“If we had conducted the debate on Belo Monte well, we could have had an indigenist policy of respect, which would avoid getting where we are today”, says the regional attorney of the Republic Ubiratan Cazetta, who has acted in almost 30 lawsuits about the hydroelectric plant.
With 23 years of experience with the Public Ministry in Pará, the prosecutor worked on cases that marked the environmental management of the PT and also Bolsonaro governments.
In 2020, he asked for the removal of the then Minister of the Environment Ricardo Salles due to the dismantling of environmental bodies and the deregulation of standards – a practice dubbed “cattle” by the head of the ministry himself.
In this interview, he analyzes the historical socio-environmental conflicts in the region and the challenges for the performance of the Public Ministry. “Our relationship with Funai is almost non-existent or one of mutual distrust”, exemplifies Cazetta, who presides over the ANPR (National Association of Public Prosecutors).
This Tuesday (14), at 7 pm, Cazetta participates in the online event Dialogues for the Climate, promoted by Funbio (Brazilian Fund for Biodiversity). Registration, free of charge, can be made through the project’s website.
For the prosecutor, society’s lack of perspective is at the origin of conflicts in the Amazon. He says that the current government, on the other hand, has a project for the region: destruction.
Mr. filed more than 20 lawsuits pointing out problems in the licensing of the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant, but already considered that preventing it would be an impossible mission. What was the strategy there? There were almost 30 actions. From a real economic point of view, the account does not close. On the other hand, it had the largest public investment in works in Brazil, more than R$ 40 billion, 75% of which were publicly financed by BNDES. It was illusory to think that it was possible to stop. What we tried to do is make the mistakes clear. We lost almost all the shares, but that’s not my account.
The Federal Supreme Court has a 2004 process to judge, which is that of prior consultation with communities. We won this one at TRF [Tribunal Regional Federal]but the government and the contractors managed to keep this without reaching the Supreme Court for almost eight years.
If the Supreme Court decides this action, what will be the consequence, after the consolidated damage? Only the after-effect of indemnity. But it has a very important transcending effect on Belo Monte: the establishment of the Supreme Court’s position on what is prior consultation with indigenous communities and what its effects are. This ends up being applied to all enterprises that may affect traditional populations. The discussion has not lost its object.
What is in ILO Convention 169 [Organização Internacional do Trabalho] is that the State must consult an indigenous community every time it takes a measure that could affect it. We still don’t do that. You end up placing the prior consultation only within the environmental licensing. And it does so from a decision made about doing that work, about which design and how much it will cost. Then it is no longer a query.
Now we have the concrete effect of Belo Monte to look at what could have been different. We can also see what has been pointed out that could even happen.
Could you give an example of the predictions about Belo Monte that came true? In 2011, we talked about how the Xingu water regime affects energy production: for four months you have energy production at the maximum limit of the plant, for four months it drops and for another four months it is stopped.
This isn’t news to anyone, but it resurfaced in 2021 as if it were something new for the company. Now you can’t claim you’re making a loss. You bought this project with this financial drawing. Or there was a planning error, or a falsification of data in the judicial discussion.
What did Belo Monte already reveal about Lava Jato, still in the PT government, and even about the weakening of the instruments of social control, more evident in the current government? What Belo Monte pointed out right away: you have campaign financing there. We could have understood this operation of campaign financing linked to works.
When looking at the judicial results of Lava Jato, many things were understood as competence of the Electoral Justice. Belo Monte would have already been able to make this more transparent and have directed an investigation to this line.
Regarding the weakening of indigenous policy and traditional populations, we return to the issue of prior consultation, which basically means recognizing the need to listen to and understand these communities. For this we need to recognize them as existing and worthy of attention.
If we had conducted the debate on Belo Monte well, we could have had an indigenous policy of respect that would prevent us from getting where we are today. Today you have a total contempt for it. And there is a growing co-option of indigenous leaders on issues of mining and resource use. Belo Monte gave us that.
How did the socio-environmental conflicts in Pará evolve to what we see today, with the government defending illegal miners and loggers? The lack of society’s view of the Amazon is at the origin of this, in my view. People don’t know what to do with the Amazon and oscillate between protecting everything or using everything.
Before the current government, we already had a problem of uncertainty about how we want to treat the wealth that is the Amazon and, more specifically, Pará.
What has changed with the current government and what led us to act of improbity [contra o ministro Ricardo Salles] it was the opposite. It was a look that said: let’s work like scorched earth, make the herd pass, to use an expression of his.
Mr. points out a difference: previous governments did not have a vision for the Amazon, while the current one has a project for the region. Yes, a destruction project. And this comes from that vision that exists in our society, we have to recognize, that the Europeans destroyed their forests and now they want us to protect ours. It is a myopic view. Just because someone set their own house on fire doesn’t mean I have to set mine on fire.
Faced with the dismantling of environmental agencies and the “cattle”, why did Mr. Do you think that the action of administrative improbity against the former minister was denied by the Justice? Salles was also acquitted in an improbity lawsuit in São Paulo. Would there be a legalization or social acceptance of these policies? The improbity law works with two very clear concepts: damage to the treasury or illicit enrichment. Environmental and climate damage has a problem: how to demonstrate the concrete damage caused by the dismantling of environmental policy?
What we lack in the judicialization of this issue is an instrument that allows us to characterize that this policy was harmful to the Brazilian State, it was intentional and therefore needs to be punished.
In a way, you are right in that sentence: we naturalize harm. Not the improbity itself, but that these policies can occur and that they are disastrous. And I have no instrument to punish.
Does the package of green actions that the STF passed to judge in April bring consistency or precedent to help in this judicialization? bring He signals that he cannot deregulate and that civil society must participate. It’s a first step.
Climate litigation grows around the world. Mr. see this happening in Brazil? What are the challenges for this judicial route here? I see. These are initial attempts, but there is a litigation that has grown straight to the Supreme Court. But the civil suit is still heir to an idea of the fight between so-and-so and so-and-so. It has advanced a little towards collective actions, but it still thinks through the eyes of the individual process.
When I take a climate change lawsuit to the judge, he says: “Wait a minute, who’s your lawsuit against whom? Because if it’s a public policy lawsuit, it’s not my role.”
On the other hand, the evolution of climate science has allowed the accountability of individual actors who cause climate change with their emissions. Do these processes go in opposite directions? Exactly. Now we are in the middle of this path: of science being able to do this quantification and individualization and of the civil process being able to look at this.
Our judges today were trained in law and in a view of the world in which science did not have the individualization that you are saying and the civil process did not have the collectivization that we have today. We were not educated with these logics and this creates friction. It’s a challenge.
How does the political situation under the current government impact the performance of prosecutors? There is no escaping the recognition that Brazilian society is in a moment of great polarization and that it has also affected public bodies.
Our relationship with Funai, with the central body of Funai, for example, is almost non-existent or one of mutual distrust. Several times the president of Funai represented against prosecutors because of his actions.
Advancing your speech scheduled for the event Dialogues for the Climate, this Tuesday, what is the role and challenge of the Public Ministry in the face of climate change? I need to be an agent in the discussion process and this requires the MP to qualify its members and make it one of the institution’s topics of action, not just prosecutor A or B.
In the MP, the processes were made to respond reactively. Civil inquiry has arrived, decided the case and goes ahead. In climate change, you cannot be reactive, you have to be proactive, otherwise you will only end up with what is already destroyed. This is the MP’s challenge: looking at the data that science already gives us, leaving the reactive and moving to the proactive.
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Ubiratan Cazetta, 53
He is regional prosecutor of the Republic of the 1st region and president of the National Association of Public Prosecutors. For 26 years in the Federal Public Ministry, he worked for 23 of them in the state of Pará. Graduated in law from USP (University of São Paulo), he has a master’s degree in human rights from UFPA (Federal University of Pará).
UNDERSTAND THE SERIES
Planeta em Transe is a series of reports and interviews with new actors and experts on climate change in Brazil and around the world. This special coverage follows the responses to the climate crisis in the 2022 elections and at COP27 (UN conference in November in Egypt). The project is funded by the Open Society Foundations.
