Most Brazilians don’t want it. Major sponsors have fled. Even players balked at the idea. But ready or not, the Copa America, one of Latin America’s most important sporting spectacles, is coming to town.

The international soccer tournament, which President Jair Bolsonaro greenlit with little warning late last month, will begin Sunday in Brazil against a backdrop of controversy and fear.

A third wave of the coronavirus, which is still killing on average nearly 2,000 Brazilians per day, is on the near horizon. Hospitals are again barreling toward capacity.

The decision to host an international sporting event at such a moment has divided this traditionally soccer-obsessed country, further inflaming political differences amid an ongoing humanitarian disaster that has already killed nearly a half-million Brazilians.

A prominent sports announcer called Bolsonaro’s decision to host the tournament a “slap in the face of the face of Brazilians.”

A senator leading an inquiry into Bolsonaro’s pandemic response called the tournament a “championship of death.”

Players on the Brazilian team put out a letter saying the were “disappointed” in Copa America.

Polls have shown more than 60pc of Brazilians are against hosting the tournament. Scientists are warning Brazil is again teetering at the precipice.

“We are having more than 70,000 cases per day,” said Domingos Alves, director of the Health Intelligence Laboratory at the University of São Paulo in Ribeirão Prêto. “We are in a third wave.”

“It’s ridiculous that we would have Copa America in Brazil amid the epidemiological situation that we’re going through,” he added.

Bolsonaro, who has spent the length of the pandemic diminishing its significance, begs to disagree. The nationalist president says it’s long since time Brazil got back to business as usual. And when Colombia and Argentina backed out of their commitments to host the tournament, he stepped forward.

“The Copa America will happen in Brazil,” he said earlier this month. “From the beginning I’ve been saying in regard to the pandemic: I’m sorry for the deaths, but we have to live.”

 In recent weeks, the country has been absorbed by a congressional probe investigating his administration’s erratic behavior during the coronavirus pandemic.

Several witnesses have provided deeply damaging testimony, detailing his administration’s failures to purchase vaccines and its quixotic commitment to the anti-malarial medication, hydroxychloroquine, long after it was shown to be ineffective against the virus.

© Washington Post