The Brazilian president will participate in the G20 summit in Rome but will not meet with the Pope, who instead receives Biden
What better than a trip abroad when in your land you are accused of crimes against humanity for your terrible management of the pandemic. The president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, arrives this Friday in Rome to participate in the G20 summit after a commission of the Senate of his country requested on Tuesday his imputation for the errors committed during the health crisis, which has caused in the giant Latin American more than 600,000 deaths. With a controversial environmental position, defending mining and agricultural operations more than the protection of the Amazon and indigenous reserves, Bolsonaro will probably feel very alone in the Eternal City now that a denialist of the United States is no longer in the US presidency. climate emergency like Donald Trump. His successor, Joe Biden, maintains an antagonistic position, to the point that he wants the Rome summit to conclude with the commitment of the most developed countries in the world to achieve zero emissions by 2050.
Unlike the other leaders present at this weekend’s meeting of the G20 in Rome, the Brazilian president will not then travel to Glasgow to participate in the climate summit convened by the United Nations (Cop26). Instead, he will travel to a small town in the province of Padua, Anguillara Veneta, in northeastern Italy, where his great-grandfather comes from and whose City Council will appoint him an honorary citizen. This decision has caused a controversy due to the controversial positions of the Brazilian politician, who to his lack of interest in combating climate change and protecting the Amazon adds the denial of Covid-19 and the transmission of hoaxes about vaccines to combat this disease. His last outburst was to associate these serums with the transmission of AIDS.
“Honorary citizenship is given to Bolsonaro as president of Brazil, but it has nothing to do with his person, but as a representative of the Brazilian people and the Italians who emigrated to Brazil,” the mayor of Anguillara Veneta, Alessandra Buoso, justified herself. . His words failed to quell criticism. The Italian left considered “an outrage” the decision to reward a politician “misogynist and allergic to democracy” and even the local bishop, Claudio Cipolla, said that it was an “embarrassing” visit and recalled the complaint from the Brazilian Church for “the environmental devastation” that the Bolsonaro government is facilitating. It has also not gone unnoticed that although the president of the Latin American country will stay in Italy for five days, he will not take advantage of his stay to hold an audience with the Pope at the Vatican, with whom he maintains antithetical positions.
Francis, on the other hand, will receive this Friday at the Apostolic Palace Biden, the second Catholic American president after John F. Kennedy. It will be the fourth time that the two coincide, although the first since the Democratic leader arrived at the White House. These two men who have become “allies” and have risen to positions of “top leadership” at an advanced age and with “a progressive leadership,” as ‘The Washington Post’ writes, are fully in tune with issues such as fight the climate emergency and concern for the weakest. There may be more edges in the conversation between the two if Francis presses Biden to give his country more coronavirus vaccines to poor nations or reminds him of the run-down way the United States left Afghanistan.
The bishop of Rome and the president also share the common contempt of the more conservative part of the American episcopate. The bishops who seek to excommunicate the Democratic leader for his pro-abortion policies are the same ones who do not hide their lack of harmony with Jorge Mario Bergoglio due to his openness towards homosexuals and the divorced, as well as the limitations he has placed on the celebration of the mass with the pre-conciliar rite.
.
#Controversy #haunts #Bolsonaro #trip #Italy