Amazon: Bolsonaro’s incentive to explore challenges Lula – 04/30/2023 – Environment

“Unfortunately, the first news is the strongest.” This is how Marcelo Cwerner, one of the four volunteer brigade members from Alter do Chão (PA) arrested by the Pará Civil Police at the end of 2019, on charges of setting fire to an APA (Environmental Protection Area), still perceives the damage to his reputation caused by the episode.

The day after the arrest was announced, the Sheet revealed that the police investigation did not bring evidence for the prosecution. Two days later, the governor of Pará, Helder Barbalho (MDB), changed the delegate in the case and the brigade members were released.

The case went up to the Federal Police with another line of investigation and, in little more than a year, it was archived by the Federal Justice.

Even so, four years later, the brigadistas continue to deal with rumors that multiply in the streets of Alter do Chão —where three of the four accused live— and reverberate even in their homes, when they receive a service provider, or in the work.

“A few months ago I went to take a Navy course and the professor mentioned the ‘brigade members who set fire to Alter’, without knowing that I was one of them”, says João Romano, a brigade member who was also arrested.

In Cappadocia, part of the APA Alter do Chão affected by the fires, it is easy to get to the places that burned: signs for the sale of land guide the way. Next to a busy beach, the fire area is “clean”, devoid of vegetation, and allotted.

The action of land grabbers was already the main suspicion of the Federal Public Ministry at the time of the fires, although the investigation did not reach accusations.

Clarified by the press, misinformation about the case started with hot backs. Then-President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) had already blamed environmental NGOs for fires in the Amazon in September 2019 – when the fire crisis gained international proportions and the Civil Police of Pará began investigating the fire at APA Alter do Chão.

At the end of that year, Bolsonaro also praised the Pará Civil Police investigation, criticized the release of the brigade members and even involved actor Leonardo DiCaprio in accusations without evidence – that he was a financier of NGOs that would burn the forest to affect the government’s image.

In the Amazon, attacks on environmentalists make up the tripod of Bolsonarist anti-environmental strategy, which persists in time and is among the obstacles of the Lula government (PT). In addition to the persecution of environmentalists, the tripod had political support for illegal activities and the “boiadas” —the nickname given by the then Minister Ricardo Salles (Environment) for the deregulation of norms.

The challenge imposed on the new management implies leaving the current level of 11,000 km^two of annual deforestation and return to previous rates of 7,000 km^two and 4,500 km^twotowards zero deforestation at the end of the decade.

Actions during the Bolsonaro period had global repercussions. Since 2019, the world has witnessed, in addition to the arrest of volunteer brigade members accused of causing the fires they were fighting, the visit to Campo de Salles to release wood seized by the Federal Police, in early 2021. Another highlight of the period, in January 2021 2022, were the images of the changing color of the Tapajós River, contaminated by mining.

These three scandals were concentrated in the Baixo Tapajós region of Pará. A Sheet toured the region, between the municipalities of Santarém and Itaituba, to hear the perspectives of those who live with the exploitation of wood, gold and land.

Leaving by speedboat from Santarém, the waters narrow as you leave the immensity of the Tapajós River to enter the curves of the Arapiuns River to the village of Cachoeira do Aruã. On the trip, which lasts about four hours, you pass by ferries loaded with wood and a port used by logging companies.

Since the Federal Police’s Handroanthus operation, which in November 2020 seized 130,000 cubic meters of wood suspected of illegal extraction —a volume that made it considered the largest operation ever carried out in this sector—, loggers in the region have become skittish, he said, on condition of anonymity, one of the people who received the report in Cachoeira do Aruã.

Earlier that year, Salles extinguished the environmental authorization for exporting wood, at the request of logging associations. The decision turned him into a target of investigation by the Federal Police and led him to leave office in June 2021.

Two months earlier, the then minister went to the region of Cachoeira do Aruã and publicly defended the legality of wood logs seized by the PF.

The challenge of traceability of illegal wood lies in the “heating up” of loads that hitchhike in regular batches, with adulterated information about the origin of the exploitation.

Cachoeira do Aruã is located on the border of the Nova Olinda tract with the Tapajós-Arapiuns Extractive Reserve (Resex). The protected area coexists with the invasion of illegal loggers.

“The policy of the timber sector is like this: the role of inspection is not mine, even because of the risk to life. It is a sector in which we have a history of murders, so there is not an abundant denunciation”, says forestry engineer Murilo Moda, owner of Ampe Ambiental, the company responsible for management projects and environmental licenses for 9 of the 11 logging companies in operation in Cachoeira do Aruã.

His office is the only representation of the loggers in the village. Around it, young people gather to connect to the internet through the company’s network. In addition to the wifi point, Ampe is seen as a partner by a large part of the community.

In conversations with the reporter, residents mention benefits such as asphalt, the construction of a school (partly financed by management projects) in a more remote area, in addition to the movement of local businesses and the opportunity for temporary jobs in the dry season, for extraction from the wood.

Even a masonry bathroom, built in a wooden house that serves lunch for loggers, was made by the sector and prints, just above the door, the Ampe brand.

“Here the State is not enough, so the community has a better development with the companies. And they also demand social counterparts, there is no longer a silly community”, says Moda.

Outside the village, however, the climate of cooperation between the community and the loggers takes on another name.

“What happens there is called enticement. The communities are very manipulated. They think that logging will bring infrastructure and that doesn’t happen”, says Ian Camará, 22, while sweeping the floor of the backyard of his house in Camará village.

Part of the Lago Grande extractive settlement, the community is one of the few that refused logging in the region on the banks of the Arapiuns.

“[A atividade] changes the temperature of the water, the color, the number of fish, in addition to discarding wood bark and oil in the river”, describes Ian, who is part of the activist group Guardians of Good Living and has been pulling “rabetaços”, protests in rabetas (canoes motorized), against loggers.

If in Cachoeira do Aruã wood dominates the activities, in Itaituba, the “nugget city”, mining is the highlight. The municipality, 368 km from Santarém on the Transamazônica highway, concentrates a good part of the mining concessions in the country.

Itaituba is experiencing an explosion in mining driven, according to Mayor Valmir Climaco (MDB), by the adoption of backhoe loaders in the last decade, and by the increase in the price of gold, especially from 2020 onwards.

In the city, mining equipment stores and gold buying agencies are common. On cars, the sticker “Garimpeiro is not a bandit, he is a worker” can often be seen.

At the turn of 2022, the mud stirred up by mining turned the generally crystalline waters of the Tapajós river muddy. The images of the contaminated river in the tourist region of Alter do Chão, known as the Amazonian Caribbean, were highlighted in the international media.

The municipality’s environmental licenses for mining facilitate the “heating up” of illegal exploration. According to a study by UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais) in cooperation with the MPF (Federal Public Ministry), the Itaituba region was the origin of 81% of illegal gold mined in the country in 2019 and 2020.

The city hall published a new normative instruction regarding licensing one month after the operation Caribe Amazônico, by the Federal Police, destroyed 21 excavators in illegal mines in Itaituba and Jacareacanga, in February 2022.

“Now every time we issue a license, we send it to ICMBio [Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade] give the approval”, says Climaco, who is also the owner of a mine, a logger and a farmer. “I recognize that some gold taken from indigenous lands is legalized with the licenses we issue.”

Despite the normative reinforcement, Climaco indicates that the “nugget city” will keep the tradition.

“Mercury does not contaminate anyone. That muddy water color that you are seeing there has nothing to do with mercury”, he says.

_{The Planeta em Transe project is supported by the Open Society Foundations.}