Brazil is facing the worst health crisis in its history. Intensive care units across the country are running out of space, hospitals lack basic medical supplies, and major cities are running out of vaccines. Instead of something approaching leadership, the country’s extreme-right government is busy forcing on the population a cocktail of snake oil remedies (ivermectin and chloroquine) known as “COVID kits” and persecuting those that criticize its response to COVID using dictatorship-era laws.

In the midst of the national collapse of Brazil’s health system, it’s worth recalling how exactly the country arrived at this dark moment.

It is a great historical irony that the political chaos, mass death, and authoritarianism bubbling over in Brazil was unleashed in large part through a judicial crusade that promised to modernize its civil service and rid the country of corruption. Instead, Brazil has broken new ground in cruelty, deliberate incompetence, and sheer idiocy in its farcical response to the COVID-19 crisis. As of this writing, more than 300,000 Brazilians have died from COVID-19, and 12 million are infected.