400 body bags placed on Copacabana beach for victims of coronavirus in Brazil

The emblematic Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro was dyed in mourning this Friday in tribute to the 400,000 victims that the coronavirus covid-19 has left in Brazil, one of the countries in the world most affected by the pandemic.

The NGO Río de Paz held an act in the arena of Copacabana in protest against the management of the Government of President Jair Bolsonaro during the pandemic, which has left more deaths from covid-19 in the first four months of 2021 than in the entire previous year.

The entity scattered 400 black body bags on the beach, symbolizing the 400,000 victims of coronavirus in the country, a sad mark that the country surpassed the day before.

“It is a reproduction of an emblematic scene of the current moment in our history,” the president of Rio de Paz, Antonio Carlos Costa, told EFE.

Aerial view showing rows of body bags on Copacabana beach. (Photo by CARL DE SOUZA / AFP). (CARL DE SOUZA /)

Protesters from the Rio de Paz human rights activist group lower a body bag onto a symbolic grave on Copacabana beach. (Photo by CARL DE SOUZA / AFP). (CARL DE SOUZA /)

The country registered its first death from coronavirus on March 12, 2020 and in just over fourteen months it has reached 401,186, almost 13% of the world total, when Brazil barely represents 3% of the planet’s population.

Brazil is the second country with the most deaths related to covid-19, after the United States, and the third with the most infected, with more than 14.5 million, after the United States and India, now the main focus global pandemic.

“These are facts that were not fabricated by the media and it is humiliating for our democracy. To shut up at this time means to be complicit in the crimes committed by the Brazilian ruling class, ”Costa said.

And he added: “The federal government was very wrong from the beginning of the pandemic, minimized the lethal power of this virus, did not present the country with a national plan and prescribed drugs without the minimum scientific verification.”