By Tulio Ribeiro on June 24, 2021
Ricardo Salles
Often praised by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for the advancement of agriculture by logging the Amazon rainforest, Ricardo Salles, investigated for corruption by the Supreme Court (STF), has been removed from the Ministry of Environment. The process began in the United States when the Biden administration implicated him and connected him to a shipment of stolen timber without official registration.
The usual arrogant Salles was stuttering and nervous in court as he tried to explain it away. Salles is known for deceiving public opinion and use the collective anguish of the pandemic to “pass the tractor” deeper into the Brazilian rain forests.
The illegal timber seized in North American soil, provoked an investigation by the Brazilian Federal Police authorized by Minister Alexandre de Moraes, who is investigating whether Salles acted to loosen IBAMA’s (supervisory body) control over illegal timber exports. There is strong evidence of the minister’s meetings with a group of loggers in Pará who had been detaining timber loads in foreign ports for lack of authorization.
With the departure of Salles, more than half of Jair Bolsonaro’s original ministry have changed positions or left the government.
However Salles will now be replaced by another occupant who carries the same profile as a destroyer of the forest and the advancing of the agricultural frontier by hitting the lungs of the planet. Joaquim Álvaro Álvaro Pereira Leite, former advisor of the Sociedade Brasileira Rural, who acted as Secretary of Amazon and Environmental Services, is the one who assumes the portfolio.
The real drivers of the fires that destroyed part of the Amazon and generated more than 500,000 deaths by covid, with lack of purchase of vaccines and ventilators is President Bolsonaro as he is now being surrounded by threatening bonfires in front of his genocidal administration.
Audios and messages sent to Jair Bolsonaro’s interlocutors would put pressure on Luis Ricardo Miranda, the right wing congressman Luis Miranda’s brother and head of import of the Ministry’s Health Logistics Directorate in the disastrous purchase of the Indian vaccine Covaxin.
Covaxin was the most expensive vaccine purchased by Eduardo Pazuello’s management at the Ministry of Health, at a cost of US $15 per dose. The overpriced purchase of the immunizing agent was the only one for which there was an intermediary and outside the vaccine industry, the company Necessidade. The purchase price was 1,000% higher than that announced by the manufacturer six months earlier.
Propagated by the right wing throughout Latin America, with the help of the United States and its communication network, what is the reality is that nobody steals and destroys the future of a nation like the neoliberals and the extreme right wing. The truth is that corruption, and not fighting it, is the specialty of the governments of Bolsonaro, Macri, Piñera, Duque and Co.
Source: Telesur, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English