Showing posts tagged as: Brazil
Brasília, Brazil’s Modernist Capital in the Interior: An Unliveable Utopian Showcase?
Brazil’s bold experiment in creating a new capital city from scratch in five years, Brasília, won much praise as a modern architectural marvel upon its inauguration in 1960. With project town planner Lúcio Costa’s radical, artistic urban plan (the Plano Piloto) for the central city in the shape of a bird in flight⦑a⦒, and the symmetry and spacing of architect Oscar Niemeyer’s stark white, curvilinear, futuristic structures with sculptural silhouettes⦑b⦒, Brasília was heralded as “a modern utopia (expressing) optimism and trust in the future” and a demonstration of Brazil’s capacity for modernising progress (Dr Steffen Lehmann, cited in ‘60 Years Ago, The Modernist City of Brasília Was Built From Scratch’, Stefanie Waldek, AD, 21-Aug-2020, www.architecturaldigest.com).
Bland homogeneity? Detractors of the futuristic urban ‘miracle’ in Brazil’s central west however have been many and varied. Brasília’s inner city residential zones comprising superquadras (“superblocks”) were characterised by French writer Simone de Beauvoir as all exuding “the same air of elegant monotony”. The city’s large open lawns, plazas, and fields have been likened to wastelands. Structures intended 65 years ago to represent the future, now crumbling, accentuate this sense of decay and obsolescence (‘Brasília, national capital, Brazil’, Britannica, www.britannica.com)
↟ Highway hell? (Photo: BBC)The car is king! In a city built for the automobile, Brasília is uber-pedestrian-unfriendly. “With long distances and harrowing six-lane highways connected by spaghetti junctions, Brasília presents challenges for walkers” (Lonely Planet) – which is good news at least for the city’s car hire firms! Transport options for the non-driver in Brasília have been meagre…the subway was basically an afterthought; footpaths are confined to a scanty few, where they exist they are dwarfed by the criss-crossing gargantuan highways; the first set of traffic lights in Brasília didn’t get installed until the 1970s (‘Lost and Found – Brasília’, Blueprint, ABC Radio (broadcast 21-Jan-2022).
Source: airshipdaily.comA lack of a pulse? Some critics point to the Brasília lifestyle’s deficit in “humanness”. The city centre is bereft of “the typical street life of other traditional Brazilian cities”. It is merely a place to work…night life is unstimulating, city workers tend not to hang around after hours, few stay to “live and play in the Pilot Plan” centre (Kobi Karp in Waldek). According to Prof. Ricky Burdett (LSE), Brasília flounders on the basics of what constitutes a city…no messy streets, no people living above shops, no mixed use neighbourhoods – rather it’s “a sort of office campus for a government” (‘Niemeyer’s Brasilia: Does it work as a city?”, Robin Banerji, BBC News, 06-Dec-2012, www.bbc.com). The scope for improvement is hamstrung as a result of restrictions on development and expansion in accordance with the city’s world heritage covenants.
↟ Taguatinga, one of Brasilia’s irregular satellites (Photo: Frederico Holanda/ Researchgate)The creation of two segregated communities Overpopulation is part of the Brasília problem…designed as a city for 500,000 people, it has five times that many residents today, hence the growth of satellite towns which the poorer residents of Brasília have been shunted into⦑c⦒. Allocation of resources is another…whereas in the centre everything was zoned, over-organised city blocks to the point of impracticality, the satellite towns have been neglected and left in a disorganised state without adequate infrastructure, services and civic spaces (Britannica; ‘Lost and Found – Brasília’). Accentuating the imbalance between the centre and the outliers, only 300,000 of the 2.5 million Brasiliense live in the Pilot Plan area where the jobs are!
Source: modern diplomacy.eu”A monument to technocratic rationalism” One of the biggest savagings of Brasília’s architectural merit came from trenchant art critic Robert Hughes who brutally summed up the capital city’s shortcomings: “a ceremonial slum…this is what you get when you think in terms of space rather than place and about single rather than multiple meanings, when you design for political aspirations and not real human needs. Miles of jerry-built, platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens” (The Shock of the New, Ep. 4 (BBC documentary, 1980). The “utopian” city of Niemeyer and Costa, lauded at its onset as ilha da fantasia has acquired other, less glowing epithets such as “concrete carbuncle” (‘fast:track’, BBC News). For Jane Jacobs (Death and Life of American Cities, the failure of Brasília and other such utopian dreamscapes was in making the mistake of trying to substitute art for life – with unworkable consequences for the inhabitants. Brasília has also come under fire on environmental grounds, the impact of its footprint has contributed to the deforestation of the Amazon region.
↟ Niemeyer’s Alvorada (Presidential) Palace, Brasília (Photo: wikimapia.org) Postscript: the whole purpose of Brazil’s new capital in the interior for President Kubitschek⦑d⦒ and the urban planners was to create a modern city that avoided the excesses of Río and São Paulo (overcrowded slums, the preponderance of favelas). Costa’s “grand vision” envisaged a new urban centre that was deliberate, orderly, rational, dignified and systematic. In practice, the endgame to the myopic focus on the Plano Piloto was a city of inequality (with a good quality of life only for a minority of the inhabitants), congestion and urban sprawl (‘Inside Brazil’s ‘cautionary tale’ for utopian urbanises’, Diana Budds, Curbed, 07-Jun-2019, www.archive.curbed.com). Rather than being transformed into the shining exception, Brasília is “a mirror of Brazilian society…those with power live in a little island or cocoon. Those who don’t—which is the majority—live on the outside” (Prof. Vincente Del Rio).
—————————————-——— ⦑a⦒ alternately it has been likened to the Crucifix, to an airplane or even to a bow and arrow ⦑b⦒ and avant-garde landscape design by Roberto B Marx ⦑c⦒ 90% of the Brasiliense, in the lower or lowest income brackets, live outside the centre in satellite towns ⦑d⦒ the politician in power who initiated the Brasília project in the mid-1950s
The Americas, Pandemic on the Back of Poverty: Mexico and Venezuela
While Brazil has sown up the unenviable title of the worst coronavirus hotspot in Latin America, Mexico has steered a similar course to disaster in the face of the pandemic. As Brazil’s coronavirus count climbs to well over 1.1 million confirmed cases and closing in on 53 thousand fatalities, the galloping toll in Mexico—60% the size of Brazil population-wise—now registers 191,410 cases and 23,377 deaths (as at 24-June-2020).
(Source: www.lonelyplanet.com) False security? Among some Mexicans there seem to be a sense that the country’s demographics which are skewed toward the young—around 85% of the population is under 55—may act as a barrier against coronavirus. This confidence may be misplaced due to several factors: pre-existing health conditions in Mexico which affect younger cohorts as well—make the population more vulnerable to the ravages of coronavirus, as the table below indicates [‘Many young Mexican at risk from Covid-19’, (James Blears), Vatican News, 31-March-2020, www.vaticannews.va]. the death-rate from COVID-19 among maquiladora workers in the border region of Baja California was found to be 25 times higher for the age bracket 40-49 than in the corresponding San Diego County, [‘COVID-19 killing young maquiladora workers, study shows’, (Salvador Rivera), Border Report, 11-Jun-2020, www.borderreport.com].
A league of populist leader ‘bedfellows’?
The way Mexico under its president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has approached the pandemic has disturbing parallels with that of Brazil’s leader Bolsonaro, and with the US under Trump. Despite a difference of ideological orientation—Obrador (who’s commonly known within Mexico as AMLO) is a Left-populist whereas Bolsonaro and Trump are Right-populists—the Mexican leader has pursued much the same course with similar outcomes. AMLO’s government was slow to engage in the fight against COVID-19 in the critical early period. The virus apparently entered Mexico via overseas returnees, primarily wealthier Mexicans returning from business trips to Italy and skiing holidays in Colorado, and then spread to low-income groups [‘Mexico’s Central de Abasto: How coronavirus tore through Latin America’s largest market’, (Mary Beth Sheridan), Washington Post, 21-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com].
🔺 AMLO, pressing the flesh (Photo: Mexico’s Presidency Handouts/Reuters)
How not to contain a pandemic Like his US and Brazilian counterparts, AMLO justified his inaction by being dismissive of the disease, continually downplaying its risk to people, and he was negligent by example. After the outbreak Obrador toured the country, holding rallies sans face masks, nonchalantly meeting and greeting supporters, freely shaking hands, embracing people and even kissing them✱. The president’s advice to the Venezuelan people was simply to continue to “live life as usual”…until late March he was encouraging people to go out, attend fiestas, dine in restaurants and go shopping, airports remained open◘ – a clear indicator that Obrador’s priority was the health of the economy rather than the health of the public [‘Poverty and Populism put Latin America at the centre of the pandemic’, (Michael Stott & Andres Schipano), Financial Times, 14-Jun-2020, www.amp.ft.com; ‘AMLO’s feeble response to COVID-19 in Mexico’, (Vanda Felbab-Brown), Brookings, 30-Mar-2020, www.brookings.edu].
Abject lack of medical preparedness. Obrador’s dangerous indifference to the crisis extended to a half-hearted medical intervention. Testing for COVID-19 has remained woefully low, no program of widespread testing or of contact tracing – these vital measures dismissed as being impractical for a population of 128 million (Sheridan; Stott & Schipano). The reluctance to test extensively is no doubt also related to Mexico’s health care incapacity. Despite having gone through the experience of the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak, subsequent Mexican administrations have permitted the country’s health sector to run down, funding to hospitals and medical centres have been cut by millions. Mexico has only 1.4 hospital beds for every 1,000 persons and just over 2,000 ventilators all up. The shortfall extends to physicians, medical equipment including PPE and coronavirus test kits [‘Mexico’s coronavirus-sceptical president is setting up his own country for a health crisis’, (Alex Ward), Vox, 28-Mar-2020, www.vox.com].
Shooting the messenger Inevitably AMLO has copped a lot of internal criticism for his irresponsible response to the crisis. Rather than taking positive measures to try to undo the disaster of his own creation, Obrador has gone on the attack against the Mexican independent media. Again invoking the Trump playbook, he has railed against the “fake news” and “Twitter bots” who have opposed his government’s handling of the situation. Independent investigations in fact have brought to light the clandestine activities of Notimex (the state-owned news agency) which has created a network of bots and fake accounts to discredit prominent journalists and label them as ‘criminal’ [‘Mexican President López Obrador frets about the spreading virus of fake news, but not COVID-19’, (José Miguel Vivanco), Dallas News,16-Jun-2020, www.dallasnews.com].
AMLO has taken to giving regular video ‘sermons’ to the masses (he calls them “Decalogues to emerge from coronavirus and face the new reality”)…these are not as you might surmise updates on how the government is attempting to counter the pandemic, but an uninspiring mish-mash of banalities about staying positive, eating corn and getting sun and fresh air. With the unchecked escalating death toll from the disease, many believe Obrador has given up any pretence to even trying to combat the virus [‘Mexico’s president has given up in the fight against the coronavirus’, (León Krauze), Washington Post, 19-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com]. In this most unpropitious context AMLO is now taking an imprudent gamble by lifting restrictions – despite the curve of Mexican infections continuing to shoot upwards.
🔻 Mega-mercado, Mexico City
Footnote: Mexico City epicentre
Mexico City accounts for about one quarter of all COVID-19 deaths in Mexico. The offical counts however are only starting points to explain the catastrophe. A Mexico City study by Nexos magazine found that there was an “excess mortality” of more than 20% unaccounted for by the official figures [‘8,000 ‘excess deaths’ in Mexico City as coronavirus rages: study’, Ajazeera, 26-May-2020, www.aljazeera.com]. One of the capital’s biggest clusters is the wholesale mega-market, the Central de Abasto. The enormous mercado providing 80% of the city’s food is a petri-dish for the virus which has cut a scythe through its 90,000-strong workforce, infecting its tomateros, chilli vendors and other workers whose need to keep working is often greater than their fear of the pandemicφ. The vendors and carters have another reason for continuing working even when they become ill – working class Mexicans are accustomed to poor quality health care and often harbour a distrust of hospitals (Sheridan).
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(Image source: www.studentnewsdaily.com)
Venezuela: Showcase numbers but a lack of transparency Although the available statistics relating to Venezuela don’t reflect the dramatic numbers in Mexico, the situation in the South American country is peer bit as parlous. Venezuela has fessed up to 4,186 cases and 35 deaths (24-Jun-2020), but these figures have little credibility with independent observers. Venezuela has done very limited testing for the disease with the testing data guarded very carefully by the government [‘Hunger, Infection, and Repression: Venezuela’s Coronavirus Calamity’, (Stephanie Taladrid), The New Yorker, 29-May-2020, www.newyorker.com]. Doubters outside the country have noted that Venezuela’s health system was already in a state of collapse before COVID-19 arrived, citing as evidence: the country‘s functioning intensive care beds are estimated to number between 80 and 163; nil or intermittent supply to water to two-thirds of hospitals; power cuts off at regular intervals; shortages of gloves and face masks in 60% of hospitals; 76% of hospitals shortage of soap and 90% were short of sanitising gel [‘Venezuela’s Covid-19 death toll claims ‘not credible’, human rights group says’, (Tom Phillips), The Guardian, 27-May-2020, www.theguardian.com].
🔺 Maduro: “People, we are identity”
President Maduro—already embroiled in a political and socio-economic crisis acerbated by long-term US trade sanctions on Venezuela—imposed a national lockdown in March. A side benefit to the lockdown (now extended to July) is that it allows the regime more scope to crack down on its critics…the obvious targets being opposition politicians and increasingly journalists, doctors and nurses who report adversely on Maduro’s handling of the pandemic (especially if they query the reported official numbers). [‘Venezuela’s Zulia State emerges as coronavirus hot spot’, Reuters, 24-Jun-2020, www.news.yahoo.com].
Footnote: Rich and poor, a widening of the divide
At the point of corona impact, the contrast between Venezuela’s masses and the elite have sharpened even more. The brunt of the economic crisis has fallen squarely on the poor and middle-class citizens – skyrocketing prices, scarcity of necessities, a greatly devalued Venezuelan bolivar, the oil price plunge (oil accounts for 98% of Venezuela’s export revenues), and over-reliance on the informal economy by the lower socio-economic classes [‘Why coronavirus could be catastrophic for Venezuela’, (Katy Watson & Vanessa Silva), BBC News, 12-Apr-2020, www.bbc.com]. With corruption, cronyism and nepotism ingrained in Venezuela, the Maduro regime and its acolytes—the heirs of Chavismoism—continue to benefit lavishly from black-market and other illicit financial activities◊ [‘Freedom in the World 2020: Venezuela’, Freedom House, www.freedomhouse.org].
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✱ AMLO preferring to travel and mingle accompanied only by his personal amulets for ‘protection’
◘ only in the last week of March did the government retreat a bit and start to urge the public to stay-at-home
φ the CDMX-run market only acted, bringing in health workers, ramping up testing and contact tracing, after workers starting dropping in significant numbers (Sheridan)…as with the rest of Mexico, too little, too late
◊ beneficiaries of this state largesse and privilege include the bolichicos, the wealthy children of the regime’s top leaders
The Americas, Pandemic on the Back of Poverty: Peru and Ecuador; and a Southern Cone Contrarian
As Europe starts to pull itself out of the worst of the coronavirus outbreak, the Americas for the most part are still firmly mired in the devastating crisis of the pandemic…more worryingly, COVID-19 cases continue to rise and even accelerate in some countries as Latin America seems to be turning into “pandemic central”, the ‘new’ Europe❅. This is occurring despite the continent comprising only eight percent of the world’s population and having had the advantage of time to prepare for the virus which reached its shores some six weeks after ravaging Europe.
(Source: www.maps-of-the-world.net)
Smallness helps
The picture of Central and South America is not uniformly bleak. Some of the smaller countries, such as Uruguay, Paraguay and El Salvador, have managed to restrict their nation’s outbreaks to low levels of infection and casualties. This last mentioned country was surveyed in an earlier blog entitled Courting Controversy in Coronavirus Country: Belgium and El Salvador – June 2020). Among the Southern Cone countries, Argentina and Uruguay stand in contrast to their neighbours Chile and Brazil. Argentina (population of >45 million)—its commendable performance vs the virus slightly tarnished by a recent upsurge following an easing of the lockdown—has a total of 39,557 COVID-19 cases and only 979 deaths, compared with Brazil (whose leader Jai Bolsonaro has taken a recklessly dismissive attitude towards the pandemic). Even on a per capita basis Argentina‘s figures are still a fraction of the human disaster befalling Brazil which has racked up 1,038,568 cases and 49,090 deaths (population: 212 million). The Argentine Republic’s results are also way better than Chile’s record of 231,393 cases and 4,093 deaths (from just 19 million) [‘Argentina’s president enters voluntary isolation amid coronavirus surge’, (Uni Goñi) The Guardian, 18-Jun-2018, www.theguardian.com].
Brazil: COVID-19 mural message (Source: Getty Images)
Uruguay: Stellar success of an outlier
Uruguay has fared as well as anyone in Central/South America in avoiding a pandemic catastrophe on the scale of some of its neighbours. A tiny population (3.5 million) helps immeasurably but the sheer lowness of its corona numbers stands by themselves – just 1,040 confirmed cases and 24 deaths. This has been achieved despite a demographic profile that should have made it highly vulnerable to the disease: the largest regional proportion of elderly citizens and a population which is 96% urban. And an outcome secured not by lockdowns and quarantines (allowing Uruguay to preserve its national economic health cf. the stricken economies of its large neighbours Brazil and Argentina), but by eliciting the voluntary compliance of its citizenry – and through the luxury of having a near-universal, viable health care system✺ [‘Why Is Uruguay Beating Latin America’s Coronavirus Curse?’, (Mac Margolis), Bloomberg, 30-May-2020, www.bloomberg.com].
Uruguay (Photo: Daniel Rodrigues/adhoc/AFP via Getty Images)
Peru:
Aside from Brazil the country in the region most in strife due to the pandemic at the moment is probably Peru. Peru’s statistics are stark – over 247,925 confirmed cases and 7,660 deaths in a population of 32 million. What is particularly troubling about Peru is that, unlike Brazil, at onset it seemed to be pulling all the right reins, implementing one of Latin America’s earliest and strictest lockdowns. Months of enforced lockdown have however failed to flatten the curve of infections. Peru finds itself in a demoralising “double whammy”, the public health catastrophe continues unabated❈ while the recourse to a tough national lockdown has further crippled the economy [‘Poverty and Populism put Latin America at the centre of the pandemic’, (Michael Stott & Andres Schipano), Financial Times (UK), 14-Jun-2020, www.amp.ft.com; ‘Peru’s coronavirus response was ‘right on time’ – so why isn’t it working?’, (Dan Collyns), The Guardian, 21-May-2020, www.theguardian.com]✪.
⇑ Andean pabluchas patrol Cuzco streets to enforce social distancing and mandatory mask measures (Photo: Jose Carlos Angulo/AFP/Getty Images)
Indicators of the poverty trap
The economic predicament Peru finds itself stems from the country’s high reliance on an informal economy (reaching some 70%). What Peru has in common with Brazil—and has been exacerbated by the pandemic—is very high social inequality. The poorest Peruvians cannot afford to stay home, to isolate as they should. Many are without bank accounts and under the informal economy have to travel to collect their wages, those without home refrigerators also need to shop frequently – all of which makes them more vulnerable to be exposed to the virus [‘Latin America reels as coronavirus gains pace’, (Natalia Alcoba), Aljazeera, 15-Jun-2020, www.aljazeera.com]. Disease and impoverishment have converged in Peru to make the predicament more acute for those of the poor who need life-saving oxygen of which there is now a scandalous critical shortage – the situation being exploited by profiteering hit men (the sicarios) controlling the black market oxygen supplies [‘In Peru, coronavirus patients who need oxygen resort to black market and its 1,000 percent markups’, (Simeon Tegel), Washington Post, 18-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com].
Ecuador and Guayaquil ⇓
Ecuador:
In Ecuador the pandemic epicentre is the western city of Guayaquil, the country’s largest city. This is thought to be due to a couple of factors, the city’s sprawling slums where “many residents live hand-to-mouth and routinely violate the government lockdown…in order to work”, and because many Guayaquil exchange students and migrant workers came back to the city from Spain and Italy in March [‘COVID-19 Numbers Are Bad In Ecuador. The President Says The Real Story Is Even Worse’, (John Otis), NPR, 20-Apr-2020, www.npr.org]. The unpreparedness and inability of the authorities to cope with the crisis has affected the woeful degree of testing done, the lack of hospital facilities for patients and even the capacity to bury the dead as the bodies of coronavirus victims were left piling up on the city’s streets. In the wake of the disaster the Guayaquil Council entered into a slinging match with Quito (the national government), asserting that the government has under-represented the city’s death toll by as much as four-fifths, that it failed to provide it with the health care backup demanded of the disaster, as well as calling out the corruption of public utilities which has accentuated the crisis (Alcoba). Ecuador currently has 49,731 confirmed cases and 4,156 fatalities in a population of 17 million.
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End-note: The hypothesis of virus protection at high altitude
Among the multitude of worldwide research projects triggered by the pandemic, a multi-country study looking at Bolivia, Ecuador and Tibet has advanced the theory that populations that live at a height of above 3,000 metres have significantly lower levels of susceptibility to coronavirus than their lowland counterparts. The study attributes the capacity of high altitude to nullify the disease down to the fact that living at high altitude allows people to cope with hypoxia (low levels of oxygen in the blood), and that the altitude provides a favourable natural environment—dry mountain air, high UV radiation and a resulting lowering of barometric pressure—reduces the virus’ ability to linger in the air. The COVID-19 experience of Cuzco in Peru seems to corroborate this hypothesis, being lightly affected compared to the rampage elsewhere in the country – the high Andean city has had only 899 confirmed cases and three deaths. Similarly, La Paz, Bolivia, the world’s highest legislative capital, has recorded only 38 coronavirus-related deaths to date⊠ [‘From the Andes to Tibet, the coronavirus seems to be sparing populations at high altitudes’, (Simeon Tegel), Washington Post, 01-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com].
<Þ> all country coronavirus counts quoted above are as at 20-June-2020
……………………………………………………………………………………………………
❅ for week ending 20th June 2020, confirmed cases for Latin America represented half of all new coronavirus cases (Source: WHO)
✺ a like-for-like comparison to Uruguay might be Paraguay – also a small population (6.9 million), only 1,336 cases and 13 deaths but at the cost of a draconian lockdown with an economy-crippling end-game.
❈ even prior to COVID-19 striking, the Peruvian public health system was struggling due to “decades of chronic underinvestment” (eg, spending <$700 a day on health care) (Tegel, ‘In Peru’)
✪ the strict lockdown has been less rigorous when removed from the urban centres…in outlying areas, in the northern coast and the Amazonas region (particularly bad in the Amazonian city of Iquitos) it was less “honoured in the breach than the observance” leading to the formation of new virus clusters (Collyns)
⊠ other experts discount the study’s findings noting that most coronavirus infections occur indoors, negating the relevance of UV levels (Tegel, ‘From the Andes’)
Courting Controversy in Coronavirus Country: Belgium and El Salvador
As countries try to deal with an epidemic that is novel to the world of public health, with no tried-and-true templates to follow, there have been various quite differing approaches to the COVID-19 crisis. Some of these approaches have inevitably roamed into the realm of the controversial and polemical, polarising people at home and abroad. In previous blogs 7dayadventurer.com has sketched the go-it-alone path adopted by Sweden✱,〘Two Antithetical Approaches to the COVID-19 Crisis: A Controversial Outlier Versus a a Low-key Over-achiever (10-May-2020)〙and the denialist response of President Bolsonaro to the epidemic in Brazil〘Covid/Ovid 2020: Crisis (Mis)Management – How the World’s Leaders are Responding? (02-Apr-2020) 〙.
Belgium’s unenviable record – with an asterisk This blog turns the spotlight elsewhere, on to an unlikely duo, two vastly dissimilar countries whose strategies towards the pandemic have proved controversial, each in it’s own way. Belgium, a small European state, has surprised and shocked many observers by its prominence on the table of world’s worst affected countries. The country has recorded 815 deaths per million of population (as at the 1st of June), easily the worst per capita toll in “First World” Europe (next closest Spain, 580/one million). Although Belgium has some distinguishable factors which contribute it its fatality rate—the country and especially the capital Brussels is the sixth-most dense in Europe, and Brussels has a very international and mobile population, a high number of Belgians reside in nursing homes (accounting for more than half of the disease’s victims)✬—there’s another (statistical) factor that goes a good way to explaining why there has been 9,580 recorded victims of the disease⊡. Belgium counts both the deaths confirmed as resulting from coronavirus and the deaths which are suspected to have been caused by the disease (most countries do not include this second category in their official COVID-19 counts)✪. (“Is Belgium the world’s deadliest COVID-19 country or just the most honest?’, (Bevan Shields), Sydney Morning Herald, 01-Jun-2020, www.smh.com.au).
🔺 Belgians returning home to a coronavirus-hit country
In defence of over-counting
Belgian virologist Prof Steven Van Gucht has deflected criticism of both Belgium’s numbers and its method of calculating corona casualties, commending Belgium for its honesty in selecting the more inclusive determination of the death toll. Van Gucht has argued that “public health shouldn’t be a political game or a contest on who is doing better than someone else”, adding that other governments not being honest with the public about the true scale of their outbreaks will be caught out on it later. Not everyone in Belgium applauds such transparency and honesty with the corona data, some within the kingdom’s business leadership have expressed alarm than the methodology used to ‘inflate’ mortality and morbidity numbers may have a deterrent effect on tourists returning to Belgium once the economy reopens (Shields).
(Source: www.graphicmaps.com/)
El Salvador’s tough stand on lockdown transgressors part of a worrying authoritarian trend? Pre-existing conditions in the Central American country of El Salvador have dictated the government approach taken to coronavirus. El Salvador’s high incidence of both gang activity and homicide prompted president Nayib Bukele (at 38 youthful and very social media savvy, eg, >1.9 M Twitter followers) to act hard and fast. Bukele’s government took a preemptive approach to the outbreak, schools and colleges were suspended and a state of emergence declared before the country had recorded its first confirmed case of the virus. Borders were closed, public gatherings in excess of 500 people banned, anyone caught driving cars without a sanctioned reason were detained at confinement centres for a 30-day period. Quarantine-breakers have been dealt with, summarily and harshly. Towns in El Salvador deemed to not be complying with the president’s strict lockdown orders have been cordoned off by the police, barring public egress [‘Savior or Strongman? El Salvador’s millennial president defies courts and Congress on coronavirus response’, (Patrick Oppman), CNN, 21-May-2020, www.edition.cnn.com].
(Source: El Salvador Presidency via Reuters)
The new Salvadoran president has gone particularly hard on the country’s street gangs, the maras, who he fears would take advantage of the state of emergency to increase their criminal business activities when the security forces were busy policing the lockdown measures. Most controversial has been Bukele’s treatment of gang prisoners during the crisis – shockingly dehumanising images have emerged of large numbers of half-naked convicts shackled and huddled together in tight-knit formation (with zilch regard for social distancing), resembling a great amorphous mass of “human cargo” [’El Salvador’s president accused of using coronavirus to bolster autocratic agenda’, (Patrick J Mc Donnell & Alexander Renderos), Los Angeles Times, 01-May-2020, www.news.yahoo.com].
Recently Bukele has copped a lot of flak for the way he’s handled the crisis, including from labour organisations decrying the draconian quarantine measures as abuses of human rights. The legality of his actions has been questioned as has the increasing militarisation of the regime [‘One Year After Taking Charge, Nayib Bukele Faces Severe Criticism for Handling of COVID-19′, (Zoe PC/ Tanya Wadhwa), News Click, 03-Jun-2020, www.newsclick.in/].
El Salvador’s ‘hip’ president: taking a selfie before his speech at the UN 🔻
Shades of the White House
As an outsider—both as the son of an immigrant family from the Middle East and from a minor centre-right party which sits outside the political establishment traditionally dominated by the two main parties in El Salvador)—the president has deliberately attempted to work outside the mainstream including the National Assembly (NA) to achieve his aims. And he’s not adverse to employing military muscle to intimidate opponents⌽ while also reaching out to El Salvador’s impoverished with cash and food handouts (to buttress his personal popularity with the social base). Political opponents in the NA have accused Bukele of using the pandemic to consolidate an authoritarian regime, and of seeking to violate the national constitution (Oppman). The similarities seemingly extend to shared personal traits. President Bukele has disclosed his prophylactic use of hydroxychloroquine, while referencing Trump’s use and endorsement of the drug. The El Salvador authorities have managed to hold the death toll thus far to 53 (06-Jun-2020) at the cost of drastic restrictions on individual liberties.
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✱ Sweden‘s top epidemiologist has now conceded the government’s laissez-faire approach was seriously flawed – with a status quo of 43 fatalities per 100,000 people and Sweden finding its borders with its Scandinavian neighbours remaining firmly closed [‘Top epidemiologist admits he got Sweden’s COVID-19 strategy wrong’, (Bloomberg), National Post, 03-Jun-2020, www.nationalpost.com]
⊡ as at 06-Jun-2020
✬ some countries simply don’t count deaths occurring in nursing homes in their COVID-19 tallies, the UK only belatedly included them later in the crisis
✪ if Belgium applied the same criteria as most countries the recorded number of deaths by COVID-19 would be around half of what it is
⌽ such as deploying the army inside the Legislative Assembly as ‘bouncers’ [‘Nayib Bukele’s military stunt raises alarming memories in El Salvador’, (David Agren), The Guardian, 16-Feb-2020, www.theguardian.com]
Covid/Ovid 2020: Crisis (Mis)Management – How the World’s Leaders are Responding?
Lockdown immediately, quarantine everyone, isolate the virus? Close the borders! Go hard, go fast! Make haste slowly! Laissez-faire? Test as many as you can! Watch and wait, hold off, preserve the economy, keep people working! Half/half?Herd immunity? As the experts—both recognised and putative—come out of the woodwork, a plethora of different approaches to the 21st century’s greatest crisis are thrown up, causing ever deeper descent into confusion for those of us watching from the sidelines.
Sweden: Personal responsibility to do the right thing, fingers and toes crossed At one extreme there’s the “hands-off” non-interventionist line adopted by Sweden…”a relatively relaxed strategy, seemingly assuming that overreaction is more harmful than under-reaction” – in other words, keep calm and carry on. The Swedish government’s goal being to build up a “herd immunity” of the population to (they hope) forestall further waves of infection. The blueprint involves letting the virus spread slowly while sheltering the old and weakest elements of society until the bulk of the population become naturally immune. So schools, restaurants, bars and gyms remain open, all places that many other countries have ’hot-spotted’ as potential petri dishes (to use of the media’s current favourite buzzword in the virus crisis). Critics of the Swedish voluntary approach have stressed the risks it is exposing itself to – a danger of overwhelming the health system’s capability and precipitating large numbers of premature deaths [‘Inside Sweden’s Radically Different Approach to the Coronavirus’, (Bojan Pancevski), Wall Street Journal, 30-Mar-2020, www.wsj.com; ‘Sweden under fire for ‘relaxed’ coronavirus approach – here’s the science behind it’, The Conversation, (PW Frank & PM Nilsson), 30-Mar-2020, www.mamamia.com.au]. While Sweden persists in it’s “long game”, Sweden’s death toll from coronavirus has reached 239❈, a far-from-inconsequential figure for a small population nation like Sweden (and more than double the next highest total of fatalities in the Nordic region, that of Denmark). Not happy, Scandinavian neighbours of Sweden!
🔺 Boris in isolation – self-sacrificing crash-test dummy for the nation, gauging the coronavirus level of virulence: “taking one for the nation!” (Picture: No 10 Downing Street/AFP)
Boris, not dancing The UK government in the early stages of the crisis, along with the Netherlands, flirted with adopting Sweden’s herd immunity approach, but subsequently (and belatedly) opted for lockdown. The UK number of cases and mortality rates continue to rise alarmingly (2,352 dead❈) and it’s citizens can draw little reassurance from the antics of its erratic Conservative Party leader Boris Johnson. At the onset the insouciant Johnson downplayed the epidemic and declared that he was all for shaking hands with as many people as he could (his Churchillian bluff AKA confidence-building strategy?) This didn’t prove a good move, personally for the prime minister, as he was soon struck down with the virus (recalling wistfully whilst in self-quarantine that shaking hands with some people at a hospital, who with hindsight probably had coronavirus, probably wasn’t a good idea).
(Photo: AP)
China’s southern neighbours Taiwan and Singapore both got early warning of the outbreak in China, which helped them get an early start on their countries’ protective measures. Taiwan, at the get-go, posted health workers at airports – incoming passengers from Wuhan (the virus’ origin-point) were checked for symptoms before they exited the planes. Singapore on January 3, inside four days of China’s notification to WHO of an unknown virus, which later was confirmed to be the COVID pathogen, was temperature screening passengers arriving from Wuhan. Taiwan and Singapore were also in a better state of preparedness (than say northern Asian countries bordering China like South Korea and Japan which initially struggled with their respective outbreaks) The two southeast Asian micro-states had learned invaluable lessons from the 2003 SARS and the 2009 swine epidemics. That the Singaporean and Taiwanese governments were upfront and transparent with the public, also got everyone in society quickly on board with the “national project”. The death toll for both Taiwan and Singapore stands well short of double figures❈ [‘How Taiwan and Singapore Have Contained the Coronavirus’, (Chloe Hadavas), Slate, 11-Mar-2020, www.slate.com].
(Photo: AP)
Continental contrast The European comparison of how different countries have handled the virus focuses largely on a Germany v Italy correlation – unfortunately to the great disadvantage of the latter. Angela Merkel and Germany have been able to restrict their coronavirus fatalities thus far to 931❈, compared to Italy’s out-of-control, frighteningly catastrophic 13,155 deaths❈. The reasons for the size of discrepancy are manifold. First as with Taiwan Germany was ready at the outset, comparatively Italy wasn’t. Germany went to social distancing and lockdown early while Italy prevaricated, and Italy was also slow to seal it’s borders. Anticipation paid off for Germany, it had developed a favourable type of test for the virus before it hit. They then tested fast and widely. Italy was slower off the mark, and it’s testing regime was (and is) half or less that of Germany’s capacity. Integral to Germany’s edge is its medical infrastructure, the ratios are stark: Germany has 33.9 hospital beds for every 100,000 of population, cf. Italy, only 8.6 per 100,000. So, by the time Italy got its testing into full swing, the country was swamped with way too many corona-patients requiring critical and urgent treatment. Italy’s age demographic, skewed towards the geriatric end of the scale (second oldest population in the world after Japan) was also a decisive factor in the extremely high mortality rates it has experienced [‘How one country got months ahead of its neighbours in coronavirus fight’, (AP), Yahoo!News, 02-Apr-2020].
Life on Planet Trump In the US a reasonable expectation the citizens of the world’s leading democratic-capitalist state might normally entertain in such a disastrous crisis, would be to have mature, insightful national leadership. Instead, they have Trump! Countless reems of pages of news-copy have been wasted on the US president, but to briefly summarise his Covid-19 performance: at the start in January we got the glib and blasé Trump – “the virus was one person coming from China and we’ve got it under control”; by February it was, we had “pretty much shut it down” (somehow he thought it was over before it had hardly started taking root!?!); next he opined “warm weather will kill it in April”; “the numbers are going down” (said after public health officials had advised the White House that the virus was spreading); by late February it was “we have lost nobody to coronavirus” (there had already been US fatalities). In March Trump, rebuked for repeatedly spreading misinformation, resorted to “it’s the Democrats’ new hoax”; then, “it will disappear one day – like a miracle!” which perhaps demonstrates one of Trump’s rare threads of consistency, drawing a link to the president’s later assertion (completely tone-deaf to the message of social distancing and ignorant of realistic timeframes) that he wanted to see the churches in America full at Easter!✪ [‘Coming Soon: Donald Trump As the Hero of COVID-19”, (Richard North Patterson), The Bulwark, 23-Mar-2020, www.thebulwurk.com].
(Photo: CBS News)
Perhaps the most striking and alarming example of Trump’s off-the-cuff and off-the-rails raves is his wilful and flagrant ignoring of the professional advice of his top medical advisers, eg, “anyone who wants a test can have one” (wrong); “we’ll have vaccines relatively soon…they’re coming” (even the non-scientific layperson knows it will take at least one to one-and-a-half years to be publicly available); “we have tremendous control of the virus”, completely contradicting Dr Fauci’s starkly realistic warning that the worst is ahead of us. The consequences of Trump’s disregarding scientific truths provided by medical experts in favour of convenient misinformation has been downright dangerous. His advocacy of an unproven coronavirus treatment (chloroquine phosphate) still being scientifically reviewed was a causal factor leading to the death of a man who tried to self-medicate using the ‘treatment’.
Trump, master of the ad hominem at the lectern, recently on TV seems bored with the subject, maybe looking round for a new focus (Iran?). Trump as president takes no responsibility. When he should be uniting all the key cogs in a coherent national response to the corona-crisis which is killing hundreds of Americans every day, he has been his divisive worst, brawling with the media, attacking medical workers for supposedly hoarding supplies, shifting blame to state governors. Fortunately, governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo, California’s Gavin Newsom and Washington’s Jay Inslee, recognising the gaping gap in leadership and the lack of support coming from the White House, have risen to the mammoth and increasingly desperate challenge facing the country and taken the lead in the crisis [‘History’s verdict on Trump will be devastating’, (Michael D’Antonio), CNN, 30-Mar-2020, www.cnn.com].
(Photo: Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)
The “Trump of the Tropics” Trump’s abject performance, his “epochal incompetence” (to quote Michael D’Antonio), in the crisis, is bad enough for the risks he has exposed Americans to, but his influence as a “role model” for far-right leaders in other countries, is helping to undermine those countries’ fight against the virus. One such leader is Brazil’s authoritarian president Jair Bolsonaro who expresses profound admiration for Trump (hence his nickname above), whose skepticism for the virus’ threat Bolsonaro mirrors. Bolsonaro has publicly dismissed the coronavirus as “a little cold”, refuses to isolate and continues to attend public events, irresponsibly mingling with crowds of his supporters, shaking hands with all❖. Bolsonaro, like Trump, has tended to “flip-flop” on the epidemic, lunging erratically from urging Brazilians to show caution in avoiding transmission of the disease (do as I say, not do as I do!) to calling for an end to the quarantine restrictions and removal of the shackles on the economy.
When confronted with the danger of the virus to Brazilian society, Bolsonaro rivals Trump in loopy explanations, eg, Brazilians possess a “natural immunity” which means that they cannot be infected by diseases❅ (part of the Bolsonaro fantasy playbook!) So far, despite these unique ‘antibodies’ claimed by Bolsonaro, some 244 Brazilians have died from coronavirus❈. The Brazilian president has also exhibited the Trump trait of disbelieving the medical experts and the official statistics. When São Paulo recorded a sharp spike in deaths from the virus, Bolsonaro was quick to cast doubts on the numbers. The governors of São Paulo and Rio are two of the most vocal critics of his lax approach to the crisis, in return Bolsonaro blames the state governors for their concerted measures to halt the disease, labelling their efforts ‘criminal’ [‘Brazil’s Bolsonaro makes life-or-death coronavirus gamble’, (David Biller), Sydney Morning Herald, 29-Mar-2020, www.smh.com.au].
🔺 Bolsonaro, unsafe at any distance?
Some analysts have noted the element of political calculation in Bolsanaro’s hard line on the epidemic. The Brazilian leader’s may feel that if he can take the economy (still feeling the severe effects of the 2015/16 recession) to the next elections in good health, the voters may be less concerned about the country’s death toll from coronavirus (David Biller). Mexico’s president, López Obrador, is singing from a similar hymn-sheet as Bolsonaro. Obrador contends that the severity of the virus has been overstated, and has been quoted as saying that personally he would rely on his (lucky) amulets to keep him safe [‘In Brazil and Mexico, Leaders Downplay Dangers of Virus Outbreak’, Latino USA, 26-Mar-2020, www.latinousa.org].
🔺 President Lukashenko, national leader, sportsman, tractor enthusiast
Belarus, 2020 global sporting capital Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko is another head of state professing an admiration for the US president and similarities in style can be observed. Lukashenko has launched the small East European country on a novel path to (supposedly) combat the deadly virus – a cocktail of sport, cold, vodka and saunas. The Belarus government has vetoed lockdowns and social isolation to counter coronavirus, and it is just about the only place in the world that hasn’t discontinued sporting events. The Tokyo Olympics have been canned for 2020 but crowds still flock to football matches in Belarus. The remarkable leader himself, leading by example, recently participated in an ice hockey game. Likewise, the annual victory parade scheduled for May is still all systems go! In addition to spruking sport (and would you believe, “tractor-riding” in the countryside⊞) as antidotes to the virus, the Belarusian president recommends drinking vodka and taking saunas, whilst reassuring Belarusian citizens that God will protect the country from the global pandemic, adding the rider that Belarus’ icy cold climate will also do the job [‘“Reckless” World Leader says vodka and saunas will protect people from coronvirus’, (James Hawkins), The Mirror, 30-Mar-2020, www.mirror.co.uk].
Postscript: Crisis climate – encroaching on democratic rights? While the pandemic continues to rage, the politics don’t abate. All countries trying to restrict the movements of their citizens have enacted emergency measures to try to confine the pathogen. Most countries have closed their borders and some have legislated the power to detain people. The fear for advocates of civil liberties is that the more authoritarian states may use the new arrangements to move towards martial law. Regimes cross the globe have enacted new powers, ostensibly to protecting the public, but at the same time with the effect of protecting themselves from public and press scrutiny and accountability [‘”Coronavirus” profound threat to democracy’, (Noah Millman), The Week, 01-Apr-2020, www.theweek.com]. In Hungary the right-wing Orbán government has suspended existing laws, by-passing the parliament to allow president Viktor Orbán to rule by decree (with no end date). Thailand has taken the opportunity to censor the nation’s news media (suing and intimidating journalists who criticise the government’s handling of the crisis). Turkmenistan has taken the unusual approach to the pandemic of banning all use of the word ‘coronavirus’ by it’s citizens and state-controlled media
✧. According to Radio Free Europe‘s Turkmenistan watch group, people talking about the virus or wearing masks in public could be arrested by the authoritarian regime which claims to have had no confirmed cases of the virus…as Turkmenistan shares a border with coronavirus-ravaged Iran this claim is viewed from outside with extreme skepticism. President Berdymukhamedov✜, not to be outdone for whacky coronavirus remedies, has recommended inhaling smoke from a burning desert-region plant (Vanguard) [’For Autocrats and Others, Coronavirus Is a Chance to Grab Even More Power’, (Selma Gebrekidian), New York Times, 30-Mar- 2020, www.nytimes.com; ‘Coronavirus: The unusual ways countries are managing lockdowns’, BBC News, 01-Apr-2020, www.bbc.co.uk].
🔻 President Berdymukhamedov, safe distancing not on the agenda here! 
(Photo: AFP/Igor SAFIN)
╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍
❈ as at 1000 hours, Greenwich M-T, 02-Apr-2020
◘ faced with an overwhelming dose of reality, “Flip-Flop Man” Trump has been forced to pivot 180° away from this…now the White House is acknowledging the health authorities’ dire, nightmarish predictions, (‘US predicts up to 240,000 deaths even with social distancing’, ABC News, 01-Apr-2020, www.abc.net.com.au)
✪ the secular and materialistic lifestyle Trump follows, nay revels in, contrasts conspicuously with the image he tries to sow in the minds of the American public and especially the Religious Right, of him as piously religious
❖ Bolsonaro himself has apparently tested twice for coronavirus but won’t publish the results
❅ including the notorious assertion by Bolsonaro that they “can swim in raw sewerage and not catch a thing” – in effect this is what he is doing to Brazilians with his cavalier policy
⊞ the Belarusian president was quoted as saying: “There, the tractor will heal everyone. The fields heal everyone.” (tractors are apparently something of a fetish item in Belarus!)(‘Belarusian president proposes ‘tractor’ therapy for coronavirus’, Vanguard, 16-Mar-2020, www.vanguardngr.com)
✧ Turkmenistan is ranked by Paris-based RSF (Reporters Without Borders) as the country with the least press freedom in the world
✜ Berdymukhamedov has an exalted status in Turkmenistan, being seen as the Arkadag (protector of the people)
Iguazú, the Argentinian Waterworld
Travel Destination Review
Left the Sorgente hotel in Puerto Iguazú to get an early start for the bus ride to the falls area. When we arrived there were already a great number of visitors lining up at the entrance – international visitors, nationals (Buenos Aireans and from elsewhere in the country), school groups, and so on.
We were at the Argentinian section of the falls of course (on the Brazilian side the falls are called Iguaçu). Spare a thought for Paraguay and its tourism industry, the country shares the Rio Paraná with Brazil and Argentina and is just up the river from Iguazú, but none of the falls lie on Paraguayan territory.
Train thru the jungle to the FallsInside the national park, despite the train standing on the track, our guide gets us to by-pass the train and walk a couple of kilometres through the bush to the second train station. By getting there before the first train arrived at station # 2 this ensured that we’d be in the first train to arrive at the falls. Good, but I was left wondering WHY, a) there wasn’t more trains scheduled seeing that Iguazú was a world-class highlight on the global tourism calendar, and b) train # 1, instead of terminating at station # 2, didn’t just go straight through to the falls, considering that both trains left from the same track! To me, that would be the logical way to operate it!
The falls as a whole are divisible into two parts, the Cataracts and the Gorge. We started at the Gorge first, El Diablo Garganta. From the Gorge entrada, we still needed to walk about 1200 metres on a linear footbridge to the actual ‘Devil’s Throat’. As you get closer to the throat, the roar of the powerful waters gets louder and louder and a couple of hundred metres away, the spray shooting up from El Diablo can be seen.
El DiabloWhen you finally get there, it is 100 per cent worth it! At the edge of the waterfall, the catwalk bends round into a U-shape (more accurately the structure is three-pronged, fork-shaped) to maximize the number of people that can view the waterfall from point-blank range. The viewing platform extends out over the edge of the ground (as in the Grand Canyon) so that anyone standing on it cannot avoid getting a decent old drenching! Ponchos are definitely the preferred accessory at the Throat! Standing on the footbridge, trying to look and take photos and videos at the same time, you get the sense of all that cascading power, the spectacle was quite mesmerising.
Cory – the long-nosed Argie coatíLater we journeyed the short distance to Cataratas del Iguazú, exploring the multiple, other reaches of the falls, walking on the National Park’s upper and lower trails, the Paseo Superior and the Paseo Inferior as they are called. This gives you a different viewpoint of the Cataracts and lots more photo opportunities. Plenty of flora (in a broad, dense jungle) and fauna around, including dazzlingly beautiful and unusual butterflies and cute long-nose coatís. However I lucked out on spotting the elusive toucan, the emblematic bird of the falls.
As 80 per cent of the waterfalls are on the Argentinian side of the river, the best panoramic views tend to be from the Brazilian side or from the river itself. So, I decided on the optional speedboat ride (Macuco Safari Boat Ride) under the waterfalls itself, which was a great thrill. Be forewarned though that YOU WILL get drenched by the falls and from the motion of the boat rapidly swerving from side to side (make note to bring or wear swimmers on the falls tour).
Amenities at Iguazú left plenty to be desired. The Kiosk and the other food outlets were not good quality or value, not a great selection of food and (predictably) overpriced. Don’t try to exchange dollars at Parque Iguazú, the rate is not good, wait for BA.
The more than one-and-half stretch of Iguazú’s falls were simply astonishing to behold, even a bit intimidating to witness the scope of its sheer, unshackled power. Undeniably it is one of the natural wonders, a sublime Maravilla as the Hispanophone South Americans say.
Paseo Inferior