Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has once again used the pandemic to attack his Brazilian counterpart Jair Bolsonaro. He says the P.1 coronavirus variant — commonly known as the Brazilian or Amazon variant — should be named the “Bolsonaro mutation” instead.
The increasingly authoritarian Mr. Maduro — who Brazil does not recognize as Venezuela’s legitimate president — has already imposed restrictions on the Brazil-Venezuela border and issued a formal accusation against the Bolsonaro government to the United Nations for “neglecting” the pandemic.
While Brazil has been singled out by the international community as a cautionary tale of how not to handle a pandemic, Mr. Maduro’s comments may come across as rich, as his administration faces accusations of concealing Covid-19 data in Venezuela.
