Bolsonaro Uses Military To "Crack Down" On Illegal Mining - For Two Months, Ending This Week
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Amid rising global alarm at the climate emergency and the Amazon’s decimation under Brazil’s ultraconservative president, the army has sprung into action with a two-month offensive against illegal gold miners and loggers. The mission, which began in July and ends this week, has been accompanied by a public relations blitz in which Bolsonaro’s administration claims: “It’s in our nature to preserve”. Tarcísio Gomes de Freitas, a key Bolsonaro ally and cabinet member, said their government was determined to show the world a new, greener face after three years in which deforestation rates and global outrage exploded.
“I recognise there has been a deterioration of [Brazil’s] image as a result of the deforestation figures and what the government is now doing is increasing its monitoring capabilities so these statistics can be reversed,” the infrastructure minister said during a recent visit to the region. “The fight against deforestation will be intensified,” Freitas insisted, trumpeting the recent doubling of the environmental enforcement budget.
Activists are skeptical the clampdown, which comes on the eve of November’s Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, will have any meaningful long-term impact while Bolsonaro remains in power. Deforestation has soared to a 12-year high under a leader who critics claim has emboldened Amazon outlaws with his anti-environmental words and deeds. “This softening of the rhetoric doesn’t convince me … [and] I really don’t think the world will buy this so easily,” said Suely Araújo, the former head of Brazil’s environmental agency Ibama.
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Signs of the devastation wrought by decades of rampant exploitation are everywhere in Jardim do Ouro and the surrounding state of Pará, one of nine that form Brazil’s Amazon. The Jamanxim River, which meanders past Viana’s waterside bungalow, runs a disturbing milky brown: the result, locals say, of mining pollution. When Viana arrived in 1981, the region’s rainforests were largely untouched. Forty years later, like much of the Amazon, they have been replaced by a sprawling patchwork of dirt tracks and cattle ranches – and the destruction continues. Twenty miles upriver, in a supposedly protected area near the Jamanxim national forest, the hum of a chainsaw could be heard despite the army’s presence. The machine fell silent as the Guardian’s reporters approached, but huge damage had already been done. Satellite imagery showed a 541-hectare strip of jungle was felled here in recent months – the equivalent of some 650 football pitches. At least 4,147 sq km of forest were destroyed in Pará state between August 2020 and this July – an area more than 2.5 times larger than Greater London.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/15/brazil-bolsonaro-illegal-mining-amazon