Jair Bolsonaro demands Macron withdraw 'insults' over Amazon
fires
Brazilian and French presidents continue feud over G7 aid
package for wildfires raging in Amazon rainforest
Tom Phillips Latin America correspondent
Tue 27 Aug 2019 18.47 BST Last modified on Tue 27 Aug 2019
21.26 BST
Brazil’s far-right president and his backers have escalated
their row over the Amazon with Emmanuel Macron, attacking the French
president’s “lamentable colonialist stance” as fires continued to rage in the
world’s biggest rainforest.
As Brazil said it would reject a $20m (£16m) G7 contribution
to fight the fires, Jair Bolsonaro spurned Macron’s criticism of his
environmental record and flaunted Donald Trump’s support for his far-right
administration.
“We have nothing against the G7. We have something against
one of the G7’s presidents,” Bolsonaro told a summit of governors from the nine
states that make up the Brazilian Amazon.
Brazil’s leader said he had been cheered by an earlier tweet
in which the US president said Bolsonaro was “working very hard on the Amazon
fires and in all respects doing a great job for the people of Brazil”.
Bolsonaro responded tweeting: “Thank you, President Trump.
We’re fighting the wildfires with great success. The fake news campaign built
against our sovereignty will not work.”
Macron has been
less kind to Bolsonaro, a rightwing nationalist who campaigners accuse of
greenlighting a new era of environmental destruction and being partly
responsible for the scale of this year’s Amazon burning season.
Last week, Macron
sparked a diplomatic skirmish with Bolsonaro when he called for emergency talks
on the Amazon at the G7 summit – a move Bolsonaro responded to by mocking the
appearance of Brigitte Macron, France’s first lady, on Facebook.
On Monday, Macron lamented Bolsonaro’s “extraordinarily
rude” attack on his wife and said he hoped Brazil would soon have a leader
worthier of the office.
Bolsonaro and his backers hit back on Tuesday. Bolsonaro
condemned what he described as Macron’s meddling in Brazilian affairs and insisted
he would only consider the G7’s Amazon aid package if Macron withdrew his
“insults”.
Gen Augusto
Heleno, Bolsonaro’s hawkish institutional security chief, took a particularly
hard line, lambasting “Macron’s lamentable colonialist stance”.
“Ninety percent of [former] French colonies are in a
deplorable state,” Heleno, the former head of the Brazil-led United Nations
stabilization mission in Haiti, told the gathering of governors.
“Wherever they went they left a trail of destruction, chaos
and misery. They shouldn’t be giving anyone advice. This is a joke.”
Mauro Mendes, the governor of the Amazon state of Mato
Grosso, accused Macron of “surfing on the ashes” of the Amazon conflagration
for political and economic purposes.
“Macron isn’t worried about our environment. He’s worried
about creating mechanisms to introduce possible barriers [to Brazilian
products],” Mendes claimed.
The Amazon assembly in Brasília was convened to discuss
responses to the blaze currently sweeping through swaths of the region.
But Bolsonaro used the encounter to repeatedly pillory
environmentalists and what he called the “psychotic” demarcation of indigenous
reserves, claiming both had hamstrung Brazil’s economy.
He said: “This environmental question has to be dealt with
rationally and not with the almost savagery that it has been throughout
previous governments. We cannot allow a country as rich as ours to be in the
situation it finds itself in.” He vowed to “take the decisions that need to be
taken” to turbo-charge development of the Amazon.
Bolsonaro insinuated that indigenous reserves had been
created by previous governments as part of a foreign conspiracy designed to
hinder Brazil’s economic development.
He complained:
“Indians don’t do lobbying. They don’t speak our language. And somehow
they’ve ended up with 14% of our national territory.”
He added: “One of the aims is to make us unworkable.”
Bolsonaro also
accused Brazilian journalists of waging a “a massive, anti-patriotic, sell-out
campaign” against his government by reporting on the Amazon fires.
Many of the
Amazon governors cheered Bolsonaro’s vision.
The governor of
Rondônia state, Bolsonaro ally Marcos Rocha, said: “We have always had
presidents who thought about environmental protection. Today, we have a
president who thinks about protection but who puts human development first.”
But there was also pushback.
Mendes, the governor of Mato Grosso state said he was “very
worried” about how Brazilian farmers might be affected by the negative
international reaction to the crisis.
“Sixty percent of our GDP comes from our exports,” Mendes
noted.
The governor of Pará, Helder Barbalho, cautioned against
spurning foreign aid mechanisms such as the Amazon Fund – to which Norway and
Germany recently suspended contributions because of Bolsonaro’s environmental
policies.
Barbalho warned that Bolsonaro’s clash with Macron was a
distraction when Brazil should be attempting to avoid a costly boycott of
Brazilian products.
He said: “I think we are wasting too much time on Macron. We
should take care of our own country and get on with our own lives. we should be
taking care of our own problems and showing our environment diplomacy to the
world, which is essential to agribusiness.”
Flávio Dino, the Communist party governor of Maranhão, also
opposed rejecting much-needed international support for environmental
protection.
“We cannot tear up money – tearing up money is not
sensible,” said Dino, a staunch Bolsonaro critic who has described the
Brazilian president as the “insane” leader of a “minority sect”.
Dino also warned against the “satanization” of environmental
NGOs, which Bolsonaro has vowed to expel from the Amazon and accused, without
evidence, of starting this year’s fires.
“It isn’t by setting NGOs on fire that we are going to save
the Amazon,” Dino warned, urging Bolsonaro to show “moderation”.
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