RIO DE JANEIRO: As an ecological disaster in the Amazon escalated into a global political crisis, Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, took the rare step on Friday of mobilising the armed forces to help contain blazes of a scale not seen in nearly a decade.
The sudden reversal, after days of dismissing growing concern over hundreds of fires raging across the Amazon, came as international outrage grew over the rising deforestation in the world’s largest tropical rainforest. European leaders threatened to cancel a major trade deal, protesters staged demonstrations outside Brazilian embassies and calls for a boycott of Brazilian products snowballed on social media.
As a chorus of condemnation intensified, Brazil braced for the prospect of punitive measures that could severely damage an economy that is already sputtering after a brutal recession and the country’s far-right populist president faced a withering reckoning.
On Friday, he said that he was planning to send the military to enforce environmental laws and to help contain the fires starting Saturday.
“Whatever is within our power we will do,” he told reporters. “The problem is resources.”
Bolsonaro did not indicate what resources the military would bring to bear, but he gave a televised address ON Friday evening to describe the government’s response plan.
In it, Bolsonaro said the government would take a “zero tolerance” approach to environmental crimes. But he also said Brazilians in living in the states that encompass the Amazon must be provided with broader opportunities to make a decent living.
“I have a profound love and respect for the Amazon,” Bolsonaro said in a rare scripted message. “Protecting the rainforest is our duty.”
He provided no details about what assets the military would bring to bear in areas where fires are spreading.
It was unlikely that Bolsonaro’s plan could address the underlying crisis without a fundamental shift in his environmental policies, which have emboldened miners, loggers and farmers to strip and burn protected areas with a sense of impunity.
Since the nationalist former army captain took office in January, deforestation has increased sharply across Brazil, including in indigenous territories. Bolsonaro has pledged to make it easier for industries to gain access to protected areas, arguing that native communities are in control of unreasonably vast areas that contain enormous wealth.
Brazil’s stretch of the Amazon lost more than 3,444.6 square kilometres of forest cover during the first seven months of the year, a 39 per cent increase over the same period last year.
Experts say that spike appears to be the main driver of the fires in the Amazon this year.
The number of fires in the Amazon so far this year, 40,341, is the highest since 2010, and roughly 35 per cent higher than the average for the first eight months of the year, according to Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research agency, which tracks deforestation and forest fires using satellite images.
Most of the fires are set intentionally to clear land for agriculture and cattle grazing. But the fire season got off to an early start this year, and blazes set along the edges of the rainforest are unusually potent, raising the risk that some will spread beyond the intended areas, according to Doug Morton, a scientist at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who tracks deforestation and fires in the Amazon.
“This is a critical time,” he said in an interview. “Part of the international attention to what is going on comes from the fact that Brazil has been such a pioneer and leader on environmental protection and it has shown the world it’s possible to have economic development while protecting the rainforest.”
That hard-earned reputation has been crumbling in the Bolsonaro era.
Global outrage over the fires has spurred calls to boycott Brazilian products and led European leaders to threaten to walk away from a trade agreement that the European Union struck with Brazil and a handful of neighbouring countries in June.
In what has become an unusually nasty exchange among leaders of major democracies, President Emmanuel Macron of France went so far as to accuse Bolsonaro of lying about being committed to fighting climate change and protecting the Amazon. “Our house is burning. Literally,” Macron wrote on Twitter on Thursday.
Macron said on Friday that he would try to kill a major trade deal between Europe and South America that has been years in the making. He and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said that the Amazon fires should be added to the agenda of the Group of 7 summit meeting this weekend.
Bolsonaro fired back that Macron was the liar, chiding him for releasing “photos from the past century” to generate “hatred against Brazil.” As for the G-7, he told Macron and Merkel to mind their own business.
On Friday evening, President Donald Trump, who supports Bolsonaro and has not criticised his environmental policies, said he had spoken to Bolsonaro and offered to provide assistance in containing the fires.
“I told him if the United States can help with the Amazon Rainforest fires, we stand ready to assist!” Trump wrote in a tweet.
There were several years in the early 2000s that the Amazon had more fires than those so far this year. But the rate of deforestation then prompted Brazil to adopt an ambitious set of policies to preserve the Amazon and other environmentally sensitive areas.
Many of those protections have eroded on Bolsonaro’s watch.
In the state of Rondonia, firefighters said they were in triage mode.
“It’s impossible to be everywhere at the same time,” said Col. Demargli Farias, the state’s chief of firefighters. “Even if we had 50,000 men.”
