By Leonardo Sakamoto on November 16, 2022
With no enforcement, destruction runs wild – Christian Braga/Greenpeace
Since he lost the election to Lula, Bolsonaro has disappeared, perhaps shredding documents, erasing hard drives, renewing his passport, or analyzing ways to avoid answering for the crimes he committed when he left power. This gives the impression that the petista is already governing in his place, which is a big mistake. Deforestation and coup plotters continue to run the Bolsonarist project amidst the presidential silence and the months of transition.
Everything Lula said at the COP27, in Egypt, about the Amazon, the environment, and climate change priorities, will only be valid after 2023. In the meantime, land grabbers, loggers, miners, and criminal ranchers, allied with Bolsonaro are taking advantage of the remaining months of lax inspection and non-existent collection of fines to destroy the present and the future.
Indicator of this is that, after the worst September of the historical series that began in 2015, deforestation alerts had the worst October, according to data from the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) – that institution that Bolsonaro publicly spanked for disclosing, get this, facts.
Jair has acted on two fronts since 2018: a) excite his followers to defend him and b) deconstruct the country that emerged from the 1988 Federal Constitution by failing to enforce the law or changing it.
Since the beginning of his mandate, Jair Bolsonaro has weakened oversight institutions, such as Ibama, ICMBio, Funai and Incra, but also the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Highway Police, Coaf, sectors of the Federal Police. With this, it created problems to verify compliance with the laws protecting social, cultural, economic, and environmental rights. The law of the strongest, or better, of the most armed, has come into force.
An exemplary case of this Bolsonarist policy in which right becomes wrong and wrong becomes right was the punishment of Alexandre Saraiva, the Federal Police delegate responsible for the largest seizure of timber logs in history. After submitting a criminal complaint to the Federal Supreme Court against the then Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles, for having hindered the work of inspection and defending the interests of criminals, Saraiva was transferred from the Amazon to the interior of Rio de Janeiro.
And having given rope to the extreme right for four years, it now walks and talks alone – calling for a coup d’état outside barracks, persecuting journalists, professors and Supreme Court justices, distilling gratuitous violence in the streets.
Driven to live in a parallel reality, in which covid-19 vaccines kill or inject 5G chips programmed by Chinese and pedophile billionaires to dominate the world, and in which electronic ballot boxes were manipulated to give Lula the victory through algorithms canceled in a meeting in a New York pizzeria with Alexandre de Moraes, Mark Zuckerberg, António Guterres and Tony Stark, many no longer need the guidance of the “myth”. They go to fight, facing the authoritarianism they preach as freedom.
Yes, Brazil is on autopilot, but it is advancing toward the abyss. And allowing the president’s followers and criminal allies to take advantage of the last months of the government to do whatever they want will greatly delay the reconstruction of the country in the coming years.
Source: Brasil de Fato, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US