Small talk about protecting the rainforest in the Brazilian Amazon

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — In the Brazilian Amazon these days, it’s almost impossible to run for office talking about the environment.

More common is a scene like this: a congressional candidate parades in a helicopter, the symbol of illegal gold mining, painted with the Brazilian flag, through the streets of the Amazonian city of Boa Vista. He defends a gold rush that has devastated indigenous territories and polluted rivers. In a neighboring state, an indigenous candidate stops wearing green clothes in public for fear of violence.

Like all Brazilians, the inhabitants of the vast Amazon region will elect governors and legislators in general elections in October. But as the campaign takes to the streets, few candidates or voters are talking about current record deforestation rates or other environmental problems.

Instead, many politicians are vying over who has the boldest promise to relax legal restrictions on gold mining, expand deforestation for agribusiness, or pave roads through the forest. The few who run on an environmental platform struggle to compete and face hostility from the public.

Amid widespread poverty and a lack of economic opportunities on top of those that harm the environment, Amazon voters have increasingly favored politicians who frame legal protection of the world’s largest rainforest as a barrier for development.

A survey conducted by the ((o))eco news website found that a majority of legislators in Brazil’s nine Amazonian states voted in favor of five major bills that soften environmental laws, from opening up indigenous territories to mining until the legalization of land theft. In three of the votes, representatives from the Amazon region voted more in favor than those from other parts of Brazil.

ONE OF MORE THAN A HUNDRED

Today, only 1 of the 118 legislators in Congress representing the Amazon was elected on a socio-environmental platform. Joenia Wapichana, only the second indigenous leader elected to the national parliament in Brazilian history, is from the state of Roraima, where indigenous people make up 11% of the population, the highest in the country.

In his bid for reelection, one of his opponents is a gold prospector and businessman named Rodrigo Martins de Mello, who has used a helicopter as a trademark of his campaign. The plane is the only way to transport seekers and equipment to remote indigenous peoples reserves, such as that of the Yanomami people, where most of the illegal gold mining in Roraima occurs.

“It is mining that brings money to Boa Vista’s commerce,” Mello said into a microphone from the back of a pickup truck. Behind him, a much larger truck moved forward, carrying the helicopter emblazoned with the Brazilian flag, now a symbol of support for far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.

In a telephone interview with The Associated Press, Mello, who campaigns under the name Rodrigo Cataratas, (Rodrigo Waterfall in English), promised to defend the rights of searchers, whom he estimated at 40,000.

The tendency to discount the value of the forest is strongest in regions where immigrants of European descent arrived in the 1960s and 1970s. To attract people to the Amazon, the military government at the time built roads, turned a blind eye to a chaotic gold rush and gave away vast stretches of virgin forest where isolated indigenous tribes lived. Diseases and forced displacement brought some groups to the brink of extermination.

That is the case of Rondônia, where most of the cities were founded starting in the 1970s by these immigrants from southern Brazil. Today it is one of the most deforested Amazonian states and a large producer of beef, with soybean agriculture on the rise.

Last year, the Rondônia State Assembly voted unanimously 17-0 to reduce a protected area by 2,200 square kilometers (850 square miles), an area larger than greater London, to allow in illegal ranchers and open up the bush. tropical to agribusiness. Governor Marcos Rocha, a staunch ally of Bolsonaro, signed the law. It was later declared unconstitutional by a state court.

According to Ricardo Gilson, a geographer at the Federal University of Rondônia, large swaths of the so-called arc of deforestation, which encompasses dozens of cities, share this cultural history.

“It is a frontier society, which transforms the natural landscape into an extractive economy: mining, livestock, crops, hydropower. It’s not a society that sees standing forest as something positive,” he told the AP.

To stand out in that culture, Military Police Corporal Cáiro Teixeira da Silva, who is running for Congress for the first time, sells himself as more radical than his competitors. With a Brazilian flag printed on his T-shirt, he recently appeared in a campaign video brandishing a rifle and vowing to arm illegal searchers against police raids.

“I will fight for the miner to have a T4 rifle to secure his dredge, his gold,” he yelled, clapping his hands on the gun.

The historically small and dwindling support for the environment explains why two of the leading defenders of the Amazon rainforest chose to leave the region altogether and run for Congress in Sao Paulo state, thousands of miles away. This is the indigenous leader Sônia Guajajara, whom Time magazine crowned as one of the most influential people in the world, and former silva marine minister, who was elected senator twice for the Amazonian state of Acre.

For Mario Mantovani, senior adviser to the Environmental Parliamentary Front, running an environmentally-based campaign in Amazonian states has become more difficult this year, because lawmakers who support Bolsonaro have had access to generous federal funds that they can dole out to their whim.

“They have invested so much money in the region that it is difficult to even establish a strategy against them. It is a game played with marked cards. You would be an isolated voice there, you couldn’t do anything,” Mantovani told the AP in a telephone interview.

In such a hostile environment, it makes sense to run for office in Sao Paulo, where there are more people who care about the Amazon, he said.

Despite these odds, several lesser-known pro-environmental candidates are running in the Amazon states, most of them indigenous leaders. Vanda Witoto is running for Congress in the state of Amazonas. That state has eight seats, currently all held by men and none by his party, Rede, founded and led by Marina Silva, who is also a former environment minister.

“It’s a big challenge, as big as the Amazon,” Witoto told the AP by phone. “We already have a history of threats for our defense of the environment and indigenous peoples. We are seen against economic power.”

Witoto is a nurse on the outskirts of Manaus with no assets according to the revelations. Mello, whose main business is air transportation for gold miners, declared $6.5 million in assets.

Recently, during a road trip, Witoto was harassed by a car that chased her group for tens of kilometers. She said it was probably because she and her supporters were wearing red caps associated with Brazil’s landless movement, a symbol of the left.

After the incident, indigenous leaders who support her advised her not to wear red or green to avoid the attention of anti-environmentalists and anti-leftists, usually supporters of Bolsonaro. “We’re wearing clothes with neutral colors to try to avoid conflict,” she said.

——-

Associated Press climate and environment coverage is supported by several private foundations. See more about the AP climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

Conversations are the opinions of our readers and are subject to the Code of conduct. The Star does not endorse these views.


Leave a Comment