The coronavirus was probably brought to Brazil by rich returning holidaymakers but it is threatening to explode in marginal communities

In many ways, Washington Castro was a typical resident of Rocinha, the immense redbrick favela that towers over Rio de Janeiro’s Atlantic coast.

Industrious, God-fearing and the offspring of migrants from Brazil’s parched and impoverished north-east, he supported two young children by working two separate jobs and wore a suit and tie when attending his local church.

“He was a marvellous boy. He worked Monday to Monday,” his grief-stricken father, José Osmar Alves da Silva, remembered as he reflected on his son’s death. “Now there’s this hole inside of me and I just can’t make sense of anything.”

Castro died of suspected Covid-19 last Saturday at age 27 – one of at least six Rocinha residents to lose their lives to the coronavirus as it begins what many fear could be a devastating march through some of Latin America’s most vulnerable communities.

“He was a cutie … Whenever we met he was always wearing the same smile,” said Cecília Vasconcelos, a childhood friend who grew up with him in this sprawling hillside community of some 100,000 residents in southern Rio.

The coronavirus appears to have been brought into Brazil by members of the country’s middle and upper classes as they returned from February holidays in Europe or the United States.

In Rio and São Paulo, many of the early infections were concentrated in the richest neighbourhoods, such as Copacabana and Gávea, where Castro had worked as an assistant at an accountancy firm and a poolside waiter at a club for Brazil’s wealthy elites.

One of the most famous clusters was Rio’s Country Club, an ultra-exclusive enclave of privilege and power just three miles from Rocinha where at least 60 of the 850 members were infected.

But two months after Brazil’s first reported Covid-19 case the disease is making headway in the deprived, densely populated favelas of both cities, with potentially far-reaching political and humanitarian consequences.

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