[Brazil’s president is determined to save his country’s
rainforest but agribusiness and its political supporters stand in his
way]
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LULA FACES POWERFUL OPPOSITION AS HE SEEKS TO PROTECT THE AMAZON AND
RECOGNIZE INDIGENOUS RIGHTS  
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Farai Shawn Matiashe
June 27, 2023
New Lines Magazine
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_ Brazil’s president is determined to save his country’s
rainforest but agribusiness and its political supporters stand in his
way _

Brazil’s President Lula (right) and Indigenous Peoples Minister
Sonia Guajajara (left) attend a ceremony in Brasilia on April 28,
2023, Andressa Anholete/Getty Images

 

Surrounded by thousands of supporters, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
(known simply as “Lula”) was sworn into office on Jan. 1, 2023, at
a colorful inauguration ceremony held at the Planalto Palace in
Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. It was not Lula’s first time
assuming the highest office of Latin America’s largest country. He
was first sworn in two decades ago and served two terms as Brazil’s
president from 2003 to 2010. The 67-year-old is a true veteran of
Brazilian politics: He was the presidential candidate of the leftist
Workers’ Party in 1989, 1994 and 1998, losing each time. In the
October 2022 elections, he narrowly defeated the right-wing populist
incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, with 50.9% of the vote.

In his third term as president, Lula faces the formidable task of
uniting a deeply polarized Brazilian society. Bolsonaro, a close ally
of Donald Trump, did not attend the traditional handover of the
presidential sash to his successor. Instead, he repaired to Florida
after his defeat and sat out the inauguration. Just a week after Lula
assumed the presidency, pro-Bolsonaro militants stormed the Congress
in Brasilia in a manner reminiscent of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection
at the U.S. Capitol.

During his campaign, Lula promised to combat deforestation in the
Amazon, which worsened under Bolsonaro’s presidency. Brazil is home
to nearly 60% of the Amazon, the largest tropical rainforest on the
planet. (The remainder is shared by eight other South American
nations, principally Peru and Colombia.) Bolsonaro, a consistent
defender of Brazil’s powerful agricultural industry, backed farm and
ranching expansion in the Amazon.

Lula hit the ground running by appointing the longtime
environmentalist Marina Silva as his environment and climate change
minister. Silva’s mission is to rebuild Brazil’s environmental
protection agencies and stanch the destruction of the Amazon
rainforest. Lula also appointed the first-ever Indigenous woman
elected to Brazil’s Congress, Joenia Wapichana, as leader of the
country’s Indigenous affairs agency, the National Foundation of
Indigenous Peoples, popularly known as FUNAI.

This is a landmark achievement for Brazil’s Indigenous communities,
which Bolsonaro went out of his way to antagonize — slashing
FUNAI’s budget, cutting its staff and crippling its authority after
he assumed the presidency in 2019. Vanda Witoto, an Indigenous leader
and activist who in 2022 ran for federal deputy for the state of
Amazonas (as a candidate of the Sustainability Network, an
environmentalist party in Brazil), took to Twitter to voice her joy.
FUNAI will be “chaired by an Indigenous woman for the first time in
history,” she tweeted. “We trust you, [Wapichana].”

The Bolsonaro administration’s policies threatened the existence of
many Indigenous communities within Brazil’s Amazon region. One youth
activist fled his home in an Amazonian Indigenous community out of
fear for his life, following his tribe’s resistance to the incursion
of an agribusiness firm. “They killed two of my friends. I had to
run away,” he tells _New Lines_, speaking in Portuguese through a
translator.

The Indigenous activist, who preferred not to be named for security
reasons, is now seeking refuge in Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian
state of Amazonas, where he is continuing his university education.
“Our territory is wanted by the government. They want it for timber
logging and cattle ranching. My people have been receiving threats,”
he says. “I am fighting to protect our land. I am here on the front
line. I am in fear. I don’t even know if I am going back there or
not.” He says all the companies threatening his community and
exporting timber should be investigated and held accountable for the
crimes they are committing.

The lives of Indigenous community activists and leaders have been
under threat throughout the Amazon. In 2020 alone, more than 260 human
rights defenders were murdered in Latin America, 202 of them in
countries of the Amazon Basin, with Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia
representing 77% of the cases, according to a report by the
Confederation of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin, known
as COICA. Roughly 69% of those murders were against leaders working to
defend the territory, environment and rights of Indigenous peoples.

Brazil and Bolivia are responsible for close to 90% of deforestation
and degradation in the Amazon, according to “Amazonia Against the
Clock,” a September 2022 report by scientists from the Amazon
Network of Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information, in
collaboration with COICA. According to the report, agribusiness is
responsible for 84% of deforestation in the region, and the amount of
land given over to farming has tripled since 1985. Indigenous
organizations are calling for a global pact for the permanent
protection of 80% of the Amazon rainforest by 2025.

The rainforest plays a significant role in absorbing carbon dioxide
from the atmosphere, which reduces the effects of climate change
caused by greenhouse gas emissions from around the world. There are
over 390 billion trees in the Amazon, helping it to retain some 123
billion tons of carbon dioxide. But over the years, increasing
deforestation and land degradation have impeded the forest’s
absorption of carbon dioxide and contributed to global warming through
both human-caused and natural fires.

The Amazon has also been experiencing droughts and floods. In thick,
untouched forests like the one where Camp 41 (a unit of the Thomas
Lovejoy Amazon Biodiversity Center) is located, scientists are
noticing changes, such as the decline of insect and bird species.
Mario Cohn-Haft, a researcher from the National Institute of Amazonian
Research, which is funded by Brazil’s federal government, says that
on his patrols in the forest he is observing the decline of some
sensitive species, and climate change cannot be ruled out as a cause.
Cohn-Haft is a research ornithologist and curator of birds who has
spent decades conducting studies in this part of the Amazon, which has
not yet been devastated by human activities such as mining,
agriculture or logging.

Another activist based in Manaus, whose life is in danger from
powerful people and who preferred not to be named for security
reasons, says that deforestation in the Amazon worsened under
Bolsonaro. “He reduced the number of protected areas in the Amazon.
He weakened the laws that protect the forest.” During Bolsonaro’s
presidency, this activist explains, the rates of deforestation and
biodiversity loss increased, while incursions into Indigenous
communities in the Amazon rose. Agribusinesses and extractive
industries also used pesticides and chemicals that have contaminated
bodies of water in the rainforest, putting the lives of many people
and animals in danger.

Rafael Ioris, a historian of modern Brazil who teaches at the
University of Denver, tells _New Lines _that, while the Amazon
rainforest has been under attack for a long time, Bolsonaro
exacerbated the process and reversed the progress made during Lula’s
presidency in the 2000s. “The process of exploitative occupation of
the Amazon regions dates back decades, but it was accelerated from the
1970s and 1980s, all the way into the agriculture expansion of the
last 25 years,” says Ioris, who is also a co-editor of the recent
book “Frontiers of Development in the Amazon: Riches, Risks, and
Resistances.”

“Under Lula’s first time in power,” Ioris says, “significant
rates of reduction of deforestation were seen, but this trend was
reversed dramatically under Bolsonaro, who incentivized illegal
logging and mining even into protected areas of Indigenous lands.”

Indigenous leader and activist Vanda Witoto at her home in Manaus,
capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, in October 2022. (Michael
Dantas/United Nations Foundation)

Ioris says this motivated Indigenous leaders, including many women in
public positions, to resist by calling the attention of domestic and
international audiences to the crimes being committed by loggers,
miners and farmers under Bolsonaro’s push for massive and
unregulated occupation of the Amazon. Vanda Witoto, the Indigenous
leader, says that multinational companies and agribusinesses were
funding illegal operations such as logging in the Amazon during the
Bolsonaro era.

“I visited some communities in the Amazon. There was illegal gold
mining. Sadly there is less reporting because the locals are being
threatened. Big companies are investing a lot in illegal mining and
deforestation in the southern part of the Amazon,” says Witoto,
lowering her voice and holding back her tears during an interview at
her home in the neighborhood of Parque das Tribos just outside Manaus.

“I saw this with my own eyes,” Witoto continues, noting that
poverty and unemployment push many Indigenous people into working for
these companies. “We are against this. We have always been fighting
to stop it.”

Adriano Karipuna, who represents the Karipuna people, an Indigenous
group that has inhabited the Amazon rainforest for centuries, explains
that law enforcement agents in the Bolsonaro administration did
nothing to stop loggers and miners from committing crimes against his
community. “Our people have been struggling with deforestation. We
have been reporting for the past years. But it worsened under
Bolsonaro,” he says.

“We have been receiving threats. Bolsonaro’s government [took] our
land and [donated] it to the invaders. We reported this to Geneva and
the United Nations General Assembly. Environmental criminals are going
unpunished,” he continues. Karipuna says the group even filed a
petition at the German Embassy in Brazil to help push Bolsonaro’s
government to protect the Amazon forest.

Witoto says Bolsonaro’s Amazon policies turned the clock back to the
1970s. “It was nothing but promises. Many Indigenous people lost
their lives; they were killed because they were simply Indigenous
people,” she says.

Indigenous people have a central role to play in safeguarding the
Amazon rainforest. According to the “Amazonia Against the Clock”
report, Indigenous territories and protected areas represent nearly
half the Amazon. About 86% of deforestation has taken place outside
these areas. Amazonia is home to at least 16,000 tree species and
Indigenous peoples safeguard 80% of the world’s biodiversity,
according to data cited in Australia’s newly released “State of
the Environment” report.

Lula made environmental issues central to his campaign against
Bolsonaro. In June 2022, he published a political plan outlining how
his government would preserve the environment through his commitment
to the “relentless fight against illegal deforestation” and the
restoration of degraded areas to achieve “net zero deforestation.”

Lula pledged to revive the Amazon Fund set up in 2008, a project that
is critical to the protection of the rainforest but that Bolsonaro set
aside during his four years as president. On his first day in office
in January, Lula reinstated the $1.2 billion fund. Norway and Germany,
the biggest donors to the fund, had pulled out in 2019, citing
Bolsonaro’s rampant deforestation policies.

Ioris says the challenge of turning things around in the Amazon is
immense, but Lula has appointed knowledgeable people to important
positions, such as Marina Silva as his environment and climate change
minister and Sonia Guajajara, an Indigenous and environmental
activist, who was named the head of the newly established Ministry of
Indigenous Peoples. This body was created on the same day Lula
declared a public health emergency for the Yanomami Indigenous
peoples. Reports show that, under Bolosonaro’s government, there was
a rise in the number of children dying of diseases caused by toxic
chemicals from illegal mining in the Yanomami rainforest reserve in
northern Brazil, which stretches across the states of Roraima and
Amazonas and is home to about 30,000 Indigenous people.

“They will need to rebuild the government’s environmental
protection agencies that were dismantled under Bolsonaro. And in this
task, they will also need support from international actors, such as
the Amazon Fund from European countries that promised to help fund new
protective initiatives,” Ioris says. He adds that Lula’s
government will need to be bold to face powerful economic interests
that favor continuing to explore the Amazon forest in an unsustainable
way.

Witoto says she is hopeful that the predicament of Indigenous people
will change under Lula’s regime. “Our hopes are in Lula. He
supports the rights of Indigenous peoples. I believe he will put in
place policies that protect us,” the activist tells _New Lines_.
According to a joint study by researchers at the University of Oxford,
the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and the
National Institute for Space Research, deforestation could fall by 89%
by 2030 if Lula reinstates the policies introduced during his first
term in office, which would save 28,957 square miles of the Amazon
rainforest. Yet he faces an enormous challenge: to empower
environmental agencies and Indigenous communities that safeguard the
Amazon, while resisting powerful multinational companies operating in
the tropical rainforest.

In March, lawmakers approved Bill 490, which limits the recognition of
new Indigenous territories and threatens to reverse Lula’s measures
to protect the environment. To pass, the bill still needs the approval
of the Senate (the upper house of Congress) and the president.

The new Ministry of Indigenous Peoples is also being threatened and
its powers weakened. Under new measures passed by the Senate in May,
land decisions are being transferred instead to the Justice Ministry,
which was previously in charge. But Indigenous peoples — many of
them now in positions of power, thanks to Lula’s efforts — are
fighting back. The opposition to Lula’s environmental agenda is
spearheaded by the pro-agribusiness faction of Brazil’s Congress,
which numbers 347 of the body’s 594 total members. Some are farmers
themselves, and some are Bolsonaro allies. They are keen to return to
the modus operandi under Bolsonaro, which served their economic
interests.

Given the role the Amazon plays in absorbing greenhouse gas emissions
from around the planet and thus in reducing the effects of climate
change, the battle over the fate of the rainforest is not only
national but global.

_Reporting for this story was supported by the United Nations
Foundation._

_Farai Shawn Matiashe is an award-winning journalist based in Mutare,
Zimbabwe_

 

* Brazil; Lula; Amazon Rain Forest;
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