Bolsonaro disparaged for lies on virus and environment

Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president, told the UN general assembly he had come to the meeting to showcase “a new Brazil, with its credibility restored before the world”.

But in an address over 12 minutes the far-right populist preached unproven Covid remedies, denounced containment measures and peddled a succession of distortions and lies about Brazilian politics and the environment, doing little to repair his country’s mangled international reputation.

“It is sickening and shameful to see this kind of president give such a lie-filled speech on the international stage. This kind of man should not be representing our country,” said the leftist congresswoman Vivi Reis.

Ahead of Bolsonaro’s address some Brazilian diplomats reportedly had hoped their president might show a softer face to the world than he had done during his last in-person appearance at the UN. On that occasion, in September 2019, he accused the “deceitful” media of hyping the Amazon’s destruction and launched a Donald Trump-style excoriation of socialism.

Those hopes of moderation evaporated within seconds of Bolsonaro taking the podium, however, as he announced he had come “to show a Brazil different to the one you see in newspapers and on TV”, claiming incorrectly: “We haven’t had a single concrete case of corruption for [the] two years and eight months [of my presidency].” Bolsonaro, a rightwing nationalist, has personally undermined efforts to immunise citizens against the coronavirus, which has now killed almost 600,000.

On Monday the New York mayor, Bill de Blasio, and Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, publicly goaded Bolsonaro over his failure to get a Covid-19 vaccination. Blasio told Brazil’s president he should not have bothered visiting without doing so.

In his speech Bolsonaro also trumpeted his administration’s support for Covid remedies known to be ineffective – called in Brazil “early treatment” – despite widespread opposition from the global medical community. “We do not understand why many countries, along with a large part of the media, opposed early treatment. History and science will how to hold everyone to account.”

In his address he painted an implausibly rosy picture of his country’s environmental protection efforts. “Which other country in the world has a policy of environmental protection like ours?” suggested Bolsonaro, under whom deforestation has soared to 12-year highs.

Marcio Astrini, executive director of the Climate Observatory, said of Bolsonaro’s claim that 84% of the Amazon rainforest was intact: “Somebody cooks up these numbers and the president repeats them.”