Cartoons showing hanging cannon tanks have spread on Twitter.
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil:
Brazil’s military came under scrutiny on Monday after a lawmaker revealed it had bought Viagra pills for the troops, sparking a flurry of jokes on social media.
Congressman Elias Vaz said he had been informed through a freedom of information request that President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration had approved an order for 35,000 erectile dysfunction pills for the armed forces.
“Our hospitals don’t have enough medicine and Bolsonaro and his crew are using government money to buy ‘the little blue pill’,” the opposition lawmaker said, calling the purchase “immoral”.
The documents he received don’t mention Viagra by name, but say the order was for sildenafil, the active ingredient in the drug, the center-left delegate said.
The Defense Department said in a statement that the pills were in fact “to treat patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension,” or high blood pressure in the lungs, another use for sildenafil.
That did little to dampen the glee of social media users.
Cartoons depicting hanging gun tanks spread on Twitter, where Viagra was one of Brazil’s hottest trending topics.
“This explains why the military’s support for Bolsonaro is only growing and rising,” joked one user, playing on the far-right president’s close relationship with the armed forces.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain, has stuffed his government with members of the armed forces and has openly nostalgic for the Brazilian military dictatorship of 1964-1985, despite a track record of human rights abuses.
“Some say these pills should help the armed forces f*** democracy even harder,” wrote the satirical news site Sensacionalista.
Left-wing congressmen Marcelo Freixo and Elias Vaz, meanwhile, said they would ask prosecutors to investigate whether there was anything else wrong with the purchase: the bill.
They said there was evidence that the government had overcharged by up to 143 percent – often a sign of corruption.
(This story was not edited by DailyExpertNews staff and was generated automatically from a syndicated feed.)
