 was a military operation to ‘rescue’ Brazilians from Wuhan province in an Armed Forces aircraft and take them to an Air Force base for 15 days of quarantine. The heavily militarized affair featured a recorded message of Bolsonaro stating: ‘You have just entered Brazilian airspace. Welcome back to your country, our Brazil. No one was left behind. We are a single people, a single race. We are brothers. Our Armed Forces, the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Health, Congress and Senate, as well as Anvisa [the National Sanitary Surveillance Agency], have worked tirelessly so that this mission could be crowned a success’ (Poder360, 2020). Bolsonaro’s recording illustrates how the administration framed the effort to repatriate Brazilians in Wuhan through a nationalistic repertoire, while also placing the Armed Forces first and public health authorities second. The repatriation efforts’ messaging focused on the urgency of removing Brazilian nationals from China and was widely disseminated by Brazilian media as a ‘rescue’ from ‘enemy territory’.

The Bolsonaro administration’s response to COVID-19 has involved aligning specific foreign enemies abroad—China and Venezuela—with the so-called ‘invisible enemy’. As Bolsonaro put it, response measures consisted of ‘closing the borders, in particular the one that causes us great worry, with Venezuela’ (TV BrasilGov, 2020), with which Brazil closed its frontiers first without any public health reason. When Chinese flights became restricted without holding other infected countries to the same criteria, China was tacitly framed as a foe. This progressed into COVID-19 being referred to as the ‘Chinese virus’, which became part of the national debate when Eduardo Bolsonaro, the president’s son and a Congressman, retweeted a far-right thread blaming China for COVID-19 (BolsonaroSP, 2020). Brazil’s leading trade partner is attacked here in an attempt to deflect attention from the administration’s mismanagement of COVID-19.

On 23 March, President Bolsonaro’s Chief of Staff, General Braga Netto, was placed in charge of ‘centralizing’ and ‘coordinating’ COVID-19 actions. In this, COVID-19 security discourse became security practice. Later that same day, the general spoke alongside the health minister, who, until then, was in charge of all federal government communication on COVID-19. In such a way, discussing COVID-19 in terms of war has literally led defense authorities to be in charge of handling the pandemic instead of public health authorities.

‘War’ against a not-so-invisible ‘enemy’

We can convey the utmost gravity of the COVID-19 pandemic without war-framings (Ingram, 2005). A ‘conflict’ implies an enemy threat that ought to be left to the preserve of an empowered few and handled in secret (Buzan et al., 1998). By contrast, a ‘crisis’ demands urgency and priority without restricting participation, thereby allowing for broad open engagement, diversified expertise, and transparency (Kay and Williams, 2009). A conflict anticipates an enemy’s defeat, whereas no party need be defeated in a crisis. Beyond ‘combating’ the COVID-19 pandemic, we must take care not to depict specific Others as ‘enemies’. Yet, the question remains: In what ways and to what extent does Bolsonaro’s administration benefit from securitizing COVID-19?

Bolsonaro’s administration first portrayed the COVID-19 pandemic as an ‘invisible enemy’, seeking to justify the government’s non-active role concerning public health. These statements allude to Donald Rumsfeld’s speech on the ‘unknown unknowns’ made while serving as US President George W Bush’s Secretary of Defense. The very idea that there is an ‘invisible enemy’ or an ‘unknown known’ instantiates the need for a national enemy in order to pursue internal cohesion and legitimize the administration’s militaristic measures. Subsequently, COVID-19 has been portrayed as a not-so-invisible enemy aligned with specific ideological foreign enemies. In naming and attacking these perceived enemies, Bolsonaro’s administration has framed the COVID-19 threat as an external Other (Bashford, 2014), to create a sense of immediate detachment from danger. The tacit implication is that ‘everything is fine’ in the homeland, diverting the focus from internal problems and the ineffective response to COVID-19.

This rhetorical trajectory is a means of framing COVID-19 in terms of the imaginative geographies of war (Gregory, 2010) when the domain of public health ought to be prioritized instead (Kay and Williams, 2009). Such a device enables political actors to stabilize the representations of an ‘unknown’ threat in terms of nationalistic and territorial discourse. Evoking military jargon spreads a sense of ‘geopolitical anxiety’ to replace ‘pandemic anxiety’ (Ingram, 2008), which instigates a need for national cohesion to face such an ‘unknown’ threat. These securitized discursive framings have enabled Bolsonaro’s administration to reframe the ‘unknown known’. Imaginative geographies stabilize the perception of threat through a referential enemy and location—in this case, China and Venezuela. Such an attempt to project stability is only possible by framing the COVID-19 pandemic as a conflict, imperiling a matter of public health by envisioning it through the lens of war.

Whereas the imaginative geographies of COVID-19 in Brazil situate the threat abroad, discourses of shared territory and ‘race’ produce proximity by referencing a collective identity, as portrayed in Bolsonaro’s recording played to Brazilians ‘rescued’ from Wuhan. This becomes particularly strategic in a moment of strong criticism of the administration’s handling of the pandemic. Klotz and Lynch (2014: 83) emphasize how identity and security imaginaries are intertwined, since ‘identities imply subject positions which empower certain speakers to define collective interests’. In this, the Bolsonaro administration’s effort to securitize COVID-19 discourse and response can be interpreted as an attempt to bring a sense of domestic peace and economic stability. Yet efforts to depict a peaceful homeland are only possible by portraying turmoil abroad.

Conclusion

By drawing attention to the dangers of discussing COVID-19 through war-framings, our intervention analyzes how and why national governments like the Bolsonaro administration in Brazil benefit from evoking security discourse during a pandemic. The point we have made is that COVID-19 messaging is crucial because it has implications for how we respond to the pandemic.

We advocate that Brazil’s national response to COVID-19 be framed as a crisis, not as a conflict. In more direct terms, we contend that doctors and public health authorities—not generals—ought to oversee Brazil’s response to COVID-19. More so, this commentary serves as a warning that a lack of effective medical response may lead to the perceived need for a militaristic response. While Sevcenko (1984) suggests that ‘the health authority [is] practically indissociable from the police authority’, Brazil’s response to COVID-19 underscores the need for scholars to critically examine how public health crises are unnecessarily framed through the rhetoric of war to serve militaristic agendas.