Mourão admits he is to blame for lack of coordination in combating deforestation

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The vice president and coordinator of the CNAL (National Council for the Legal Amazon), Hamilton Mourão, admitted that he was to blame for the failure to combat deforestation in Brazil.

Last week, data from Prodes (Project for Monitoring Deforestation in the Legal Amazon by Satellite), by Inpe (National Institute for Space Research), showed a new record of deforestation for the month of October. The data is the worst in 15 years, with a devastation of 13,235 km2 between August 2020 and July 2021 — an increase of 22% over the previous period

“If you want someone to blame, it’s me. I’m not going to say I was minister A, minister B or minister C. I couldn’t do the coordination and integration the way it worked,” the vice president told reporters after the last CNAL meeting of 2021, at Itamaraty, this Tuesday (23).

“It only worked in the last phase of the operation, when Samaúma [nome da terceira operação] it happened and then the group woke up to the need to talk effectively with each other, let go of your prejudices. Because each one has its own prejudice, in relation to the other, to the other’s way of working, and from then on there was a synergy of work,” he continued.

Mourão heads the Amazon Council, a structure responsible for coordinating conservation actions in the biome, but which is undergoing a process of emptying.

Ministers Joaquim Leite (Environment) and Anderson Torres (Justice), who are currently coordinating the main measures to combat deforestation, were not present at the meeting, since the military action in the region was not extended in October.

Mourão said that Leite is “the face of the fight against deforestation”, but he minimized the absences, claiming that the technicians responsible for coordinating the actions in the ministries would be present.

The militarization of the fight against environmental offenses lasted 16 of the 34 months of the Bolsonaro government, cost BRL 550 million to public coffers and did not bring down deforestation rates in the Amazon, such as the sheet showed in an article published on October 24th.

In all, there were three GLOs, whose presidential decrees gave legal support to three military intervention operations: Verde Brasil, Verde Brasil 2 and Samaúma. The vice president even announced the extension of the latter, which did not happen.

The most recent data on deforestation in the Amazon was released last Thursday (18th). Such as sheet showed, Inpe concluded the data on October 27 and entered the report into the system information from the federal government on the same day, but it was only made available three weeks later —in a period after the COP26, the UN conference on climate change, held in Glasgow, Scotland, between the 31st of October and the 13th of November.

Mourão also said that, of the 13,235 km2 deforested between August 2020 and July 2021, around 60% corresponds to illegal deforestation. The information was not disclosed by ministries or oversight bodies.

“Around 8,100 km2 definitely considered illegal and the others, as they were carried out in private areas, where there was authorization to suppress the vegetation, are considered legal deforestation”, said the vice president.

He acknowledged, however, that the illegal deforestation area is “a chuchu section”.

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