Opinion – Marcelo Leite: False patriots scream ‘Selva!’, but despise the Amazon

Many people have already written about the murders of Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips. It is one of those atrocious moments when no one decent can fail to express indignation and sadness, pay tribute and denounce those who deserve it.

I didn’t know Bruno and Dom personally. I would have known. From what can be read in the emotional reports of friends such as Tom Phillips, Jon Watts, Eliane Brum, Sylvia Colombo and many others, they were competent and courageous professionals, kind and happy family men. We lost them all with their brutal deaths.

I know and knew well, on the other hand, Lalo de Almeida, Fabiano Maisonnave, Claudio Angelo, Giovana Girardi, Daniela Chiaretti, Fernando Gabeira, André Borges, João Moreira Salles, Leão Serva, Cristina Amorim, Ricardo Arnt, Kátia Brasil and many other journalists fearless.

They and they devoted a good part of their reporting to the environmental and Amazonian agenda, sometimes at high professional cost — at the insistence of bosses seduced by denialist mermaids. The sixty-year-old memory is credited with the omission of several names that he came across on mud paths and river paths.

I also got to know, up close, researchers and activists like Carlos Nobre, Fany Ricardo, Tasso Azevedo, Beto Ricardo, Claudia Andujar, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Mercedes Bustamante, Paulo Moutinho, Ane Alencar, Daniel Nepstad, Claudia Azevedo-Ramos, André Villas-Bôas, Marina Silva, Beto Veríssimo, Cristiane Fontes, Paulo Barreto, Adriana Moreira, Antonio Nobre, Tom Lovejoy, Paulo Brando, Caetano Scannavino, Aloisio Cabalzar, Marcos Wesley, Bruce Albert…

I stop here, certain that I have committed more injustices. They were unforgettable guides in 34 years of learning about the complexity and beauty of the forest, its carbon stocks and unparalleled sociobiodiversity.

Portentous rivers like the Tapajós and the Negro. The disarmed gaze of the Yanomami and other Indians recognizing us as human, albeit threatening, even before we recognize them as relatives.

I also met, albeit superficially, Ailton Krenak and David Kopenawa. The first opened my eyes to hundreds of indigenous peoples and languages ​​in the forest and beyond, during an improbable lecture at USP on the discipline Social and Political Organization of Brazil (OSPB), in the 1980s, a doctrinal weapon of the dictatorship that backfired. The second taught me about the fall of the sky.

Any one of those names could have appeared in the news as victims of the inhuman violence that befell Bruno and Dom. Good thing that didn’t happen. They all continue to knead the clay and wet their clothes in the benevolent rain of the Amazon, although some today only do it in memory.

I knew little or nothing, by luck and aversion, of the military who roam the Amazon. They fill their mouths to talk about the international greed for the riches of the forest without knowing them. People of bad attitude, who profiled themselves as the praetorian guard of Jair Bolsonaro, the bad soldier promoted to president of the Republic.

For this group, the heroes of the Illegal Amazon are prospectors, land grabbers, loggers and gunmen who kill and deforest. Poor and bad people, pioneers in the chain of atrocities to benefit ranchers who use cattle to launder corruption money and have seats or accomplices in Congress.

Bad Brazilians, in the center of Esplanada or Faria Lima, who pose as patriots and are always ready to bark “Selva!” when they sniff out a demophobe to wag their tails and smear their paws in the blood of others.