The “green agenda” in the Federal Supreme Court, a set of seven actions on Jair Bolsonaro’s blitz against the environment, has already taken four sessions of the STF. The lie of the Attorney General of the Republic, Augusto Aras, on Thursday (7th), about NGOs in Brazil, stood out in the chatter.
The president’s family and fanatical followers propagate that environmental non-governmental organizations defend international interests in the Amazon, an old fixed idea of ​​milicos. In this barracks delirium, they would be the fifth active column to deliver the gold and niobium from indigenous lands to foreigners.
Nothing is more predictable, then, than lying to exaggerate the number of enemies in the jungle. Aras did so, in the presence of the ministers, using an alleged “survey carried out by the press and official bodies”.
“It is important to note that we must exercise certain precautions, not in particular with the ‘amici curiae’ who come to this house representing environmental NGOs, but it is worth remembering that five years ago […] there were 3,300 NGOs in this country, 3,000 in the Amazon and 300 in the rest of Brazil”, added the head of the Federal Public Ministry.
I’ll leave it to my colleague Sérgio Rodrigues to comment on the “despiciendo”, even if he doesn’t want to spend candles on a bad corpse. This column is about science and the environment, and in both matters accuracy and source of numbers are crucial.
Not in support of the PGR, however. To flatter Bolsonaro, the prosecutor refused all seven lawsuits, including one brought by his own institution. Aras did not specify the exact origin of the data used to justify the lack of a constitutional obligation to keep NGOs in the National Environment Fund.
The legal arguments that preceded the fraudulent information (“fake news”, in the newspeak of social networks) are even weighty. The ideological and apocryphal addendum, however, does not hold.
A search on the net with the mentioned figures yielded the possible origin of the untruth, even if in discrepant numbers. Taking Bolsonaro’s pains in a fight with Emmanuel Macron, president of France, the ambassador in that country, LuÃs Fernando Serra, had come out with this one in 2019:
“You can suspect that he has a hidden agenda when you see 300 NGOs in the Amazon and zero in the Northeast. Why didn’t 55 million people from the Northeast deserve an NGO, and the 25 million who live in the Amazon deserve 300?”
The levity that unites the leaders of Itamaraty and the parquet (MPF) is unmasked when searching the internet for the official bodies that Aras alluded to without consulting. Two surveys on NGOs, from the IBGE and Ipea, are soon to be found; although with incongruous data, none of them confirms the prosecutor’s invention.
The IBGE recorded in the survey “Private Foundations and Non-Profit Associations in Brazil”, from 2016, a total of 236,950 of these entities. In this broad concept of NGO, there were a mere 1,689 dedicated to the environment (0.7%) and 83,053 to religion (35.1%), the champion.
The national distribution also has nothing to do with the fabulation of Serra e Aras: 3.9% are in the North region, against 18.8% in the Northeast.
In 2020, Ipea counted 781,921 entities in its “Map of Civil Society Organizations”, based on the even more extensive notion of CSOs. In this case, there are 58,878 in the North (7.5%), and 201,336 in the Northeast (25.7%).
A lawyer-general like Bruno Bianco is only expected to have a string of falsehoods to defend the president and his policy of devastation (not the Union plundered in natural patrimony). More institutional independence would be desired from an attorney general — but not from Aras, who seems willing to do anything for a seat on the STF.
