Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has insulted adversaries and allies, disparaged women, blacks and homosexuals, and even praised his country’s 1964 to 1985 dictatorship.
Yet nothing has rallied more anger at home and criticism from abroad than his response to fires raging in parts of the Amazon region.
The far-right populist leader initially dismissed the hundreds of blazes and then questioned whether activist groups might have started the fires in an effort to damage the credibility of his government, which has called for looser environmental regulations in the world’s largest rainforest to spur development.
Photo:AFP
In response, European leaders threatened to end a trade deal with Brazil and other South American nations. Thousands of people have demonstrated in cities across Brazil and outside Brazilian embassies around the world.
Bolsonaro finally took a less confrontational approach on Friday and announced that he would send 44,000 soldiers to help battle the blazes.
Some have said it is not enough and came too late.
“No democratic government has suffered such international criticism as Bolsonaro is going through,” Rio de Janeiro State University international relations professor Mauricio Santoro said.
“By breaching international environmental agreements, Brazil has been discredited, blurred and unable to exercise any type of leadership on the international stage,” Santoro said.
Brazilian military planes began dumping water on fires in the Amazon state of Rondonia over the weekend, and a few hundred of the promised troops deployed into the fire zone.
However, many Brazilians again took to the streets in Rio de Janeiro and other cities on Sunday to demand the administration do more. Some held banners that read: “Bol$onaro is burning our future.”
Critics have said the record number of fires this year has been stoked by Bolsonaro’s encouragement of farmers, loggers and ranchers to speed efforts to strip away forest.
The leaders of the G7 nations said that they were preparing a plan for helping Brazil battle the fires and repair the damage.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said her country and others would talk with Brazil about reforestation in the Amazon once the fires have been extinguished.
“Of course [this is] Brazilian territory, but we have a question here of the rainforests that is really a global question,” she said. “The lung of our whole Earth is affected, and so we must find common solutions.”
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson yesterday pledged ￡10 million (US$12.3 million) to help restore the Amazon rainforest.
The Brazilian National Space Research Institute, which monitors deforestation, has recorded more than 77,000 wildfires in Brazil this year.
That is an 85 percent rise over last year, and about half of the fires have been in the Amazon region.
“We’ve had eight months without any type of concrete action in defense of the Amazon,” said Romulo Batista, a member of Greenpeace Brazil’s Amazonia Campaign.
The flames licking over swaths of the Amazon are a reflection of Bolsonaro’s environmental policy, he said.
Additional reporting by AFP
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