Bolsonaro tweeted Monday that he was shifting three other Cabinet ministers to new posts — chief of staff, defense minister and attorney general — and naming a new justice and public security minister and a new government secretary.

But the biggest change was moving Ernesto Araújo out as foreign minister. Araújo had most recently been under fire for comments and actions that critics said impeded faster access to coronavirus vaccines as the coronavirus batters Brazil.

It was just the latest Cabinet turmoil for the embattled Bolsonaro. The president in mid-March replaced the health minister, whose tenure coincided with most of Brazil’s 314,000 COVID-19 deaths and became the target of fierce criticism. In February, Bolsonaro tapped a retired army general to take over state-run oil behemoth Petrobras, seeking to appeal to his constituency of truck drivers who had threatened to strike over fuel price increases.

Aráujo was subjected to a nearly five-hour Senate hearing last week to defend his ministry’s actions during the pandemic. Center-right Sen. Tasso Jereissati told the minister that he no longer had the standing to remain in the post and that his exit would end the help end the crisis.

Maurício Santoro, professor of political science and international relations at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, said the Senate attacks on Araújo became too overpowering for Bolsonaro to withstand.

“The vaccine issue was the spark that lit the fire,″ Santoro said. ″The general context is Araújo failed in all the most important tasks he had to do as a minister. Brazil is facing bad political dialogue with its biggest trade partners — China, the U.S., the EU and Argeninta — all for different reasons.

The new foreign minister is Carlos França, who like Araújo is a career diplomat. But unlike Araújo, França isn’t a follower of far-right ideologue Olavo de Carvalho, the newspaper O Globo reported. He is an adviser to Bolsonaro and former ceremonial chief at the presidential palace and is considered to be pragmatic rather than ideological.

Araújo has denied climate change, which he calls a leftist dogma, and he made comments perceived as critical of China, Brazil’s biggest trading partner. In just over two years as foreign minister, he repeatedly dismayed foreign policy veterans by breaking with Brazil’s tradition of multilateralism and adopting policy based on ideology, particularly aligning with the U.S. during the Trump administration.

On Saturday, a group of 300 diplomats published a letter saying Araújo had tarnished Brazil’s image abroad and demanded his removal, according to the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo.

“Don’t let globalism kill your soul in the name of competitiveness,″ Araújo said at his swearing-in ceremony in a speech that was seen as a rallying cry for nationalism. ″Don’t believe globalism when it says having economic efficiency means suffocating the country’s soul and not loving the country.″

Brazil was also one of the last countries in the world to recognize U.S. President Joe Biden’s election victory, and Araújo declined to attend his inauguration. Instead, he took a vacation.

Santoro, the professor, said Araújo’s climate change position was an impediment to Brazil dealing with the U.S. and Europe on curbing Amazon deforestation. That issue has been the focus of European governments and many foreign investors, and Biden has said he intends to prioritize the issue.

Early in the pandemic, Araújo wrote on a personal blog that globalists were seeking to use the coronavirus as a means to subvert liberal democracy and market economics in order to install communism and enslave humans. He made other comments that angered China.

Clamor for the minister’s resignation grew as Brazil’s COVID-19 death toll surged this year and the nation suffered delays in getting active ingredients needed to bottle vaccines, mostly from China. Slow arrival was widely speculated to be political retribution by the Asian power, although both Araújo and Chinese authorities in Brazil claimed technical reasons.

“When the country needed Araújo and the foreign relations ministry to operate to guarantee what we needed to vaccinate people, they kept playing at highly ideological foreign policy,″ said Hussein Kalout, formerly Brazil’s special secretary for strategic affairs and now a research scholar at Harvard University.

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COVID 19 Rising Among Brazil’s Young

Sao Paulo (CNN)  Covid-19 cases are on the rise among Brazil’s younger population, a Brazilian research institute has found, as the country grapples with a deadly resurgence of the virus.

“The country is in a situation of collapse of the health system. At the same time, the pandemic has been gaining new characteristics affecting younger age groups: 30 to 39 years, 40 to 49 years and 50 to 59 years,” reads the report published Friday by Brazil’s Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz).

During the first part of Brazil’s struggle with the coronavirus, it was the elderly who made up the majority of those who were getting sick from Covid-19.

But since the beginning of the country’s second wave of Covid-19 on November 2020, demand has increased for health services by symptomatic young patients in Brazil, Fiocruz researchers said.

The new report analyzed weekly data from the country’s Health Ministry from January 1 to March 13, 2021. It found an increase of more than 500% in infections among people aged 30 to 39. There was a more than 600% increase among people 40 to 49 and more than 500% among people 50 to 59 in the same period.

Meanwhile, the total number of coronavirus cases nationwide among all age groups grew by 319% during that same window of time, the report found.

Although increasing numbers of younger people are becoming infected with the virus, Covid-19 deaths are still more common among older people, the report noted.

Why are more young people getting sick with Covid-19 in Brazil?

The new analysis comes as the country struggles to contain the pandemic, and as local coronavirus variant P.1 rips through the country. On Monday, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro changed six top ministers, including officials charged with defense and foreign affairs, after officially ousting the country’s health minister last week.

More than 12,573,615 cases have been confirmed since the pandemic began, and 313,866 Covid-related deaths have been confirmed.

On Thursday last week, Brazil’s Health Ministry announced that more than 100,000 new Covid-19 cases had been confirmed in that day alone — the country’s highest such figure since the pandemic began.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador flatly said that Victoria Esperanza Salazar was murdered by police in the Caribbean resort of Tulum.

Victoria Esperanza Salazar let out a scream Saturday afternoon as a female police officer knelt on her back to cuff her hands behind her. Salazar was face down on the street and barefoot. Her feet flailed. A couple people passed slowly by on a bicycle. There were food stands a few yards away.

Clips of video cobbled together give no sense of how much time elapsed. Then three other officers are seen standing around her motionless body still facedown, chatting casually. Later, three officers lift her still handcuffed body into the back of a police pickup truck and drive away.

Video circulating on social media does not show events before Salazar was face down on the street with the officer on top of her.

An autopsy concluded that Salazar died from a broken neck. The examination found, “a fracture of part of the upper spinal column produced by the rupture of the first and second vertebra which caused the loss of the victim,” Quintana Roo State Prosecutor Oscar Montes de Oca said in a video.

The injuries were “compatible y coincide with submission maneuvers applied to the victim during her detention” and demonstrate a “disproportionate” use of force. He said his office was preparing femicide charges against the four police officers.

Salazar had been living in Mexico for some years on a “humanitarian visa,” El Salvador President Nayib Bukele said. “She was brutally murdered by Tulum police officers in Quintana Roo, Mexico,” the president wrote. He said the government would support Salazar’s two daughters.

“I see thousands of outraged Mexicans, demanding justice for our compatriot,” Bukele said. “They are as outraged as we are. Let us not forget that it was not the Mexican people who committed this crime, but rather some criminals in the Tulum police.”

López Obrador swore Monday that those responsible would be punished.

“She was brutally treated and murdered,” López Obrador said. “It is an event that fills us with pain and shame.”

On Monday, a small potted plant and a couple candles sat outside the convenience store where Salazar was killed. Someone wrote “Here they killed Victoria” in large purple letters on the pavement.

Salazar left Sonsonate, about an hour west of San Salvador, five years ago to look for better opportunities and escape the area’s street violence, said her mother Rosibel Emerita Arriaza. She was a single mother of two daughters.

She left her daughters with her family and made her way to Mexico. In the southern Mexico city of Tapachula, near the Guatemala border, Salazar requested and received refugee status. Mexico’s National Immigration Institute confirmed that Monday.

Once she had legal status she moved to the beach resort town of Tulum on Mexico’s Caribbean coast. A more relaxed alternative to Cancun and Playa del Carmen, Tulum had drawn crowds and was struggling with rapid growth. Salazar found work cleaning in hotels and brought her daughters, ages 16 and 15, to be with her.

On Monday, Arriaza was working with Salvadoran authorities on getting her daughter’s body repatriated. She also planned to travel to Mexico to be reunited with her granddaughters

“I want justice for my daughter, because it isn’t fair what they did to her,” Arriaza said. “She was a woman who wasn’t armed, just for being a woman and I don’t know what happened.”

Following the autopsy results, Quintana Roo state security chief Lucio Hernández Gutiérrez said that in addition to the four police officers involved in the events, Tulum’s police chief was also fired Monday.

He called the video of the killing “shameful and conclusive.”

Tulum Mayor Victor Mas Tah said “I understand and share the outrage and pain of all of society.” He said the former police officers would be jailed in the coming hours.

Manuel Barradas, owner of a small convenience store, said Salazar appeared “off” to him so when she approached his store he barred her entry. Authorities made no mention of Salazar being under the influence of anything in discussing the autopsy. Police detained her a short time later.

Protest marches were scheduled for later Monday in Tulum, Mexico City and San Salvador.

The scenes were reminiscent of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. Floyd was declared dead after a white police officer pressed his knee against the Black man’s neck for about nine minutes, holding his position even after Floyd went limp.

Floyd’s death was captured on widely seen bystander video and sparked sometimes violent protests in Minneapolis and beyond, leading to a nationwide reckoning on race. The trial for that officer began Monday in Minneapolis.

The Quintana Roo prosecutor’s office said four Tulum police officers — three men and one woman — were under investigation for their probable involvement in the Saturday evening incident. They said fingerprints and forensic evidence were being examined in the case.