PF director sees setback in environmental inspection – 03/17/2023 – Environment

Newly created by the Federal Police, the Directorate for the Amazon and Environment has set a goal to reduce illegal deforestation in the Amazon region by 2023, even with numbers rising in the first months of the year.

In February, for example, there was a 62% increase in the area under deforestation alert (to 321.9 km²) compared to the same period last year.

Delegate Humberto Freire, chosen for the position by the director general of the PF, Andrei Rodrigues, gave an interview to Sheet on Thursday (16) and classified as “involution” what happened in the inspection of environmental crimes in recent years. According to him, the reduction in deforestation will not be immediate.

“Not only the inspection work, but the legislation itself also involved or opened up flanks that jeopardized this work of inspection and repression of environmental crimes. legislation that already existed in Brazil,” he said.

In the Bolsonaro government, under the management of Ricardo Salles in the Ministry of the Environment, inspection bodies such as Ibama and ICMbio had their performance impaired and changes in infralegal norms weakened the punishment of people and companies involved in environmental crimes.

The changes became known as “boiadas” and even created friction between Salles and the PF. The minister came to be the target of an investigation and was dismissed.

“The creation of the board itself was largely due to this involution, this step backwards that has occurred in recent years with regard to environmental crimes and the protection of the Amazon itself”, he says.

Freire says that the management team has already mapped all the main areas of deforestation and, from now on, operations will be structured. Reducing deforestation this year, he says, is one of the first steps for Brazil to comply with the Paris Agreement and reduce deforestation by 2030.

“The first result we expect is to reverse the curve [de desmatamento], but obviously this is not immediate. February had record deforestation, for example. We have actions being implemented, in which we focus on paralyzing this increase and then starting a downward curve, of reduction “, he says.

In addition to deforestation, the protection of indigenous peoples and the fight against illegal mining in these places are other objectives stipulated by the board.

In this area, the main goal is to comply with ADPF (allegation of non-compliance with a fundamental precept) 709 and remove all invaders from the Karipuna, Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, Kayapó, Araribóia, Munduruku, Trincheira Bacajá and Yanomami indigenous lands.

Actions for the so-called deintrusion (removal of intruders) began in the Yanomami Indigenous Land. The operation in Roraima was the first major action to combat environmental crimes by the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) and was triggered after a visit by the president to the place, when a state of emergency in public health was declared due to the situation of the indigenous population.

To fund all these actions, both to combat deforestation and mining and to protect the territories of the original peoples, the delegate points out the need to use sources such as the Amazon Fund, the National Public Security Fund and the PF budget itself.

The delegate cites the case of the Yanomami to speak of the difficulty in the removal processes. According to him, the PF has been carrying out a “fine-tooth comb” in the region to ensure that all the camps, mining sites and structures used by the invaders are destroyed.

“We are only going to stop this withdrawal phase, of disintrusion, when we are sure that everything has been removed. We have not yet reached that moment”, he says.

The work, he says, has been done to avoid the side effect of a humanitarian crisis also for the miners who were in the place. “It is not because they are practicing the usurpation of ore that they are no longer holders of human rights.”

Freire estimates that between 15,000 and 20,000 miners worked illegally in the area, the largest indigenous territory in the country.

Earlier, investigations by the PF had already mapped networks for buying and selling illegal gold extracted in the region. As shown to Sheetone of these groups is suspected of having heated R$ 4 billion of the ore.

Freire says that, at least for the time being, actions are still focused on disintruding and destroying the garimpeiros’ logistics. A structure with river bases and airspace control is still being prepared, he says, to prevent the return of invaders.

In addition, as he explains, the PF has carried out studies, within the Ouro Alvo program, to propose ways to improve the current legislation, assessed as an obstacle to inspection in recent years, especially due to the mechanism of presumption of good faith in the commercialization of ore.

The device, created during the Dilma government in 2013, gives free access to material exploited in illegal areas to be registered as if it had come from legal areas and, therefore, can be sold.

“How are you going to presume the good faith many times of people who have already proven to have committed environmental crimes?”, he asks.

The PF’s idea is to have a program to identify the so-called “gold DNA”, which would be incorporated into a new version of the mineral’s regulatory framework. It is a process capable of scrutinizing the composition of the ore and, based on a database with soil characteristics from different places, identifying where it was extracted.

Currently, there is already technology capable of carrying out the procedure, but the police still do not have a database with the characteristics of the Brazilian gold regions. The expectation, according to the delegate, is that by the end of the year at least two extraction areas in each Brazilian state will already have records in the system.

“We want to have a technical-scientific certainty that the declared origin [do ouro] is or is not true”, he says.

The delegate also points to international cooperation as a way to stifle the chain of deforestation and illegal mining. The objective is to identify the final recipient of illegally extracted natural goods and bring these countries into the debate on how to combat these crimes.

In addition to proposals for modernizing legislation and operations, Freire explains that another axis of actions by his board will be aimed at improving the infrastructure of the PF —a sector that, he admits, is one of the bottlenecks, due to the lack of budget.

He mentions, for example, the need to create river bases in strategic places, the displacement of teams to these locations, and the purchase of more modern equipment.

“Just the fact that we are there, present, gives us this immediate capacity for response and prevents a large part of the criminals from acting”, he says.

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