Necropolitics, coronavirus and the case of Brazilian quilombola communities

Abstract

The world is facing unprecedented events because of the coronavirus pandemic. It started in China, went to all continents, arrived in Brazil. It is a virus that acts on a global scale, but has different consequences in the countries where does it go. It is intended here to discuss how the pandemic context is highlighting the traces of the established necropolitics in relation to the black population, especially here about quilombola populations. For such, will be head a description of the concept of necropolitics from the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, towards that backdrop to analyze the data about the cases of coronavirus patients in Brazil as a whole and in quilombola communities, realizing a discrepancy about the lethality rates between quilombolas and non-quilombolas, a difference that points out that a sick quilombola with the coronavirus has about 3 times more chance of dying than a non-quilombola person. The data will be extracted from epidemiological bulletins provided by the Ministry of Health and by the National Coordination of Articulation of Black Rural Quilombola Communities (CONAQ). With the visualization of this scenario, some hypotheses about the reason for this difference will be put, but the important is that the necropolitics is present in any of them hypotheses. Thus, the let die that Mbembe concept discussed and applied here in the Brazilian scenario, may represent the biggest genocide of the quilombola population in Brazil since the slave period. Finally, it is intended to present some scenarios for the post-pandemic and how quilombola communities can interact in each scenario displayed.