Acting President Hamilton Mourão (PRTB) said this Friday (29) that Jair Bolsonaro (no party) will not participate in COP26, the United Nations conference on climate change, to avoid taking “stones”.
The event that brings together world leaders starts this weekend and runs until November 12, in Glasgow (United Kingdom). Mourão temporarily assumed the presidency of the Republic, because Bolsonaro boarded on Thursday for the G20 meeting, in Rome, which is also taking place this weekend.
“It’s that story, you know that President Bolsonaro suffers a lot of criticism, so he will arrive in a place where everyone will throw stones at him, right,” explained Mourão, when asked at Palácio do Planalto about the absence of the president in the meeting.
The acting president also said that there will be a robust team in Glasgow, “with the capacity to carry forward the negotiation strategy. [do Brasil]”. Ministers Joaquim Leite (Environment), Fábio Faria (Communications) and Bento Albuquerque (Mines and Energy) are expected to attend COP26.
Brazil arrives at the conference under pressure from the international community to present results in the fight against deforestation and fires. For Mourão, the country is the target of criticism for two reasons, for being a right-wing government, in his words, and for a matter of economic dispute.
“Most of the people who are really more environmentally conscious are on the left. So there’s political criticism built into that there,” he said.
“There is the economic issue, right, always a search for a barrier in relation to our agribusiness, meaning that it comes from a deforested area in the Amazon, which is not true”.
Last Monday (25), Mourão stated that Bolsonaro will maintain a combative posture during the conference, in which he will renew his request to other countries to pay Brazil for the preservation of the Amazon, said the vice president, Hamilton Mourão.
Brazil will defend what it considers a key national interest with the “weapons of diplomacy” at the meeting that begins next Sunday (31) in Glasgow, UK, declared Mourão, who also heads the Amazon Council, the body responsible for policies to combat deforestation in the biome.
At the last United Nations Conference on Climate Change, COP25, in 2019, Brazil was one of those responsible for blocking climate negotiations. The expectation is that they will finally be completed now, during the event in the UK — the meeting was supposed to take place last year, but was eventually postponed due to the Covid pandemic.
In the edition two years ago, the Brazilian delegation, under the figure of then Environment Minister Ricardo Salles, was already publicly defending the idea of asking for money to keep the forest standing.
A few months earlier, however, the Bolsonaro government had paralyzed the billionaire Amazon Fund, which provided money for forest conservation projects, over claims by Salles that there were irregularities in the fund’s contracts — which were subject to annual international audits. In addition, a Bolsonaro decree extinguished the fund’s management committees.
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