Brazil's super-rich and the exclusive club at the heart of a coronavirus hotspot
Brazil's super-rich and the exclusive club at the heart of a coronavirus hotspot
Connection between Covid-19 and country’s globe-trotting elite highlights gulf between rich and poor in one of world’s most unequal societies
Tom Phillips and Caio Barretto Briso in Rio de Janeiro
Sat 4 Apr 2020 05.00 EDT Last modified on Sat 4 Apr 2020 05.55 EDT
It is Brazil’s most exclusive club – a beachside sanctuary of privilege and power to which just 0.00041% of the country’s citizens have the keys.
But the Rio de Janeiro Country Club – founded by British executives in 1916 and frequented since by the crème de la crème of carioca society – has been thrown into mourning by the coronavirus pandemic, sparking a nationwide debate about class and inequality in one of the most economically lopsided societies on earth.
At least 60 of the club’s 850 globe-trotting members have reportedly been struck down with Covid-19, while one – the septuagenarian businesswoman Mirna Bandeira de Mello – has died and been laid to rest during a funeral attended by no one but her son.
“In normal times there would have been millions at her burial,” Christiano Bandeira de Mello lamented in an interview with the Brazilian magazine Época.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/04/brazils-super-rich-and-the-exclusive-club-at-the-heart-of-a-coronavirus-hotspot
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