In a recent interview, Ricardo Salles, Brazil's Minister of Destruction (known officially as the country's Environment Minister), claimed that, "Brazil is an example in environmental protection." Salles made this absurd claim as the Amazon rainforest continued to smolder and more than 20 percent of the Brazilian Pantanal – the world's largest wetland and a major biodiversity hotspot – was reduced to ashes.

By both eschewing any responsibility for this year's catastrophic burning season and seeking to frame the Bolsonaro regime as an environmental leader, the minister continued to shamelessly spout lies to a largely incredulous public. This is true to form: Bolsonaro's power rests on wholesale fraud, and Mr. Salles is among his most brazen spin doctors.

The post-truth era has brought us atrocities like Bolsonaro and Trump and this has facilitated rampant environmental plunder that pushes our ecosystems and climate to the brink. An effective means of combating deception is by offering objective truth, grounded in data and analysis, that unequivocally demonstrates the realities unfolding on the ground.

Amazon Watch's new fires mapping platform does just that, laying bare the environmental crimes unfolding in the Brazilian Amazon, which were first actively facilitated and then explained away by the Bolsonaro regime.