{"id":215794,"date":"2022-06-27T12:00:27","date_gmt":"2022-06-27T11:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=215794"},"modified":"2022-06-27T09:17:07","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T08:17:07","slug":"the-wide-role-brazils-military-has-played-in-the-destruction-of-the-amazon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/06\/the-wide-role-brazils-military-has-played-in-the-destruction-of-the-amazon\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wide Role Brazil\u2019s Military Has Played in the Destruction of the Amazon"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A member of the Brazilian army looks on as forest fires engulf a large part of the Amazon. Photo: Revista Opera<\/p><\/div>\n

23 Jun 2022 – <\/em>In the Brazilian Amazon, as deforestation reaches\u00a0record levels<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0rivers are increasingly polluted<\/a>, the illegal gold mining contributing to these problems continues largely unabated. The response of the government has been to\u00a0increase<\/a>\u00a0military action to curb environmental crimes in Brazil. Far from achieving this purpose, however, the military intervention has only led to tragedies in the region, directly or indirectly.<\/p>\n

A source from the Brazilian Amazon wrote to us at Revista Opera two years ago to warn us about something strange that was going on there: illegally mined gold was being sold at the same price as legally mined gold. \u201cIf the nugget is a big one,\u201d said the source, \u201cthey give the miner extra [money].\u201d There was no investigation based on this information since it would have required great resources and risks, neither of which we could afford. It was just another fascinating story that was buried in the green hell (Inferno Verde<\/a><\/i>) or\u00a0El Dorado<\/a><\/i>\u2014terms often used to describe the immensity of the Amazon rainforest.<\/p>\n

In August 2021, a\u00a0study<\/a> by the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in partnership with the Brazilian Federal Public Ministry (MPF) showed that in two years\u20142019 and 2020\u201428% of all gold that was both produced by and sold in Brazil appeared to have been mined illegally. Perhaps such a large influx of gold for some exceptional reason had an effect on the price paid out for mining it at a given time, or perhaps the information provided was fabricated by the source, we thought.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0study<\/a> further stated that of the gold produced in the Amazon, 44% was found to be \u201cirregular\u201d or illegal, revealing how the activity continued unchecked in the region.<\/p>\n

RELATED CONTENT: Honduras Executive Sentenced to 22 Years for Berta C\u00e1ceres Murder<\/em><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Amazon has been a multifaceted obsession of Brazil\u2019s military for some time now. During the military dictatorship, which began in 1964, the motto regarding the policy to be followed in the Amazon\u00a0was<\/a>\u00a0\u201cintegrate not to surrender.\u201d Later on, the motto conformed to the view that the forest was a site for a possible insurrection. In the \u201980s and \u201990s, Brazil\u2019s generals\u00a0would focus their<\/a>\u00a0attention on the incursion of Colombian left-wing guerrillas and on the trafficking of drugs and weapons. For them, the integration of the Amazon was a part of what the country\u2019s military institutes now\u00a0call<\/a>\u00a0a \u201cnational project.\u201d<\/p>\n

Media\u00a0attention<\/a>\u00a0has focused on deforestation during the tenure of the government under Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Despite the press coverage of the\u00a0dark skies<\/a>\u00a0that were witnessed by Brazil\u2019s major cities during the daytime in August 2019, as the smoke from the wildfires enveloped the cities,\u00a0revealing<\/a>\u00a0the extent of deforestation in the Amazon, one fact remained hidden: the militarization of the Amazon.<\/p>\n

During Bolsonaro\u2019s rule, three military Law and Order Assurance Operations (GLOs) for reducing deforestation in the Amazon have been\u00a0enacted<\/a>: Operation Verde Brasil, which ran from August to October 2019; Operation Verde Brasil 2, between May 2020 and April 2021; and Operation Sama\u00fama, between June and August 2021. The decrees of the operations\u00a0provided<\/a>\u00a0Brazil\u2019s Armed Forces with powers to take \u201cpreventive and repressive actions against environmental crimes,\u201d and for \u201csurveying and fighting fires.\u201d In total, out of the 41 months that have elapsed since Bolsonaro\u2019s government came to power, the Amazon has been under military control for almost 17 of them.<\/p>\n

In addition,\u00a0in February 2020<\/a>, the National Council of the Legal Amazon was also reestablished, with its presidency being transferred from the Ministry of the Environment to the vice presidency. The council is now chaired by Army General and Brazilian Vice President Hamilton Mour\u00e3o and is composed of 16 ministries (seven of which were being directed by army officials at the time the decree established the council). The general purpose of the council is to coordinate and integrate the action of the ministries on the issues related to the Amazon, \u201cstrengthen the state\u2019s presence in the Legal Amazon\u201d and \u201ccoordinate actions for the prevention, inspection and repression of illicit acts.\u201d In addition, the council is responsible for establishing special subcommittees and inviting \u201cspecialists and representatives of public or private, national or international bodies or entities to participate in the meetings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite this mandate of the council, governors, representatives of the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama), the National Indian Foundation (Funai)\u2014two governmental organizations working for the protection of the environment and the traditional populations of the Amazon\u2014Indigenous peoples, and traditional communities weren\u2019t invited to be part of it, and\u00a019 military officials were appointed<\/a>\u00a0to the thematic committees of the body\u2014whose composition is decided by vice president Mour\u00e3o\u2014in addition to four delegates from Brazil\u2019s Federal Police.<\/p>\n

An\u00a0article<\/a> by journalist Marta Salomon in Piau\u00ed magazine in October 2020 stated how there was a \u201cMilitary Buildup With Money From the Amazon\u201d during Operation Verde Brasil 2: renovations in barracks that included painting walls, replacing floors, doors, coatings and roofs were part of the operating expenses\u2014in addition to the secret expenses in the contracts of the Army Intelligence Center with private companies. As spending on preservation of the forest by the Ministry of the Environment fell, investments in GLO military missions in the Amazon grew by 178%: in 2021,\u00a037% of the total spending to stop deforestation was allocated to military actions<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Another government measure involving the military (or military measure involving the government) was the \u201cintervention\u201d in Funai, Brazil\u2019s official agency that is responsible for protecting and promoting Indigenous rights.\u00a0An article<\/a>\u00a0by Daniel Giovanaz in February 2021 revealed that \u201c[o]f the 24 regional coordinations of the National Indian Foundation (Funai) in the Legal Amazon, 14 [were] led by the military.\u201d One of these coordinators was Jussielson Gol\u00e7alves Silva, an inactive navy soldier\u00a0arrested in March this year<\/a>\u00a0for brokering the leasing of Indigenous lands to cattle ranchers in Ribeir\u00e3o Cascalheira, Mato Grosso.\u00a0Another article<\/a>\u00a0by Marta Salomon in October 2021 mentioned the case of Army Captain Raimundo Pereira dos Santos Neto, regional coordinator of Funai in Par\u00e1 state, who had sent a letter to the organization informing them that a \u201ccollaborator,\u201d Ant\u00f4nio J\u00falio Martins de Oliveira, had built a shed on the banks of the Iriri River under the pretext of serving the Kayap\u00f3 Indigenous people of the region. The collaborator was an illegal miner, and the Funai shed was being used for his illegal activities, according to Salomon\u2019s article.<\/p>\n

As reported before<\/a>, the three GLO operations that constituted the direct military intervention over the Amazon for a year and a half cost R$550 million\u2014almost six times the budget allocated to Ibama for environmental inspection, licensing and biodiversity management in 2020\u2014and failed to curb deforestation in the Amazon, according to Folha de S. Paulo. Brazil\u2019s government\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0that the operations \u201cattest to intransigence in the defense of our territory.\u201d Vice President General Mour\u00e3o, president of the Amazon Council,\u00a0declared<\/a>\u00a0that the results of Operation Sama\u00fama were \u201cextremely positive,\u201d despite\u00a0data showing<\/a>\u00a0that during the GLO operations, deforestation continued to increase. In April this year, the vice president\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0that the data on deforestation in the Amazon rainforest for the month\u2014when military operations were no longer active\u2014were \u201cterrible, horrible.\u201d This raises questions about the contradictions in the statements made by Mour\u00e3o during and after the GLO operations and the end-results of the military intervention in the Amazon; with the situation going from \u201cextremely positive\u201d in August 2021 during Operation Sama\u00fama to \u201cterrible, horrible\u201d a few months later, once the operation ended.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0killings<\/a>\u00a0of indigenist Bruno Pereira and English journalist Dom Phillips, who disappeared on June 5 in Vale do Javari, Amazonas state, certainly has nothing to do, directly, with the military intervention in the Amazon, despite the delay in beginning the search operation by the armed forces and the scandal over the notes that the Amaz\u00f4nia Military Command (CMA) issued,\u00a0saying<\/a>\u00a0it was \u201cawaiting command from the upper echelons.\u201d Indirectly, however, the title of\u00a0an article<\/a>\u00a0written by Phillips in 2018 explains the role played by the military intervention in their killings clearly: \u201cTribes in Deep Water: Gold, Guns and the Amazon\u2019s Last Frontier.\u201d<\/p>\n

_________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Pedro Marin is the editor-in-chief and founder of<\/em> Revista Opera. Previously, he was a correspondent in Venezuela for <\/em>Revista Opera and a columnist and international correspondent in Brazil for a German publication. He is the author of <\/em>Golpe \u00e9 Guerra\u2014teses para enterrar 2016, on the impeachment of Brazil\u2019s President Dilma Rousseff, and co-author of <\/em>Carta no Coturno\u2014A volta do Partido Fardado no Brasil, on the role of the military in Brazilian politics.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – orinocotribune.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

23 Jun 2022 – In the Brazilian Amazon, as deforestation reaches\u00a0record levels\u00a0and\u00a0rivers are increasingly polluted, the illegal gold mining contributing to these problems continues largely unabated. The response of the government has been to\u00a0increase\u00a0military action to curb environmental crimes in Brazil. Far from achieving this purpose, however, the military intervention has only led to tragedies in the region, directly or indirectly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":215795,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[180],"tags":[536,1817,547,2890,794],"class_list":["post-215794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-brics","tag-amazonia","tag-anti-militarism","tag-brazil","tag-brazilian-army","tag-deforestation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215794\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}