[The sudden reversal, after days of dismissing growing concern over hundreds of fires raging across the Amazon, came as international outrage grew over the rising deforestation in the world’s largest tropical rain forest. European leaders threatened to cancel a major trade deal, protesters staged demonstrations outside Brazilian embassies and calls for a boycott of Brazilian products snowballed on social media.]
By
Ernesto Londoño, Manuela Andreoni and Letícia Casado
 |
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President
Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil during a ceremony at Army headquarters Friday
in
Brasilia. Credit Eraldo Peres/Associated Press
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RIO
DE JANEIRO — As an
ecological disaster in the Amazon escalated into a global political crisis,
Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, took the rare step on Friday of mobilizing
the armed forces to help contain blazes of a scale not seen in nearly a decade.
The sudden reversal, after days of dismissing
growing concern over hundreds of fires raging across the Amazon, came as
international outrage grew over the rising deforestation in the world’s largest
tropical rain forest. European leaders threatened to cancel a major trade deal,
protesters staged demonstrations outside Brazilian embassies and calls for a
boycott of Brazilian products snowballed on social media.
As a chorus of condemnation intensified,
Brazil braced for the prospect of punitive measures that could severely damage
an economy that is already sputtering after a brutal recession and the
country’s far-right populist president faced a withering reckoning.
On Friday, he said that he was planning to
send the military to enforce environmental laws and to help contain the fires
starting Saturday.
“Whatever is within our power we will do,” he
told reporters. “The problem is resources.”
Mr. Bolsonaro did not indicate what resources
the military would bring to bear, but he was scheduled to give a televised
address Friday evening to describe the government’s response plan.
In a televised address Friday night, Mr.
Bolsonaro said the government would take a “zero tolerance” approach to
environmental crimes. But he also said Brazilians in living in the states that
encompass the Amazon must be provided with broader opportunities to make a
decent living.
“I have a profound love and respect for the
Amazon,” Mr. Bolsonaro said in a rare scripted message. “Protecting the rain
forest is our duty.”
He provided no details about what assets the
military would bring to bear in areas where fires are spreading.
It was unlikely that Mr. Bolsonaro’s plan
could address the underlying crisis without a fundamental shift in his
environmental policies, which have emboldened miners, loggers and farmers to
strip and burn protected areas with a sense of impunity.
Since the nationalist former army captain
took office in January, deforestation has increased sharply across Brazil,
including in indigenous territories. Mr. Bolsonaro has pledged to make it
easier for industries to gain access to protected areas, arguing that native
communities are in control of unreasonably vast areas that contain enormous
wealth.
Brazil’s stretch of the Amazon lost more than
1,330 square miles of forest cover during the first seven months of the year, a
39 percent increase over the same period last year.
Experts say that spike appears to be the main
driver of the fires in the Amazon this year.
The number of fires in the Amazon so far this
year, 40,341, is the highest since 2010, and roughly 35 percent higher than the
average for the first eight months of the year, according to Brazil’s National
Institute of Space Research agency, which tracks deforestation and forest fires
using satellite images.
Most of the fires are set intentionally to
clear land for agriculture and cattle grazing. But the fire season got off to
an early start this year, and blazes set along the edges of the rain forest are
unusually potent, raising the risk that some will spread beyond the intended
areas, according to Doug Morton, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight
Center who tracks deforestation and fires in the Amazon.
“This is a critical time,” he said in an
interview. “Part of the international attention to what is going on comes from
the fact that Brazil has been such a pioneer and leader on environmental
protection and it has shown the world it’s possible to have economic
development while protecting the rain forest.”
That hard-earned reputation has been
crumbling in the Bolsonaro era.
Global outrage over the fires has spurred
calls to boycott Brazilian products and led European leaders to threaten to
walk away from a trade agreement that the European Union struck with Brazil and
a handful of neighboring countries in June.
In what has become an unusually nasty
exchange among leaders of major democracies, President Emmanuel Macron of
France went so far as to accuse Mr. Bolsonaro of lying about being committed to
fighting climate change and protecting the Amazon. “Our house is burning.
Literally.” Mr. Macron wrote on Twitter on Thursday.
Mr. Macron said Friday that he would try to
kill a major trade deal between Europe and South America that has been years in
the making. He and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said that the Amazon
fires should be added to the agenda of the Group of 7 summit meeting this
weekend.
Mr. Bolsonaro fired back that Mr. Macron was
the liar, chiding him for releasing “photos from the past century” to generate
“hatred against Brazil.” As for the Group of 7, he told Mr. Macron and Ms.
Merkel to mind their own business.
To be fair, Mr. Bolsonaro has a point: the
fiery images zooming across social media that have focused world attention on a
real crisis have not always been what they seem.
The Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo,
for instance, shared a dramatic view of a glowing strip of flames and smoke
with his 120 million Facebook followers and nearly 80 million Twitter
followers, but the photo was taken in 2013, far from the Amazon.
The photo Mr. Macron tweeted, also shared by
Leonardo DiCaprio and the singer Ricky Martin, came from a stock photo catalog
and is credited to a photographer who died in 2003.
Brazil’s minister of agriculture, Tereza
Cristina Corrêa da Costa Dias, pushed back, telling reporters on Friday that
many observers were conflating slash-and-burn fires regularly used to clear and
renourish farmland with out-of-control forest fires.
Foreign governments that threaten to punish
Brazil on trade or exports, she said, “first need to know what is happening in
Brazil before taking any measure.” She called on them to “lower the
temperature,” adding that “Brazil understands the importance of the Amazon.”
“In California fires kill people and burn
houses,” she said, arguing that Brazil is facing undue criticism.
On Friday evening, President Trump, who
supports Mr. Bolsonaro and has not criticized his environmental policies, said
he had spoken to Mr. Bolsonaro and offered to provide assistance in containing
the fires.
“I told him if the United States can help
with the Amazon Rainforest fires, we stand ready to assist!” Mr. Trump wrote in
a tweet.
There were several years in the early 2000s
that the Amazon had more fires than those so far this year. But the rate of
deforestation then prompted Brazil to adopt an ambitious set of policies to
preserve the Amazon and other environmentally sensitive areas.
Many of those protections have eroded on Mr.
Bolsonaro’s watch.
Marina Silva, who served as minister of the
environment between 2003 and 2008 and was lauded for curbing deforestation,
faulted the Bolsonaro government for encouraging people to violate
environmental laws by setting up shop in protected areas.
“Today, because of Bolsonaro, all our work is
turning into ashes,” she said in a phone interview Friday evening, lamenting
that the president’s approach on the environment has turned Brazilians into
“pariahs.”
Some local officials also expressed alarm. In
the northern state of Acre, the governor declared a state of emergency and
ordered the evacuation of areas that could become engulfed by fires.
“We have alarming data on air quality, so
health officials have increased the number of doctors available to treat our
people,” Israel Milani, the state’s top environmental official, said in an
interview.
In the state of Rondônia, firefighters said
they were in triage mode.
“It’s impossible to be everywhere at the same
time,” said Coronel Demargli Farias, the state’s chief of firefighters. “Even
if we had 50,000 men.”
As Mr. Bolsonaro promised Friday to start to
rein in the fires, many of Brazil’s embassies were mobbed by protesters. In
Buenos Aires, hundreds of demonstrators, most of them young, chanted “out
Bolsonaro!” to the beat of drums.
Like many of the protesters, Magalí Moglia, a
22-year-old college student, had a sense of existential urgency.
“I feel a lot of pain and anguish with
everything that is going on,” she said, “realizing that I am part of the
species that is killing the other species.”
Ernesto Londoño and Manuela Andreoni reported
from Rio de Janeiro, and Letícia Casado from Brasília. Richard Pérez-Peña
contributed reporting from London, Matina Stevis-Gridneff from Brussels, Daniel
Politi from Buenos Aires and Niraj Chokshi from New York.
