The Brazilian labor delegation used the annual meeting of the ILO (International Labor Organization) to accuse Jair Bolsonaro’s government of committing genocide and authoritarian action against its population for its response to the health crisis. The speech prompted the government to demand a right of reply.
“With a denial and economically brutal agenda, producing a holocaust with nearly 670,000 dead in the pandemic – a death rate four times the world average – the Brazilian government is fostering a tension in our democracy,” he said in a statement on Tuesday. Antônio Neto, president of Brasileiros Central dos Unions and chairing the country’s workers’ delegation at the ILO conference in Geneva this year, is also president of the São Paulo State Union of Information Technology Professionals.
“The president of Brazil promotes distrust of the electoral system, encourages discord between powers, and encourages his followers to persecute the press, the opposition and the judiciary,” he said.
In his speech, he pointed out that the pandemic “has revealed the collapse of the global economic system, especially in developing countries such as Brazil”.
“Deindustrialization, a decline in income, the dissolution of the State, the insecurity of work, the weakening of unions, and the inequalities produced by neoliberalism have been relentless for the most vulnerable. Governments that promise stability, bring misery and an absurd concentration of income.”
According to him, the issue in Brazil was exacerbated by a government that “pushed values such as democracy, humanism and tolerance into the background”.
The lack of growth would be “the result of the hegemony of neoliberalism, expanding with the complicity of sectors claiming to be progressive, fostering the most brutal inequality and paving the way for the rise of an authoritarian government”.
Neto points out that almost 70% of the workforce is discouraged, unemployed or informal. “And only five people have the same wealth as the poorest 100 million Brazilians,” he said.
“The current government has continued and exacerbated its attacks on workers by reclaiming rights, dismantling Social Security, persecuting unions, weakening collective bargaining, indifference to child and slave labor, and choosing public officials as enemies,” it warned.
Faced with the speeches of the unions, the Brazilian government demanded the right of reply from the organizers of the event. Reiterating what was already a pattern of backlash by the authorities, the speech simply highlighted Bolsonaro’s policies, without reference to the return of hunger, poverty and social crisis in the country. Nor was it that Brazil added one of the highest death tolls in the world due to the pandemic.
“To date, more than 83% of the eligible population in Brazil has been fully vaccinated,” the official government delegation said.
“To address the devastating effects of the pandemic on business, the Brazilian government has successfully enacted layoffs programs that employ 11 million workers and cash transfers that provide immediate relief to nearly 70 million workers. We focus on the most vulnerable,” he said.
“Income inequality has returned to pre-pandemic levels and has been decreasing ever since. Currently, the program called Auxilio Brasil reaches over 18 million families,” he said.
The government also stressed that “unemployment is now at its lowest level since 2015, at 10.5%. This is the lowest rate in 6 years”.
source: Noticias
[author_name]
