Jair Bolsonaro sent four spies to the Climate Summit in Madrid to monitor NGOs

The delegation sent by the Government of Jair Bolsonaro to COP25, the Climate Summit held in Madrid last December, included at least four members of the Brazilian secret services, as revealed by the newspaper

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During the meeting, the spies watched the NGOs, which were constantly targeted by the president, the Brazilian representatives and those of foreign delegations.

Environmental policy is the great Achilles heel of Brazilian diplomacy since Bolsonaro is president.

It not only leads to criticism but also to financial loss.

Bolsonaro's misgivings about NGOs go back a long way.

He has repeatedly falsely accused them of being part of the ecological problems of the Amazon, even of fueling the fires in the largest rainforest in the world.

But the Government is also suspicious of the activities that the Catholic Church carries out around the Amazon.

Months before the summit in Spain, the Government mobilized the secret services in order to monitor the meetings promoted by the Episcopal Conference to prepare the synod on the Amazon.

In the eyes of President Bolsonaro, Brazil's Catholic hierarchy, a great defender of indigenous people, is too far to the left.

The Brazilian government is concerned about the image of an environmental villain because it also has economic effects.

Bolsonaro does not want the issue to ruin the ratification of the Mercosur-European Union agreement, which already has notable difficulties on the side of the Twenty-seven.

Other consequences, however, are already noticeable, as the president of the Central Bank of Brazil admitted on Tuesday, explaining that investments are not returning to Brazil at the same speed as to other emerging economies due to "that perception in relation to everything that is an agenda of sustainability, today so widespread in other countries, "Roberto Campos Neto told

Some thirty large international funds that manage almost four trillion dollars expressed their concern over environmental policy in June to the Brazilian authorities.

Deforestation has accelerated and fires increase while the supervisory bodies have been weakened with Bolsonaro at the head of the Executive.

In addition to having deployed hundreds of military personnel in recent months to fight the fires in the Amazon, its policy regarding the environment continues to be surrounded by controversy.

This same Tuesday the Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles, defended increasing the number of cattle in the Pantanal so that they eat the brush that serves as fuel and worsens the fires.

This rich ecosystem, located in the southeast of the Amazon, is the largest wetland in the world and has lost a quarter of its flora in this year's fires, the worst in recorded history.

The increase in fires in the Amazon and this season, especially in the Pantanal, are worrisome abroad due to their effects on climate change, an issue that until the pandemic topped the European political agenda.

The Climate Summit, which was held in Madrid after Brazil and Chile gave up hosting it, was the first major international environmental event in which Brazil participated after the destructive fires of the summer of 2019 that opened a notable diplomatic crisis with France, among other countries.