The rabble-rousers that hold the world’s top jobs do more than share a penchant for baying their ravings—they harbor, too, a sense of camaraderie scarcely extended to their constituents.
US President Donald Trump, infamous for deriding minorities and trolling critics, recently lauded President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil for “working hard on the Amazon fires.” His tweet disputed rebukes of the latter’s unconcern as the forest shrinks and succumbs to a surge of blazes, a scorched-earth tactic to clear land.
The forest fires gutting the planet’s largest rainforest, a crucial carbon sink, amount to a stunning windup of Bolsonaro’s incendiary policies meant to dismantle environmental safeguards and siphon off resources for revenues. Pillars of smoke belched by the fires have swept down through Brazil’s southeast coast and shrouded Sao Paulo, a metropolis thousands of miles away from the inferno raging on at record rates in the Amazon. Globally, they threaten convulsions of apocalyptic proportions in the face of the climate crisis.
Bolsonaro, a climate-change denier, is hardly a man of niceties. “Brazil is a virgin that every foreign pervert wants,” he said last month, lashing out at European leaders concerned about the Amazon. He ladles out conspiracy theories to impute the destruction to environmentalists and NGOs. He shrugs allegations of his complicity in exhorting settlers, miners, ranchers and loggers to power up their torches and chainsaws.
He has gone out of his way to signal similar hostility against the many indigenous groups who have for millennia stewarded the forest. Such a rhetoric of bravado, however, only ignites the tinderbox that his devastating dalliance with bureaucrats and agro-industrial financiers has long assembled.
“Indigenous reserves are an obstacle to agribusiness,” Bolsonaro said in 2015. Three years later, vowing to lift the economy out of the ditch he claimed left-wingery had plunged it into, he said at a campaign rally: “If I become President, there will not be a centimeter more of indigenous land.”
In Bolsonaro, corporate powers poised to cannibalize what little space is left for Brazil’s most vulnerable populations found a champion.
Fire Sale
Such notoriety for bombast and bigotry had preceded Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign, which had at its core the backing of the arms industry, the religious right, and agribusinesses. The last one, particularly, provided a groundswell of support from rural voters who had brooked spells of recession and felt Brazil’s political machinery conspired against them. Bolsonaro rode waves of such sentiments to sweeping victory.
His capture of power favored Brazil’s ruralista congressional caucus, a right-wing coterie of agro-industrial lobbyists and policymakers. They insist on stripping the Amazon of protections and short-circuiting laws to raze or pillage previously shut-off areas for cattle grazing, soybean farming, and mining, among others. Several have stood accused of stashing billion-dollar profits in booty and are positioned to shovel in some more, out of breaches of sustainability standards.
Conservationists estimate that a parcel the size of 12 basketball courts gets wiped out every minute the forest is afire. Though this spells tragedy for the 306,000 indigenous people in the Amazon, it brings forth Bolsonaro’s drive to assimilate them rather than keep them apart, in his words, like “animals in the zoo.”
The next months risk lending greater license to transnational investors, traders, and consumers—to the detriment of local communities, which have increasingly fallen prey to these retrograde actors. No sooner will the flames lick and level the forest than companies will jostle for a larger stake in the charred landscape.
Bolsonaro will watch the scramble and go on snubbing the mortal peril of having choked the planet’s lungs. His track record, after all, portends greater liabilities. He has understated satellite data showing 85-percent more forest fires this year than the last. He has, over the years, kneecapped Brazil’s environmental agency, Ibama, with budget slashes and political strong-arming, and gone so far as to sack 21 of its senior officials.
Left unchecked, he is bound to erode democratic institutions with more menace to the world’s existential survival than he has so far done.
Crash and Burn
Bolsonaro’s response to the attacks on the Amazon has triggered jitters among the country’s international allies. They are quick to censure him and make a case for their governments as nature’s custodians. Their pledges to help salvage the ravaged Amazon, however, serve to air their plutocratic pieties while obscuring their culpability in wearing the planet down.
The inequality in global carbon emissions, for one, strikes at the heart of why Bolsonaro might believe the USD22-million aid from the G-7 countries, the world’s biggest advanced economies, is but a monument to hypocrisy. It is a spare change compared to the sum needed to absorb the share of per capita emissions from North America and Europe, about 86 percent of the total in 2018, per the Global Carbon Project.
To be sure, this data escapes Bolsonaro, who dismissed the offer as revelatory of “a misplaced colonialist mindset in the 21st century.” His belligerence toward leaders like Emmanuel Macron of France has begun to contradict Brazil’s commitments abroad. International outrage soon stoked an appraisal not just of his leadership but also of leverage available to rein in a man spiraling out of control.
Just as he had done when Bolsonaro wavered on the Paris Agreement, Macron again threatened to block a deal, twenty years in the works, between the European Union and Mercosur, the chief trading bloc in South America. The move constitutes less an affront to Brazil than a bargaining chip. If played, it could paralyze an export-oriented economy already hobbling on the heels of its worst slump in recent memory.
Macron and his clique may have sounded the alarms, but their largesse and retaliation could nowhere near rescue a country long buckling under the weight of failed market policies. Sanctions on export goods would, at best, infuriate Bolsonaro and, at worst, hurt the wider public. Tycoons for whom Bolsonaro already blazed the trail in the Amazon would, on the other hand, emerge unscathed and loaded.
The costs of this crisis cannot be overestimated. The casualties stretch beyond the Amazon, from the far right to countries where populist authoritarians are just a flashpoint short of burning their houses down.
The likes of Bolsonaro and Trump are, as yet, few and far between. But a pivot to their politics already risks straining the threshold of catastrophe incited, in the first place, by a global order bent on amassing capital at the expense of multitudes. Extinguishing these forces of reaction requires resisting their efforts to reimagine the society in their own self-aggrandizing image and striving to organize in the name of all the democratic values now under fire.
Such a reckoning can only begin by recognizing their regimes for the emergency that they are. ●
This article was first published in print in the Collegian’s September 16, 2019 issue.
