Opinion – Marcelo Leite: Away from Ukraine, think about the Amazon

The world is watching Ukraine, and rightly so. But the ex-Soviet republic invaded at the behest of ex-KGB Vladimir Putin is very far away, and right here there is a conflict brewing in the serpent’s egg laid by the Brazilian military in the Amazon.

The alarm was raised by Claudio Angelo, a journalist who knows the most about climate and the Amazon rainforest, in the article “Vai ter Guerra na Amazônia”. And the climate in the Amazon rainforest is really confrontational.

Not today, of course. Anyone who has passed through Novo Progresso (PA), on the BR-163, like this columnist seven years ago, knows that the atmosphere there has always been unbreathable for IBAMA agents, environmentalists and reporters, with the smoke from deforestation and the smell of lead in the air.

Angelo walked around the region at the end of 2021. This is how he describes the environment: “[Na] city ​​that eats, drinks and breathes environmental crime, it was difficult to find a commercial establishment or a farm gate without a Brazilian flag on the facade”.

At the same time, I traveled through cerrado and transition areas of this biome with the Amazon. At the entrance of each large estate, a national pavilion hung, witnessing that the prestige of Jair Bolsonaro remains high in ogribusiness.

It has been said that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels. Updating the maxim, it would be the case to say that in Brazil, today, it is the last stronghold of armed scoundrels.

No one ignores that ruralists are among those interested in the mockery in which Bolsonaro has transformed access to weapons and ammunition, as well as their control by the state. With the complicity of the Army, which turns a blind eye to the proliferation of private arsenals, some of them supplying organized crime.

Farmers like to pose as vigilantes and hunters, alibi to accumulate firearms. And they got used to the land and environmental free-for-all fostered by the president who wears a tie with rifles and his partner Ricardo “Boiada” Salles.

Any president chosen in 2022 (and not Bolsonaro) will have to take back the rule of law in that half of Brazil where miners are tolerated when they invade indigenous lands, muddy the most beautiful Amazon river (Tapajós) and set fire to federal government helicopters.

Sooner or later, Brasília will have to recycle measures such as those that brought down deforestation rates between 2005 and 2012, during the Lula and Dilma administrations, after an explosion in the early years of the first PT administration.

Lists of cities champions of devastation, credit restriction, property embargo, moratorium on products from deforested areas — whatever.

Otherwise, the State will lose control of half of its territory once and for all, just as it ceded the domain of the hills and outskirts to drug dealers or militias. A shameful balance for the military crowd that took Brasilia and spent decades fantasizing about the loss of sovereignty over the Amazon to foreign powers.

Sovereignty is gone, and whoever seized it was the enemy within. Not the communists that Bolsonaro and caterva point out under double beds, school desks and desks at vaccine stations, but the unpunished extremists who dared to besiege the Federal Supreme Court with their grain carts.

On second thought, they are only the country’s internal enemies, not the military crouching in front of Bolsonaro. Of these they would best be described as allies — the outback Azov battalion, which seems unwilling to tolerate the law’s encroachment on its lands.