“The people in the big cities of Sao Paulo and Rio, they want us to live on picking Brazil nuts,” a farmer says. “That doesn’t put anyone’s kid in college”
Bolsonaro is often called the Trump of the Tropics, and he has the same authoritarian streak, penchant for racist rhetoric, and disdain for science. This week, he claimed the fires were likely started by non-governmental organizations to “call attention” to the fact that their funding has been cut. His chief of staff said European nations lie about deforestation in Brazil and that he had no plans to visit the burning swaths of forest. “I’ll go see something more important,” he said.
The tragedy of all of this is that for over a decade, Brazil was the world’s leader in stopping deforestation. Under the leftist Worker’s Party, deforestation in Brazil dropped by 85 percent between 2004 and 2015 due to a series of aggressive reforms and the demarcation of national forest, conservation units, and indigenous reserves.
The burning season was just getting started when I visited, and in the city of Novo Progresso, in the southwest corner of Para, not far from Mato Grosso, cattle ranchers and land speculators told me they were thrilled by Bolsonaro’s election. As they saw it, the Brazilian government had sent them there in the 1970s to develop the Amazon, and then turned on them with fines and the confiscation of equipment.
There was a sense of panic and desperation among the rainforest advocates I met during my three-week long trip. Jose Sarney Filho, who served as environmental minister under two presidents, says Bolsonaro is systematically dismantling environmental protections. “What is happening is unprecedented,” Sarney Filho says. “This new government is trying to destroy what we built over 30 years.”
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