Ricardo Salles, in his campaign for a seat in the Chamber of Deputies for the state of São Paulo, maintains the proposal that became known after the announcement of the interministerial meeting of April 22, 2020. In it, then Minister of the Environment, defended that the government “passing the herd and changing all the rules and simplifying rules”.
One of the herds — a nickname that became a hallmark of the management — led to an investigation by the Federal Police for facilitating the trafficking of illegal wood. In June 2021, a month after the PF obtained authorization from the Federal Supreme Court to break its tax and banking secrecy, Salles resigned from the ministry.
After his departure, deforestation rates in the Amazon — which had already jumped in the first year of his administration — continued to rise under the command of his successor, Joaquim Leite. For Salles, the explanation is economic.
“If we don’t have an economic development policy for the Amazon and continue to have a policy of mere freezing of the biome, these people will survive as best they can”, he says.
“I would have liked to have done more. But it was not possible for several reasons, including legal ones, due to legislative constraints, which is why in the Chamber I think I can help”, he evaluates.
Why do you want to enter the Chamber of Deputies?We have too many laws in Brazil, in some ways even contradictory, sometimes even made with good intentions, but which make the implementation of effective measures to protect the environment almost unfeasible. The Chamber lacks someone who has had to implement the laws in practice to say: “look, what you are putting in place is not going to work”.
Do you intend to take to Congress the proposal to deregulate the rules that became known as cattle in your administration in the MMA?Somehow. You can anticipate problems, say, “don’t put it, or write it differently.”
An important example is the general law on environmental licensing, which has been through difficulty in the Chamber and is sleeping in a splendid cradle in the Senate. It does not diminish environmental protection, on the contrary, it allows us to take the ever-scarce resources of the public sector and direct them to what matters most.
This bill is criticized for making licensing the exception rather than the rule. The licensing of dams, for example, would be reduced to a self-declaration. Wouldn’t the bill increase the risk of disaster?to the ANM [Agência Nacional de Mineração] the function of setting the security parameters has been assigned. The ANM, with the episodes of Mariana and Brumadinho, was forced to edit a regulation on monitoring. Before, the ANM I think had seven inspectors for the entire national territory, so it was a fictitious monitoring.
With that, do you recognize that it is important to have a government requirement also through inspection?Of course, it must have. This is provided for in the ANM standard.
How do you evaluate your management of MMA?Being environment minister in a right-wing government after 22 years of the left ruling the country is very difficult. Because you have rules made with the vision of the left, employees trained to act and have a perspective of reality according to what the left has, in many cases. This structure that came from the government was designed for a different vision of the world.
I wish I had done more. But it was not possible for several reasons, including legal, due to legislative constraints, which is why in the House I think I can help.
What kind of tie do you want to review?The Snuc [Sistema Nacional de Unidades de Conservação], for example. Brazil has created hundreds of conservation units and has none that has taken care to adapt to the reality of the region.
In the Campos Gerais National Park, in Paraná, there is a part of well-preserved rural properties that could coexist within a conservation unit for sustainable use and, by chance, are inserted within an integral protection conservation unit. It is the worst investment of public money to expropriate these people.
What would your proposal be?That we would open a legislative window so that, within each conservation unit, it would be possible to adjust the perimeter, the type of conservation unit and, at once, negotiate to resolve the land issue, when applicable.
Society sometimes imagines that the complaint is from a large landowner who wants to plant soy, but in many places it is small landowners, poor people, such as fishing communities in Ceará who are prevented from fishing because ICMBio created a conservation unit where the guy lived, where fishermen have been for a hundred years.
Is it possible to resolve these issues with traditional communities without opening a gap to reduce protected areas in favor of predatory uses, such as the advance of monocultures or mining?First, it would need to have a well-established procedure. Open public consultation.
Who will make up the study group? There must be equity between the representation of environmental protection, the productive sector, and the local communities that are there. And place the economic component as something fundamental. If you are going to impose a restriction on the property right, that restriction has to be paid and it has to be paid now.
In the old days the scriptures were done in another way. Do you have to georeference? The guy has nowhere to drop dead, how is he going to georeference? You create formal impediments to solve an obvious problem: “look, so-and-so, you have four bushels, we are paying X in your bushel, here’s the check, bye, go away”.
The lack of titling also generates violence and conflicts over territory. In your 2018 campaign for federal deputy, you suggest in a pamphlet to solve with a rifle bullet. Would you repeat that communication today?No, I didn’t propose to solve it with a rifle bullet. I suggest voting for my number.
The pamphlet shows an arrow linking the term “bandit in the field” to a rifle round. What other possible interpretation for that arrow?The image has the function of recording my number in the subconscious. We’re a right-wing group that likes guns, so you alluding to a caliber number is something that marks people out. There was no incitement to violence.
The level of deforestation in the Amazon jumped from an average of 7,000 km² in the years prior to 2019 to 10,000 km² in its first year of management. In the last year, it reached 13 thousand km², already under the management of Joaquim Leite. Why has deforestation continued to rise?Look, if you don’t improve the quality of life of the people in the region, have income, economic activity, what they have to do in that region is cut wood, illegal mining and livestock.
Since 2012, when that downward trend began to reverse and deforestation began to rise again, people have been looking for a way to make a living. If we do not have an economic development policy for the Amazon and continue to have a policy of mere freezing of the biome, these people will survive as best they can.
We never encourage you to do anything wrong, we never said: “look, play stick there”.
But we are at the end of the Bolsonaro administration and we have not seen policies to control illegal deforestation. What we saw was an almost total reduction in inspections.I do not agree. There was never a government order not to carry out inspections. Very little has been said that, historically, the operations of IBAMA and ICMBio were monitored, from a security point of view, by state forces. And we didn’t have support from state police forces in virtually any state.
You had support from the Armed Forces, using a budget much higher than that of Ibama, and the fact is that the application of fines has dropped, there is practically no more.Because? Let’s go: who pays the fine?
The inspector, under your command. No, they do what they want. The inspector may not have fined precisely to embarrass the Bolsonaro government with the drop in fines. The guy may not have fined him because he is not going to work, taking advantage of the pandemic. My command was: obey the law. We never said: don’t fine. We said: if you fine, do it right, be justified.
Your decision to leave the ministry was read as a way to escape the sights of the STF, which had just authorized a search and seizure operation by the Federal Police in an investigation that links you to a scheme to facilitate the smuggling of illegal wood. How do you explain your departure at that moment?I left because I was really tired of this unfair and relentless persecution, from different sectors: parts of the media, parts of the judicial public power, part of the international community on the Brazilian environmental issue. There are times when you get tired.
X-RAY
Ricardo Salles, 47
He was born in sao paulo. He is a lawyer graduated from Mackenzie University. He was Minister of the Environment (2019-2021) and State Secretary for the Environment in SP (2016-2017). Previously, he was private secretary to the then governor Geraldo Alckmin, current candidate for vice president of Lula. Salles runs for federal deputy for the PL.
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 also follows the responses to the climate crisis in the 2022 elections and at COP27 (UN conference in November in Egypt). The project is supported by the Open Society Foundations.
