Covid inquiry requests indictment of Bolsonaro: what comes next?

As the Senate’s Covid inquiry presented its final report on Wednesday, Brazil kicked off the process of assigning blame and imposing accountability on those responsible for one of the world’s most disastrous pandemic responses, which resulted in over 600,000 confirmed coronavirus deaths — not to mention the thousands more that experts assume have been unaccounted for.

Atop the report’s list of villains is Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, to whom nine crimes are attributed — of a total of 23 crimes spread around 66 people and two companies — including charlatanism, malfeasance, and crimes against humanity.

“The president repeatedly encouraged people to disrespect social distancing policies, opposed himself to the use of masks, promoted gatherings, and slandered vaccines,” wrote rapporteur Renan Calheiros, adding that an estimated 120,000 lives would have been spared if the federal government had acted in a more responsible manner.

But while the report is an unequivocally scathing account of how the Bolsonaro administration dealt with the country’s worst health crisis in a century, it could have been even harsher on him.

As The Brazilian Report revealed last week, the original list of crimes Mr. Calheiros had intended to slap on the president included genocide against indigenous populations and murder by omission. But other members of the inquiry saw these claims as a stretch too far, legally speaking, and feared they would be impossible to prove in court. They successfully lobbied for Mr. Calheiros to remove them.

The president expected nothing but an extremely negative report — considering that the government was in the committee’s minority and that there is a lot of bad blood between his family and Mr. Calheiros. In one inquiry session, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro — the eldest of the president’s politician sons — called the rapporteur corrupt and a “bum.” 

Therefore, having genocide and murder...