Brazilian Farmers Believe They Have the Right to Burn the Amazon
On Monday, at about 3 p.m., the sky in Sao Paulo turned dark.
As rain began to fall in South America’s largest city, Leandro Matozo, a television reporter who lives on the city’s east side, noticed that the rain pooling in his mother’s garden was filled with soot. He filled up a plastic soda bottle with the rainwater and took a picture, which later went viral on Twitter. The water was black.
Satellite images from the European Space Agency would reveal a river of smoke from forest fires burning across the Amazon rainforest. Photographs taken above the tree cover are even more terrifying. They show a forest that is rapidly vanishing: Since President Jair Bolsonaro took office in January, trees in the Brazilian Amazon have been disappearing at the rate of two Manhattans a week. There have been 39,601 fires so far this year, a 77 percent increase over 2018, according to INPE, Brazil’s space research center.
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. And amid growing international alarm, Bolosonaro rebuffed offers of help from world leaders, calling it an attempt to interfere with Brazil’s national sovereignty. When Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, said, “our house is burning” and urged the G7 to prioritize the crisis when it meets this weekend, Bolsonaro brushed him back as a colonialist.
From the time he campaigned for president, Bolsonaro vowed to open the Amazon to development, finishing hydroelectric dams and paving roads that cut through the forest. I traveled to the region in June for Rolling Stone on a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting to witness firsthand the battle over the forest’s future. Emboldened by the election of Bolsonaro, farmers were already burning forest to clear more land for soy farms and cattle ranches. Bolsonaro owes his election largely to a relatively new coalition in Brazil known as the Beef, Bible and Bullets caucus, which pressured his predecessor, Michel Temer, to open the Amazon for development to stave off a scandal that threatened to engulf his presidency. According to documents leaked earlier this week, Bolsonaro has been implementing a strategy to “occupy” the Amazon with development projects — including the Trombetas River hydroelectric plant and the Obidos bridge over the Amazon River — and to prevent conservation.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/brazilian-farmers-believe-they-have-the-right-to-burn-the-amazon-875879/
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