SÃO PAULO, Brazil – “I am an army captain,” said Jair Bolsonaro in 2017. “My specialty is killing.”
He has kept his word. In just over three years in office, Mr. Bolsonaro has overseen a government known for its disregard for human life. There are, most immediately, the country’s 660,000 deaths from Covid-19 — the second most in the world, after the United States. During the pandemic, he hindered social distancing, sabotaged the wearing of masks and undermined vaccination. He claims he “didn’t make a single mistake during the pandemic”. So we have to assume that everything went according to plan.
Then there are the weapons. A series of presidential decrees easing gun controls have opened the floodgates. Last year, the federal police issued 204,300 new gun permits, a 300 percent increase from 2018. The military’s licenses to hunters and gatherers rose 340 percent. The country, which recorded the most murders in the world in 2021, is being overrun with firearms.
And then there’s the planet. Amazon deforestation has reached its highest rate in 15 years, thanks in no small part to the president’s eager dismantling and dismantling of environmental enforcement agencies. Not satisfied with his efforts so far, Bolsonaro is now trying to push through five bills that will take away indigenous rights, open the Amazon to rampant profiteering and wreak untold damage to the planet.
With international attention to the war in Ukraine and six months before an election he is on track to lose, Bolsonaro is in a hurry to use his power. And he looks set to bring death and destruction upon the world.
It’s hard to pick the worst of the bills that activists are calling the destruction package. But let’s start with the one trying to nullify the land claims of indigenous groups. By setting a date — October 5, 1988, the day of the promulgation of the Brazilian Constitution — when indigenous peoples were required to physically occupy their land, the bill permanently deprives those who had already been evicted from their ancestral home. Experts say about 70,000 indigenous people, nearly 8 percent of the indigenous population, could be affected.
Another bill aims to open up indigenous lands to mining. Mr Bolsonaro has boldly claimed that the war in Ukraine is a “good opportunity for us”. With the country’s access to Russian-supplied fertilizers disrupted, the argument goes, Brazil needs to accelerate its efforts to become self-sufficient. But most of the country’s potassium – one of the main ingredients in fertilizers and of which the country has large reserves – is not under native soils. It’s a typically lame excuse, the sort of thing we expect from a man who visited Vladimir Putin a week before the invasion of Ukraine and then boasted that he had prevented the war.
Mining in these areas, although formally prohibited by the Constitution, has happened anyway. Illegal mining activities, mainly of rafts and dredges anchored in rivers, reached an all-time high in 2020. The consequences for the indigenous population are terrible. By 2021, six in 10 people in three Munduruku villages tested positive for unsafe levels of mercury in their bodies. Mercury is used in the gold mining process and then released, contaminating waterways and fish. Fifteen percent of children under 9 had neurological symptoms related to mercury poisoning.
Gold miners, of whom an estimated 20,000 work illegally in the Yanomami countries, pose a particular problem. Seemingly encouraged by the president, they have intensified attacks on local communities, burning houses and threatening and killing indigenous people with shotguns. In May, after miners opened fire with automatic weapons from speedboats, two Yanomami children panicked, fell into a river and drowned.
Decades ago, Bolsonaro complained that the Brazilian cavalry had not been “as skilled as the Americans, who exterminated the Indians in the past”. Undoubtedly, these two bills — which would also legalize logging, industrial farming, oil exploration, hydroelectric dams and other projects on indigenous lands without even asking their residents’ consent — are something of a legislative correction to him. They amount to a stunning and sustained attack on native life.
That would be bad enough. But the bills don’t stop there. A third aims to relax environmental permit requirements for a dozen economic activities, such as mining and agriculture, and a fourth plans to grant amnesty to land grabs and illegal loggers in the Amazon. The latest of the five bills aims to relax regulations on the use of pesticides, something that Mr Bolsonaro’s government – which has registered 1,467 pesticides, many with highly dangerous ingredients – appears to be particularly enthusiastic about it.
Taken together, these bills will significantly accelerate the destruction of the Amazon. The world’s largest rainforest, already emitting more carbon dioxide than it can absorb, could reach a tipping point and turn into a savanna. That would release massive amounts of greenhouse gases, disrupt water cycles at regional and perhaps global levels, and severely curtail our ability to absorb carbon emissions. Climate change would accelerate at an even faster rate. It would be a disaster.
Still, Mr. Bolsonaro will likely get his way. Though thousands of people have taken to the streets in a colorful display of dissent, there seems to be enough congressional support — endorsed by the powerful agribusiness lobby — to pass the bills. It’s probably only a matter of time before they become law.
But in a way, Bolsonaro doesn’t even need the legislation. After all, he already has excellent results in the field of death and destruction.