After the eleven members of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (PCI) on Covid gave their approval to the final report of over 1,100 pages presented by rapporteur Renan Calheiros, there is one question that everyone is asking: will the PCI “dará em pizza”? Will it end with much ado about nothing?
“I want to see who will be able to turn a blind eye to more than 600,000 deaths. And I want to see what possible justification will be invoked to avoid punishing those responsible,” said the president of the PCI, Omaz Aziz. His message, posted on social media, had a precise target: the Attorney General Augusto Aras, a strong ally of Bolsonaro, who will have the task of confirming or dismissing the request for the indictment of the president, which includes nine charges, from fraud to crimes against humanity.
Meanwhile, the number of the accused has risen to 81, with the last-minute inclusion of Amazonas State Governor Wilson Lima and former State Health Secretary Marcellus Campêlo, in reference to the tragedy within the greater tragedy that was the management of Covid in Manaus.
The very last person to be added was a member of the CPI itself, pro-Bolsonaro Senator Luis Carlos Heinze, who, in his speech in committee, once again sang the praises of “early treatment,” rejected by science, as if nothing had happened.
But the remark that made clear the spirit in which the last session of the CPI began, at the end of six months of work, came from Calheiros, speaking to journalists shortly before, who called Bolsonaro a “serial killer.”
And the beginning of the session was no different, with the approval of Senator Randolfe Rodrigues’ request to ban the president from social media and to demand a public retraction of his latest, sensational fake news, claiming a link between the anti-Covid vaccine and AIDS (his video with this new gem had already been removed from Facebook, Instagram and YouTube).
The presidency “is not like going to a bar, where you speak without thinking while drinking beer and eating churrasquinho,” said Aziz in response to the pro-Bolsonaro Jorginho Mello, the only one to vote against the request to send that mind-numbing claim to Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes, in charge of the proceedings for fake news where the president is among the suspects.
Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, there was the conferral of honorary citizenship to the “serial killer” by the city council of Anguillara Veneta—who barricaded themselves in the council chamber amidst protests—which continues to cause uproar. Against the decision of the administration led by the mayor Alessandra Buoso—based on the laughable reason that Bolsonaro’s great-grandfather was a native of the small town in the Paduan Lowlands—there was no end to the criticism: from the political forces, ANPI, the Italian missionaries in Brazil, the Lula Livre Committee qne the Association of Italian researchers in Brazil, just to name a few.
“Maybe you could propose that Hitler’s birthplace in Austria, Braunau am Inn, should award him honorary citizenship post mortem, since he was born there,” wrote the president of the Association of Partisans in Padua, Floriana Rizzetto, and vice president Maurizio Angelini. And who knows what might happen if, as some are saying (there is no confirmation yet), after the end of the G20 in Rome, Bolsonaro will really go to Anguillara Veneta to be receive that honor—which would be a very unusual experience in his travels abroad.
