Fear that covid-19 will plunge Brazil into an economic abyss has driven Jair Bolsonaro to an extremity of delirium. There is no parallel anywhere in South America, or perhaps even beyond it, for the conduct—political, economic, psychological—of our President. Aper and servitor of Donald Trump, he has taken the erratic performance of his idol to a peak that mixes morbidity and desperation, beckoning national tragedy.

The pandemic struck Brazil at a time when its economy was already in its deepest hole since the foundation of the Republic in 1889. The country’s gdp growth had been hovering around zero for the past five years, with 11.6 million unemployed—11 per cent of the workforce. Industry, which had been contracting for the past fifteen years, comprised less than a quarter of gdp. Public expenditure on the health-care budget had been cut by 16 per cent under the Temer government which followed Dilma Roussef’s pt administration, toppled in 2016 by a judicial-parliamentary intrigue. In no other Latin American country were the recipes of neoliberalism applied so recklessly in these last years, inflating a financial sector ever-more imbricated with international capital, while laying waste to productive infrastructure.

On this scorched earth Bolsonaro proceeded to sow dragon’s teeth. The arrival of covid-19 set off alarm bells for him: a recession, and ensuing loss of popularity, would be ‘the end of my government’, he said. At which point he sped up what was already a careening zigzag towards chaos, the kind of turbulence that would allow a coup d’état. In the first week of March he travelled to the United States with the sole aim of manifesting his adulation of Trump, since there was nothing for the two to negotiate about. He used the trip to publicize upcoming demonstrations by his supporters against the Brazilian Congress and Supreme Court—despite the fact that his own Ministry of Health had warned against large gatherings. Regardless, on 15 March the planned marches went ahead, bellowing cries for a Bolsonaro dictatorship. In Brasília, where the crowd was sparse (and well-heeled), the President attended the demonstration in person, hugging fans and posing for selfies as he mingled with his flock.

In the following days, it was discovered that 25 of the people who had travelled in the presidential plane to Miami had contracted the new virus, including ministers, advisors and bodyguards with whom he had been shaking hands and conversing at close quarters. According to his son Eduardo, a former police clerk, now a deputy in the lower house of Congress, Bolsonaro took a test for infection on 13 March. His offspring told Fox News the result of the test was positive, but when the broadcaster aired the information, the younger Bolsonaro denied it, only for Fox to identify him as its source. The President took a second test, and publicly insisted he did not have covid-19, but refused to release the result of the test, claiming it was a state secret. By now his credibility had sunk so far that doubts quickly spread throughout the country.

Next, Bolsonaro stepped up a bid to put an end to the social distancing decreed by assorted state governments, on the recommendations of the Ministry of Health and the who. Assembling his ministers, who were obliged to wear surgical masks—the President bizarrely placed his own over his eyes, like a blindfold—he forced them to sing his praises. Clashing with state governors, he traded barbs with the most powerful of them, a one-time ally in control of São Paulo, the largest state in the country. In Brasília, he criss-crossed the city, visiting a bakery and a pharmacy, greeting passers-by and exhorting them to go shopping and to reopen their trades.

This isn’t a case, as with other Latin American rulers, of hesitation over the degree of social distancing required, or sceptical questioning of scientific data or even just following Trump. From Buenos Aires to Mexico City, there have been comparable failures to recover from the turbulence of 2008; lacking a stable insertion in today’s world economy, Latin America as a whole was in stagnation when the pandemic arrived. Its hospital systems, public and private, were delapidated, some all but sold for scrap. Responses to the virus were far from uniform. Argentina’s new President Alberto Fernández acted quickly, mustering his predecessor Mauricio Macri and other conservative notables for a show of unity in his imposition of quarantines. In Chile, where demonstrations against its right-wing ruler Sebastián Piñera had been continuous since October, they were called off; the last, one of the largest in the country’s history, took place on 8 March. Piñera promptly cancelled the referendum on convening a Constituent Assembly that he had reluctantly conceded, and sought to land the cost of lay-offs on workers’ own social-security funds, though there he was thwarted by Congress. In Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador at first refused to order social distancing, and then delayed its implementation. Yet in the end, in one way or another, and at varying tempos, all these and other Latin American rulers realized that to cope with the virus it was necessary to buy time—which meant: to ensure that as many people as possible stay at home.

Not so Bolsonaro. Faced with a choice between keeping businesses going and saving lives, he has opted loudly and violently for business. After initially dismissing covid-19 as ‘just a sniffle’, he would later issue the icy dictum: ‘Some people are going to die. I’m sorry. That’s life.’ For it would only be ‘oldsters’ who succumbed. Brazil has 30 million people over the age of sixty: in a country with a Christian population, most Catholic but many Protestant, remarks like this are insults. Making up for them, he guaranteed that churches would remain open, allowing millionaire evangelicals to continue extorting tithes from the faithful. Issuing assurances that the virus can be cured by chloroquine, though the drug has no proven efficacy, he has offered not a jot of evidence to support his rejection of social distancing. At the presidential palace, his youngest son Carlos directs what has been widely dubbed a ‘Cabinet of Hate’, propagating lies and slanders. The President’s appearances on television are vitriolic. Unlike most world leaders, Bolsonaro has no scientific committee advising him: medically speaking, everything he says about the pandemic is pure idiocy, inspiring only widespread fear and dismay.