I.As part of a comprehensive government reshuffle, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro filled six cabinet posts on Monday. As announced by the Ministry of Communications, the Foreign Minister and the Ministers for Justice and Defense have been replaced. The government of the far-right president is under increasing pressure in view of the skyrocketing number of corona infections and numerous patients with serious illnesses. The lack of vaccine everywhere caused further severe criticism.
With Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo and Defense Minister Fernando Azevedo e Silva, two heavyweights in the previous government had already announced their resignation before the government announced the cabinet reshuffle. The 53-year-old Araújo was considered a loyal follower of Bolsonaro and was recently under massive pressure mainly because of the Corona policy and the inadequate vaccination campaign in Brazil. After numerous parliamentarians had demanded his departure, his resignation came as no surprise.
Surprising resignation of the defense minister
However, there had been no public signs of the resignation of Defense Minister Azevedo e Silva. The 67-year-old reserve general said in a written statement that he has served Bolsonaro loyally since he took office in January 2019. “I go with this certainty: Mission accomplished.” The exchange of the other ministerial posts also came as a complete surprise to observers.
The resigned Foreign Minister Araújo was seen as the mainstay of the “ideological wing” of the far-right Bolsonaro government. He broke with the tradition of multilateralism cultivated by Brazilian diplomacy and drew a lot of criticism with statements on the “climate change ideology” and the “gender ideology”. He accused “globalists” of using the corona pandemic as a pretext to bring economic and social conditions under their control around the world.
It was only in mid-March that Bolsonaro exchanged his health minister again. Marcelo Queiroga is the fourth politician to head this department during Bolsonaro’s term of office.
Brazil is badly affected by the corona pandemic, Bolsonaro downplayed the dangers of Covid-19 from the start. In no other country are there currently so many people dying every day as a result of Covid-19 as in Brazil. A few days ago, the number of corona deaths exceeded the threshold of 300,000.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/brazil-bolsonaro-replaces-six-ministers-at-once/
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