Bolsonaro shows up at the Climate Summit with unreliable promises

President Bolsonaro during a ceremony at the Planalto Palace, in Brasilia, on April 8 ADRIANO MACHADO / Reuters

In the speech he prepares for his presentation this Thursday at the Climate Summit, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro will wear a suit that does not fit him. It is presented with a moderation and good sense that it never had regarding the Amazon and the environment in its country. The metamorphosis has a reason. On the table of the organizer of the event, US President Joe Biden, there are 10 billion dollars to help preserve the Amazon, a figure that far exceeds the budget of the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment in recent years. Biden points out that he can deliver this sum to the Bolsonaro government as part of its environmental policy as long as it demonstrates practical actions, and not just letters with unrealistic intentions, such as the one presented on April 14.The main criterion for this financing is that the country must commit to reducing illegal deforestation in the Amazon to zero by 2030. And more: that it begins to present results from 2021. However, no such pact will be signed. early.

As soon as Bolsonaro finishes his quick intervention in the meeting, to which 40 heads of state have been invited, the Brazilian president will once again be the radical Bolsonaro of always: the one who reduces environmental surveillance, leaves the control and control bodies without budgets. encourages illegal appropriations of public lands, alien to indigenous peoples and other traditional communities. This is what the experts and parliamentarians who are in the forefront of field studies and negotiations with representatives of other countries expect. Along with Bolsonaro will be the Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles, and the Minister of Foreign Relations, Carlos França, recently appointed after pressure from the Legislative and other regional governments for the president to present changes in his right-wing extremist position. The previous minister,Ernesto Araújo, was a radical like Bolsonaro, and was responsible for much of the world closing the doors to Brazil.

Until the beginning of April, the expectation was that Brazil and the United States would sign an agreement and announce it this Thursday or Friday, in the middle of the summit. But now there is no indication that this is happening anytime soon. The signals given by the Americans point in another direction. “As long as the negotiations are conducted by Minister Ricardo Salles, there will hardly be any progress. He is still considered one of the radical links in the Bolsonaro government, ”says Helena Margarido Moreira, an expert in International Relations. EL PAÍS attempted an interview with Salles, but it was not granted. Last week, already preparing for a setback at the summit, the minister told

Reuters

that there was no expectation of signing the agreement and that negotiations with the US will continue after the event.

This Wednesday, on the eve of the meeting, Minister Salles dedicated part of his day to answering his opponents on Twitter, who criticized him in a virtual protest called #FueraSalles. There are those who bet that the person in charge of the environmental portfolio will be the next Bolsonaro minister to fall thanks to the impulse of the change in behavior brought by the new times with Biden. “Salles is always on the tightrope. More than a litmus test for him, this summit will be an exam for all Brazilian diplomacy, ”Moreira says.

Reasons to distrust Salles' leadership are not lacking. The Amazon today registers its highest deforestation rates in the last 12 years and the government is reluctant to admit the flaws in its environmental policy, even paralyzing its inspection and control for political reasons. The Minister of the Environment is also being investigated for making it difficult and obstructing the control of environmental crimes. Salles has defended the alleged owners of the timber seized in the Amazon during the largest operation against illegal logging in the country.

On the other hand, Parliament is in the process of passing a bill that relaxes the rules so that illegally deforested public lands end up becoming the property of the person who occupied it with government support. With Bolsonaro, Brazil went on to register an omission in the demarcation of indigenous lands and destroyed the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), a body that deals with indigenous politics.

“The Salles thing is a kidnapping of the Amazon. He says that, if they don't finance it, we will set fire to the hostage, "says the president of the Environmentalist Parliamentary Group, federal deputy Rodrigo Agostinho, of the Brazilian Socialist Party. In recent weeks, Agostinho has met with representatives of the European Parliament and the US Embassy There is a kind of consensus that nothing will work as long as deforestation in the Amazon does not begin to decrease. The agreement between the European Union and Mercosur and the entry of Brazil into the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are jeopardized by this.

Environmentalists, indigenous leaders and entities that act in defense of the Amazon have launched an offensive against Bolsonaro in recent weeks to bomb any possible agreement with the Brazilian Administration and open a direct channel with Joe Biden's White House. Even the governors of practically all the Brazilian states, in an unusual gesture, sent a letter to Washington.

With the unprecedented worldwide attention that the degradation of the Amazon is receiving, these actors consider that there is a "space with great potential" for such dialogue to take place that dribbles the president, explains Virgilio Viana, general superintendent of the Sustainable Amazon Foundation, at journalist Felipe Betim. "We have large American private foundations, with the commitment of the business sector, with the governors ... Other things can happen in many other relational spheres," says Viana. For his part, Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a network of 60 environmental defense organizations, argues that “the government has promoted acts of environmental destruction every day for the last 28 months.It will not be a letter to Biden and three minutes of speech that undoes that legacy. "

After years acting as one of the leaders and examples of how to preserve the Environment, Brazil will come to the event as a villain.

For now, the signals from Washington remain cold: the representative for the Western Hemisphere of the US National Security Council, Juan González, made his first trip to Latin America to discuss climate change and the pandemic, but ignored Brazil, which Even in the current crisis, it still has the largest preserved forest area and is the richest country in the region.

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