President Jair Bolsonaro (no party) disallowed a military intervention in the Amazon that his deputy, Hamilton Mourão, announced and treated as existing for 45 days.
Military personnel operated in the region, despite the lack of a presidential decree supporting a GLO (Guarantee of Law and Order) operation.
The Vice-Presidency and the Ministry of Defense affirm that the activities of the Armed Forces were restricted to logistical and intelligence actions, unrelated to GLO.
Mourão presides over the National Council for the Legal Amazon. The collegiate’s flagship so far has been the execution of GLO operations, in which the Forces are called to act in areas that are beyond their original defense role.
In the case of the Amazon, the military began to take over from agents of Ibama (Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources) and ICMBio (Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation) in the repression of environmental crimes in conserved areas.
The militarization of the fight against environmental offenses lasted 16 of the 34 months of the Bolsonaro government, costing R$ 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.
Mourão announced and treated as existing a second phase of Samaúma, but Bolsonaro did not issue a decree to extend it, as did the sheet found out.
To extend Verde Brasil 2, for example, which preceded Samaúma and lasted almost a year, the president signed a new decree establishing the extension of the deadline.
At the Amazon Council meeting held on August 24, Mourão stated that he “talked to the Defense Minister [Walter Braga Netto] so that it extends to GLO [da Operação Samaúma], with the resources that remain, so that when our negotiators arrive in Glasgow for COP26 in November, they will have positive numbers.”
Leaving the meeting, the vice president gave a 20-minute press interview. He said: “I can tell you in advance that the GLO will be extended. I spoke with the Minister of Defense today. The appeal initially requested took a long time to arrive, there was still an appeal, so we are able to extend it for another 45 days, which is a period of time. critic of burning in the Amazon”.
The GLO deadline that guaranteed Samaúma, provided for in a decree by Bolsonaro, was August 31, a week after the Amazon Council meeting.
The operation began on June 28th. The president did not sign a new decree to extend the GLO, as Mourão said he would.
After the aforementioned 45 days, the vice president was asked by journalists about what would be a new extension of the military intervention in the Amazon. The questioning took place on October 15, when Mourão arrived at the Palácio do Planalto, as is usually done.
“The GLO of Operation Samaúma ends today?” asked a journalist. “It ends,” replied the vice president.
“And are they going to renew?” the reporter asked. “No, without GLO renewal. What was right: the Armed Forces continue to provide logistical, communications and intelligence support,” added Mourão.
In fact, GLO had already fallen by the wayside as of September 1st.
According to the vice president, the Ministry of the Environment had a doubled budget and “transfers the necessary resources to the Ministry of Defense”. “Coordination made within the management group and that’s it, the dance is on.”
Mourão himself, however, had already said in a radio program he maintains in an official government vehicle that the GLO had not been extended. Operation Samaúma cost R$ 50 million to public coffers, according to the vice president.
In a statement, the Vice-Presidency of the Republic stated that “effectively there was no extension of the GLO, exclusively due to difficulties in allocating specific financial resources for such”.
“The operations that have taken place, and are still ongoing, are under the context of the Amazon Plan, where environmental protection and combating environmental offenses act in their respective areas of responsibility with support, if necessary, from elements of the Armed Forces in intelligence, logistics and security,” the statement said.
The Ministry of Defense, in a statement, also confirmed that “there was no extension” of the term of the decree that guaranteed military intervention through a GLO.
“There was no action, in the context of Operation Samaúma, after the end of the legal period established by the decree,” he said.
“The Armed Forces frequently provide logistical, intelligence and communications support to various federal agencies, especially environmental protection agencies, under the terms of Complementary Law No. 97, of June 9, 1999.”
The detailed minutes of the last Amazon Council meeting record Mourão’s appeal for GLO to proceed, in order to ensure “positive numbers” at COP26 and “clearly demonstrate the commitment of the Brazilian State (Bolsonaro government) to resolve this problem.”
The United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26, is held in Glasgow, UK.
Mourão, who presides over the National Council for the Legal Amazon, was excluded from the possibility of heading the Brazilian delegation at COP26, despite having expressed his intention to do so.
The Environment Minister, Joaquim Leite, leads the work. He has not yet traveled to Glasgow.
At the meeting of the Amazon Council, the vice president anticipated the evolution of the consolidated data on deforestation in the Amazon, systematized by Prodes (Project for Monitoring Deforestation in the Legal Amazon by Satellite), from Inpe (National Institute for Space Research).
Deforestation between August 2020 and July 2021 would have been 5% lower than that recorded in the previous cycle, according to Mourão.
The loss of vegetation between August 2019 and July 2020, however, was 10,851 km² of forest, 7.1% more than in the previous cycle. It was a record in 12 years, according to data from Inpe.
The month following the end of Samaúma, September, registered a deforestation of 1,224 km², an area the size of the city of Rio de Janeiro, the worst mark for September in ten years, according to the alert system of Imazon (Instituto do Homem e Meio). Amazon Environment).
The accumulated from January to September, the period that involves Verde Brasil 2 and Samaúma, reached 8,939 km², 39% more than in the same period in 2020 and the worst index in ten years, according to Imazon data.
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