The slashing and burning of the rainforest in
northeastern Brazil: There were 2,248 such fires in June alone.
Bolzonaro's
Vendetta
Assault on the Rainforest Continues in the Shadow
of the Pandemic
As the country suffers under the coronavirus pandemic,
an unprecedented attack on the Amazon is taking place in Brazil. President
Bolsonaro is actively promoting slash-and-burn agriculture that threatens to
destroy the region and further harm the climate.
By Marian
Blasberg
13.08.2020,
17.40 Uhr
In a time
when politicians are media-savvy role-players, it's not that often that you
have the chance to peer behind the facades. The way they talk when they're
among themselves, their hidden intentions - all that usually remains concealed.
But a video recently emerged in Brazil that will take your breath away. The
recording was made in April, showing a cabinet meeting. A judge released it
because it documents President Jair Bolsonaro's attempt to protect his family
from police investigations.
The
footage, some two hours long, is shocking, and not just because of Bolsonaro's
aggressive tone. More disgraceful is the ideological hysteria with which his
then-education minister demanded the imprisonment of Brazil's supreme court
justices, saying the "scoundrels" ought to be locked up. And the
family minister's follow-up comment that critical governors were not to be
forgotten. Or the silence of the generals who were sitting at the table.
Not to be
outdone, however, was the man many Brazilians now call the "minister of
environmental destruction,""Ricardo Salles. He said that the COVID-19
crisis, which has torn through Brazil more violently than almost anywhere else,
presents an "opportunity." With all the media attention focused on
the deadly virus, he said, the government needed to use the moment to change
the state of play in the Amazon region, specifically, Salles said, by eliminating
red tape and reducing obstructive environmental regulations. "Let's run
the cattle herd," he shouted. Salles was referring to the law, but he
might as well have said the rainforest. It ultimately boils down to the same
thing.
With news
websites so full of COVID-19 coverage, it does, in fact, take quite a bit of
scrolling before reaching the conclusion that actually, the cattle drive has
long since begun.
Brazil's
National Institute for Space Research (INPE) reported in June that 10,000
square kilometers of forest disappeared last year, the largest total since
2008. Meanwhile, research by the NGO Human Rights Watch revealed that the
Environment Agency, which is part of Salles' portfolio, has virtually stopped
imposing fines on illegal loggers, and two inspectors were recently fired for
obeying the law and destroying the equipment of gold miners who had been caught
illegally mining. In April, Salles allowed some indigenous reserves to be
opened for commercial use. Not long later, he legalized the commercial use of
thousands of former forest plots that had been appropriated by their now
legitimate owners through land theft.
An
Unprecedented Attack
Taken
together, all of these stories form a larger narrative. With the people of
Brazil forced to remain indoors due to the coronavirus, an unprecedented attack
on the rainforest is taking place deep inside the country. The attacks are so
targeted that they do, in fact, make it look as though the window of
opportunity is being used to get rid of indigenous peoples who oppose the
commercialization of their territories.
It feels
like the endgame. As though something is being broken that can no longer be put
back together.
"I
hate the term Indigenous Peoples," Bolsonaro's then-education minister
said after Salles' remarks about the cattle herd. "There is only one
people in this country. We need to end this business of peoples and
privileges!"
The Amazon
rainforest is a complex system consisting of various water cycles. The forest
sweats under the tropical heat and the rising vapor creates dense clouds which
then stream southward – essentially airborne rivers that are responsible for
the rich green of the hills outside my window in Rio de Janeiro. Last year,
when tens of thousands of fires raged in the Amazon region, they carried so
many soot particles that night fell on São Paulo in the early afternoon. There
was an apocalyptic air to it.
Scientists
say that the problem is that around one-fifth of Brazil's tree population, an
area the size of Chile, has already disappeared. If another 10 percent is
destroyed, it is possible that the system, which needs a certain amount of area
and density to survive, could collapse for good. The result would be a process
whereby the forest - from the outside in - would inexorably transform into a
savanna. The trees would no longer absorb 5 percent of the greenhouse gases
emitted worldwide and would instead emit CO2 themselves as they rot. It is all
inextricably linked: the global climate, the forest and the fate of its
indigenous peoples.
Some 225
tribes, almost a million people, live within protected territories in Brazil.
No outsiders are allowed to enter without permission and it is the inhabitants
themselves who largely decide on what economic use is permitted on their lands.
As such, it's not really a coincidence that deforestation has decreased
continuously in recent years. It is said that if you want to save the forest,
you have to protect the habitat of the people who live in it. But Bolsonaro has
a different view. He sees the indigenous as being animals that need to be freed
from the zoo.
A speech he
gave in September provides a better view of what he is actually planning. It is
essentially his Amazon manifesto.
A few weeks
after the fires in the Amazon, Bolsonaro stepped up to the podium at the United
Nations General Assembly and explained to a worried world that these fires were
the product of the annual dry season. He said claims that the fires had been
set by soy or cattle farmers because they felt encouraged by the Brazilian
president were an invention of the sensationalist media.
"It is
a fallacy to say that the Amazon is the heritage of humanity and a misconception
... to say our forest is the lungs of the world," he hissed in comments
directed at Greta Thunberg, who was leading the climate protection protests in
Manhattan at the time.
"The
World Shall Know Our Wishes"
Then he got
to the actual point he wanted to make. He explained that a handful of
indigenous people occupied 14 percent of his country's land. The soils of their
reservations, he said, some of which are as large as Portugal, contain gold,
diamonds and minerals, like niobium and uranium. Bolsonaro believes it's not
only in Brazil's interest to allow corporations to exploit these treasures. He
argued that the indigenous inhabitants no longer want to live like cave people.
As proof, he read out a letter that had allegedly been signed by
representatives of 52 ethnic groups.
These
people want to develop, said Bolsonaro, and they want their territories to be
developed without ideological or bureaucratic shackles. They want quality of
life and all the trappings that go along with it, like televisions and cars.
Then he
peered out at a young woman sitting in a pink blazer in the gallery, with a
Brazilian flag resting on her shoulders. "The world," Bolsonaro said,
"shall know our wishes through the voice of Ysani Kalapalo."
Ysani was
the author of the letter, and most Brazilians heard her name for the very first
time that day. Ysani, it seemed, was one of those dystopian figures from
Bolsonaro's universe that no one knows outside of social media. She's an
anti-Greta, who refers to herself as a "a 21st century Indian" on
YouTube.
Ysani has a
half-million followers on her YouTube channel, where she shares video clips
from her everyday life and talks about everything from fishing to body
painting. But she also posts political messages, or denounces leaders of the
indigenous resistance as being "manipulated by others." When she
stood in front of a dozen microphones after returning from New York, she
repeated the mantra.
"Why
are we forced to live as we did a hundred years ago?" Ysani demanded.
"Why don't we get off the drip of government welfare programs?" With
her long hair falling down her face, she looked like a guerrilla fighter.
Several
days before her appearance, some leaders whose tribes, like the Kalapalo, live
along an Amazon tributary, had published an open letter, saying that Ysani
doesn't speak for the majority of the indigenous people. They claim she's a
traitor who allowed herself to be manipulated by others to try to convince the
world that a colonialist project was acceptable.
Ysani lives
most of the year in Embu das Artes, a suburb of São Paulo. Her parents have a
small stall in the center of town where they sell handicrafts. Ysani brought
her sister along to a café for our interview, in addition to a 10-year-old
cousin who had just left her riverside village for the first time. The girl had
a mystified look on her face as she gazed at a petit gâteau Ysani had ordered.
"Come
on. It's just vanilla ice cream," Ysani said, but the little girl didn't
touch it. Ysani tried to goad the cousin by holding the spoon out to her, but
the girl turned away. It went on like that for a while until the girl finally
caved, and there are no words to describe the expression that appeared on the
child's face at that moment.
Ysani
grinned, pleased with herself. Development.
The
Kalapalo are one of 16 ethnic groups living within the borders of the Xingu
Indigenous Park, where they live off of fishing, picking wild fruits and
cultivating cassava. Ysani was 12 when she left the village. After experiencing
a bout of delirium that lasted for several weeks, a shaman determined that she
had been possessed by an evil spirit and advised her parents to take her as far
away as possible. They traveled for a month before ending up in a homeless
shelter run by a church on the outskirts of São Paulo. The doctors who examined
Ysani at the time suggested that she may have epilepsy, but even today, she's
not totally sure.
Nobel
Savages
As her
parents worked as servants for a wealthy family, Ysani learned how to look at
her past through the eyes of a white woman. "It was disturbing," she
says. She didn't recognize herself when her teachers spoke of noble savages who
lived together in harmonious collectives. She recalled the world she came from
as being macho and crude and says her father suffered because he had four
daughters but only two sons. It was a place, she says, where a woman's opinion
didn't carry much weight. She says she saw a handicapped child be buried alive
and reports that one girl bled to death after being gang raped.
Ysani
reinvented herself as an indigenous feminist who wrote about all these things
on Facebook. Left-wing activists invited her to podium discussions, but little
by little, her priorities shifted. Ysani says that studying economics provided
her with new impetus. Instead of Karl Marx, she read biographies of Steve Jobs
and Mark Zuckerberg. Suddenly, she saw "opportunities for development
everywhere."
Ysani
lobbied for her village of Tehuhungu to be connected to the electricity grid
and applied for the village be provided satellite internet. She also managed a
website that enabled tourists to book visits and stay with her relatives, but
that wasn't enough for Ysani.
"Why
do we have to beg forever until the government finally lays an overland
cable?" she asks. "Why do we have to swap tons of pequi fruit to get
the neighboring big landowner to build a dirt road through the fields for
us?"
The reality
is complicated. The territories where ethnic groups like the Kalapalo live
belong to the government, and because they are under special protection, there
are limits to their use. If the indigenous people want to engage in more than
just mere subsistence farming and exploit their land commercially, they first
must prove that their project is in line with environmental regulations. In
theory, that would mean they could grow soy on a large scale. In practice,
though, they aren't granted licenses because they would have to clear-cut
larger areas and the pesticides used would seep into the soil or rivers.
"Talk,
Talk, Talk"
With every
application Ysani files, she must rely on the National Indian Foundation
(FUNAI) as an intermediary. The agency is supposed to be there to represent
her, but she mostly views it as a bureaucratic hurdle. "We talk, talk and
talk," she says, "but nothing happens."
If it were
up to her, FUNAI would commit itself to building roads. After that, she would
like to see it provide seeds, fertilizer and gasoline. And there should be a
plan to compensate the locational disadvantages faced by the Indigenous
Peoples. Ysani says they also need seed financing and laws that make
partnerships with companies possible. That was her hope when she rang
Bolsonaro's doorbell shortly before the 2018 election to interview him for one
of her video clips.
Since then,
she's been a member of the establishment.
Almost half
the villages on the Xingu are now connected to the internet, and the people
there listen to what she's saying, especially the younger ones. By speaking
directly to them, Ysani has sown doubts about the authority of tribal leaders,
whom she depicts as being stuck in the 20th century. And that's what Bolsonaro
is all about: By presenting his concerns as those of the indigenous peoples,
Ysani is driving a wedge through the resistance.
The
conflict, though, isn't merely an ideological one. Developments inside the
rainforest are very real. In March, Jeferson Alves, a member of the Brazilian
National Congress, shouted "never again!" as he severed a legal
barrier on the border of the Waimiri-Atroari Reservation with a chainsaw.
Meanwhile, the Yanomami people, whose territory is home to 25,000 illegal gold
miners, reported its first COVID-19 victims in April. And despite the crisis,
the meat industry posted record revenues this summer.
Of course,
it`'s nonsense when Ysani says she speaks for the Indigenous People. There are
more than 200 peoples who speak more than a hundred different languages and
believe in completely different creation myths. Some, like the Kalapalo, seek
to connect with the world of the white man. Others have retreated so deep into
the forest that we only know of their existence through word of mouth. Still
others have only recently been contacted and continue to live in voluntary
isolation.
Undermining
Cohesion
The result
is an extremely wide divide, with some Brazilians currently waiting for
high-tech ventilators from China to treat their COVID-19 symptoms, while others
have placed their hopes on the herbs of a miracle healer.
Along with
social inequality, this temporal asymmetry is the second significant challenge
to social cohesion in the country. How to address that divide is a key issue
when it comes to the national identity.
Development
is a concept that doesn't exist in indigenous cultures. It's based on a linear
worldview that first arrived in Brazil with the Portuguese, who compared the
development of human societies to climbing a ladder. The topmost rung
corresponded with the ideal of scientific reason. On the very bottom rung, they
placed the people in the forests, who first needed to be exorcised of their
belief in spirits.
Missionary
zeal was one aspect. The other was the elites' desire to overcome the
backwardness of their colony by tapping the resource-rich hinterlands. They
combined the two in a single belief structure: That you needed to force the
indigenous peoples into the production processes in order to civilize them.
The first
time the Kalapalo came into contact with the whites was in the early 18th
century, when mercenaries came up the Xingu to recruit slave laborers for the
gold mines of Cuiabá. The same thing happened in other parts of the Amazon.
Troops of whites dragged natives into mines, sugar cane plantations and coffee
and rubber fields. Even the abolition of slavery in the late 19th century did
little to change the reality of a growing demand for cheap labor.
What
changed was the narrative surrounding the indigenous peoples. The
"savages" came to be seen as children in need of a guardian.
Still in
the 1960s, when the military dictatorship made the development of the Amazon
one of their regime's priorities, many justified the violent integration of the
indigenous peoples with the vague hope that they would be inspired by the
"spirit of progress." The construction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway
brought hundreds of thousands of settlers to the region. All the massacres, the
measles and flu epidemics that wiped out entire tribes, the wounds that forced
contact inflicted on peoples' souls - none of that entered the Brazilian
consciousness until an indigenous resistance formed, demanding ever more
emphatically the recognition of historical rights, respect, and the freedom to
decide for themselves whether they wanted to develop or not.
Ailton
Krenak, a member of the Krenak tribe, summed up what they were all about when
he became the first indigenous person to speak in the National Congress shortly
after the end of the dictatorship. "In light of the aggressiveness of
economic forces, their greed and ignorance, you can no longer remain
silent," said Krenak. "How can people who sleep on mats in palm huts
be called enemies who stand in the way of Brazil's development?"
Bolsonaro's
Vendetta
Many of the
indigenous demands were incorporated into the new constitution in 1988. Brazil,
it seemed, was on its way to making peace with its past, with the asynchronism
of its cultures and their apparent incompatibility. For a man like Bolsonaro,
who was trained as a paratrooper under the dictatorship, those advances must
have come across as a perpetual affront. The borders that were drawn around the
indigenous territories, the FUNAI guards who protected them from invaders, the
fines that were paid by the loggers and gold miners - he considers all that to
be a glitch of history.
As such,
his attack on the forest is essentially a vendetta aimed at restoring a
colonial order that he considers to be natural.
Ysani is no
longer quite a close to such developments as she once was. She drew widespread
criticism when she mentioned in a tweet this spring that a foundation belonging
to businessman Jorge Paulo Lemann had paid for her studies. Lemann is one of
the richest people in Brazil and many Bolsonaro supporters consider him to be a
"globalist" because of his social commitment. Ysani says the
president hasn't responded to her WhatsApp messages since then. "Maybe I
was wrong about him," she says. "Maybe we don't share the same
goals." Or perhaps he just doesn't need her anymore.
"I know
Ysani. I know she comes from a difficult family. Her father is an aggressive,
bad-tempered person who has been accused of violence and witchcraft. When one
of her sisters committed suicide, the family moved away and founded a new
village, Tehuhungu. Ysani sometimes goes there to shoot her videos. She's an
outcast on the Xingu – she's all about money and fame."
The woman
who says this is named Kaiulu Yawalapiti Kamaiurá and she runs a small NGO
working for the rights of indigenous women. She grew up 50 kilometers from
Ysani on a side arm of the Xingu. The stories of their peoples are similar and
Kaiulu was also in New York in September. She was attending a protest rally
when Ysani made her appearance at the UN. "It's unbelievable," Kaiulu
says, "that one of us is serving this perpetrator of genocide."
Kaiulu is a
shy woman in her early forties who has given birth to six children. She offers
courses in which she explains to women how they can apply for support without
the mediation of a guardian. She is also encouraging Kaziks to develop a
stronger voice.
Kaiulu is
fighting her fight with the methods of the 20th century. Whereas Ysani speaks
to people through her smartphone, Kaiulu's most important tool is a boat that
she uses to navigate from village to village along the Xingu. Her biggest
problem right now is that she is no longer able to afford the diesel fuel.
FUNAI, which provides most of her funding, has almost completely halted its
remittances and she says the funding applications have become so complex that
they are almost certain to get caught up in bureaucracy. Kaiulu believes this
is deliberate.
Ideological
Zealots
The FUNAI
regional office responsible for the Xingu Indigenous Park is now run by the
military, as are the majority of the 39 regional offices. The Isolated Peoples
Department at FUNAI is under the control of an evangelical missionary who wants
to force contact with these tribes. To reiterate: FUNAI is actually intended to
protect the integrity of the territories, as is the Environment Ministry.
Instead, though, Minister Salles is working to legalize the export of freshly
logged trees, which has so far been prohibited.
Budgets are
being cut while departments and jobs are being eliminated. Key positions have
been filled with ideological zealots. This is how Bolsonaro is getting the
results he wants. And then there are the speeches like the one he gave in New
York, essentially a coded message to criminals that nobody is going to penalize
them if they head into the rainforest.
Now that
more than 130 ethnic groups are reporting coronavirus infections, with hundreds
of people sailing to Manaus on crowded boats because health posts near their
villages are empty, it looks almost as though Bolsonaro has figured out a way
to get the virus to work for him. There seems to be no other explanation for
why he is blocking significant elements of a law that would require him to
provide doctors, drinking water and food to the reservations.
Concern Is
Growing in Europe
In June,
2,248 fires raged in the Amazon region, the highest number in 13 years. The
journal Science recently wrote that 20 percent of the soy exported to Europe
comes from areas that have been illegally cleared.
In July,
some of Brazil's largest companies declared in an open letter that Bolsonaro's
reputation-damaging environmental policy could have serious consequences for
the economy. They have one main reason for their concern: In June 2019, the
European Union and the South American economic community Mercosur reached a
deal on a trade agreement that many companies had been hoping for. The treaty
is currently awaiting approval from national parliaments, but members of the
Dutch legislature ultimately decided not to ratify it in its current form.
In Europe,
it appears, concerns are growing that large quantities of cheaply produced
agricultural goods are harming our own farmers, who aren't particularly
competitive. Fear is also mounting that more forests are being cleared to
create new arable or pasture land. Even though Bolsonaro has committed himself
to curbing deforestation, there are no mechanisms to sanction Brazil if it
violates the rules.
Ultimately,
the issue seems pretty simple. In order to survive, we need intact forests. If
we want to die, the savanna will do. We don’t have much time to decide.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário