![Long before President Jair Bolsonaro tested positive for COVID-19, the pandemic was ravaging the country’s poor neighborhoods and prisons.](https://ibw21.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/jair-bolsonaro-and-coronavirus-put-brazils-systemic-racism-on-display-910x512-1.jpg)
By Anakwa Dwamena, The New Yorker — Several months before the coronavirus first arrived in Brazil, this spring, a series of man-made tragedies befell Maria Marques Martins dos Santos. On November 12th, dos Santos, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of three, whose five-foot frame is crowned by curly brown hair, was at her home, in Favela do Amor, in São Paulo. Just after midnight, her fourteen-year-old son, Lucas, went out to buy soda and…