In the photo, taken on July 20, the boy Eduardo is with his father, Erasmo Theofilo, a peasant leader in Brazil.
Eduardo, when you were born on April 15, your father, Erasmo, and your mother, Natalha, had been away from home for five months so as not to die. Your mother had to leave everything behind and follow your father with a risky pregnancy, risking his life and yours, because the probability of dying from a gunshot was greater than that of dying in childbirth. The times, Eduardo, are like this now. You have to do unworthy calculations like this. Your three brothers, still children, had to exchange the jungle for a closed apartment in an unknown city. You were born far from your grandparents and your community, among strangers, in a hospital packed with covid-19 patients. This is not what I would like to tell you, Eduardo, but it is what I have to tell you, Amazonian child: Eduardo, you were born in exile in your own country.
I have to tell you — and I have to tell you now — because you were born in times of war.
The wars for land have always been a massacre, due to the disproportion between the forces, and have marked the country called Brazil since the European colonizers forged it with gunpowder and viruses.
And now the climate war also reaches you, Eduardo.
Which is also a massacre, due to the disproportion between the forces.
Still, your people resist.
Your body as a child of the Amazon, Eduardo, is a corner where these wars are found.
And for that you have no choice but to fight.
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Fight for the jungle, with the jungle, being jungle too. It is no coincidence that the defenders of the Amazon are forced to flee in order to survive and continue fighting. They are running to the jungle, Eduardo. They are killing the Amazon, the largest rainforest in the world, a wonder that took millions of years to form, the home of the greatest biodiversity on the planet, the world of thousands of indigenous peoples with diverse languages and cultures. When I tell you that they are murdering the Amazon, I am not using rhetoric or forcing expression. Shamans like Davi Kopenawa and leaders like Raoni have long warned that the jungle is dying. Later, their voices were joined by those of scientists such as Carlos Nobre and, more recently, those of millions of adolescents led by the Swede Greta Thunberg. Now, Eduardo,the dead is close. The jungle is already dying.
A jungle like the Amazon is such a great being, Eduardo, made up of billions of other beings, that even when it dies quickly, as is the case of the jungle where you live, for human time it seems like a lot. Since the civic-military dictatorship, which began with a classic coup in 1964, men like those who threaten the lives of your parents have been exterminating the jungle with fire and chainsaws and poisoning its rivers with mercury. It seems a long time, but as the Earth scientist Antonio Nobre recalled, “the jungle has survived for more than 50 million years to volcanisms, glaciations, meteors, continental drifts. But in less than 50 years it has been threatened by human action ”.
On July 14, Eduardo, Nature, one of the most important scientific journals in the world, published a study coordinated by researchers from the National Institute of Space Studies of Brazil, which shows that, between 2010 and 2018, the eastern part of the Amazon, where his community lives and struggles, it began to emit more CO2, a greenhouse gas, than it is capable of absorbing. Do you know what that means, Eduardo? It means that the jungle is no longer jungle. It means, Eduardo, that the Amazon is starting to stop being a solution to become a problem. A problem of Amazonian proportions in a world where the planet is rapidly overheating.
And, Eduardo, pay attention to the date: 2018 is the last year you have analyzed the study. And in 2018 Bolsonaro won the elections. Since he came to power, the destruction of the Amazon has multiplied and accelerated. Therefore, realize that today the catastrophe investigated and verified by scientists, after two and a half years of official encouragement to the predation of the forest, is undoubtedly much greater.
In order for you to understand what is at stake, Eduardo, you who have just made your debut in the world, in this terrible world that my generation will leave to yours, I must tell you that the Amazon is (or perhaps was) the largest terrestrial carbon sink . That is to say: on land, it is the one who most absorbs this gas directly responsible for global overheating. Across the planet, the oceans absorb the most carbon from the atmosphere. And they are also being destroyed, now by deep mining, acidification, plastics and global overheating. Second come the rainforests. The Amazon is the largest of all, home to 10% of the species existing on the planet. The problem, Eduardo, is that, even knowing this, a part of humans, of which the anti-president of Brazil is one of the world exponents,he is killing nature that guarantees the survival of his own species.
Climate war, global overheating, sixth mass extinction of species will be words that will mark your generation, Eduardo. You were born at a time when the dominant minority of humans, made up of billionaires protected in large transnational companies, has caused the climate catastrophe and the sixth mass extinction of the species. Then some go on a walk into space, like Jeff Bezos did on Tuesday, while neglecting their own planet. Bezos, by the way, one of the billionaires who has benefited the most from the pandemic, has appropriated the name "Amazon", consummating another type of violence.
The planetary tragedy that is called the climate crisis, climate emergency or climate collapse began with the Industrial Revolution, in the 18th century, with the use of fossil fuels, first coal and then oil, and intensified enormously in the 20th century . Now, in the 21st century, when the collapse is very clear, some of these people — because they are people, Eduardo — continue to lead the destruction.
Why ?, you will surely ask. Will they not also kill their children? It is a more than logical and fair question, Eduardo. And I'll be forced to tell you that, on the one hand, they don't care, because all they care about is their immediate privileges, their own lives as individuals. They won't be here to deal with it afterwards. On the other hand, they believe that they will get away with it, because that is the historical experience of the elites of the planet and also of Brazil. Whatever happens, their money always saves them, the price is paid by others.
To face what is to come - and they know it will come, because they have the best and most up-to-date information - a part of the planet's destroyers rush to build luxury bunkers in New Zealand, the new paradise on Earth, the “ last refuge ”. In Europe, ads for luxury condominiums prepared for the climate emergency are already circulating for the very wealthy. Capitalism, the main responsible for the corrosion of our home planet, benefits from all the misery it causes.
I apologize, Eduardo, for giving you this news before you are even able to hear it. But they are not sincere apologies. You don't have a choice, neither do I, neither of us have time for jokes. You will have to be strong if you want to live. We have to raise strong children, capable of facing what is to come, of adapting to a hostile planet and of creating the possible in the impossible. It is a lot, but it is what we have at the moment. And you, Eduardo, are strong.
Before you were even born, you were already fighting not to die in the womb of your mother, who was fleeing from the grileiros, thieves of public lands who destroy the jungle and use their hitman militias to kill those who protect it —or, in some cases, As is the case in all of Bolsonaro-dominated Brazil, the civilian and military police themselves begin to act as private militias. While your family was in hiding, houses, a flour mill, plantations and equipment were burned in your community. They belonged to the people your father leads, agroecological peasants from the Amazon. Some families were left with only the few clothes they were wearing.
You are going to take your first steps, Eduardo, in a terrain threatened by these thieves, who are now part of the support base of the anti-president of the country where you were born in exile. That is why they commit crimes without even being bothered by a substitute for Justice. And there are people, Eduardo, who say that there is still democracy in Brazil. You are born in exile, your people have their houses burned, when they are not shot, no one is punished for crimes and this is called democracy and Bolsonaro, president.
Before telling you about these men, because most of them are white men, I want to tell you about your father, Erasmo Alves Theofilo. Your father was born in Altamira, the son of a migrant couple, she from Bahia and he from Paraná. Your mother, Natalha, is the daughter of quilombolas, descendants of rebellious slaves. You come from this world, Eduardo, the world of those who have resisted for centuries against all forms of death, the first of them slavery. As a child of this world, your father could not be vaccinated against infantile paralysis in his childhood, so today he cannot move his legs and you will always see him in a chair. But even if your father's legs are paralyzed, the truth is that few people in Brazil move — and move — as much as your father.
From his chair, he leads and resists bullets and corruption attempts, the latest of which was an offer of about $ 60,000 to leave the community, buy a house elsewhere, and stay out of the affairs of the community. others. Since your father refused, they offered him about $ 100,000. In a country where a former Minister of Health who is an active general, military and civilians of the Government and even the anti-president are suspected of delaying the vaccination against covid-19 to obtain illegal commissions in the purchase of vaccines, causing dozens of thousands of preventable deaths, your father refused. Today, the name of Erasmo Theofilo travels the world as a defender of the jungle, but this recognition is not enough to guarantee the integrity of your life, and, therefore, you were born in exile.
Eduardo, if it is sad to have to leave your own country to take refuge in a distant land, it is even sadder to have to go into exile within your own country because the institutions and the law do not protect the rights that the Constitution guarantees you. This, Eduardo, is called a dictatorship, and Bolsonaro's dictatorship corrodes Brazil from within, disguised as democracy. Bolsonaro's began even before he came to power through the vote, by apologizing for torture in Parliament, a crime included in the Penal Code, without being harassed.
Impunity is the rule in Brazil. Impunity for the big criminals, of course. For your people, Eduardo, for the theft of a shampoo and a conditioner a mother of a family was arrested, tortured in jail and lost the sight of her right eye. I will tell you just one of the thousands of similar or even worse cases, Eduardo, so that you do not get any illusions about where you live. Among your people, thousands suffer years in jail before they are even tried. And many die before having a chance to defend themselves, sometimes burned and beheaded in riots sparked by disputes between criminal factions or motivated by the dire conditions they are subjected to in overcrowded prisons that one magistrate has already compared to "medieval prisons." ”.
Bolsonaro is the son of impunity, the same one that allows the torturers and murderers of the previous dictatorship to circulate freely. Do you know how Bolsonaro started his political career? He was a captain in the Army and was caught with a terrorist plot to set off bombs in the barracks. The military justice acquitted him and, thus, blessed by the impunity of the body, began a successful career of seven terms in Parliament. He spent 27 years receiving public money to provide a public service and what did he do? He got three bills passed, one per decade. Of the three, only one became law; the other two were vetoed by the Presidency of the Republic. Already as president, Bolsonaro leads the assault on the Amazon jungle and all the natural supports of life in the Brazilian territory.
If Bolsonaro's incompetence as a deputy shines like neon lights, Bolsonaro's competition to do the dirty work of defending the military dictatorship, the carrying of weapons and explicit violence, as well as the fight against racial, gender and gender equality. gender, has been recognized and awarded with the highest position in the country. Bolsonaro was elected and reelected six times as a deputy, much more to prevent projects than to create them, and he did so competently. It was the beast that diverted attention from the cards on the table where the game was played. A game, Eduardo, where the cards are marked with the blood of your people.
However, Bolsonaro was not just a circus aberration. He cyclically made statements to produce noise, on the one hand, and, on the other, he said what no one would dare to say because of how horrendous it was. As when stating, for example, that he would not rape a deputy because she was "very ugly." Every time that Bolsonaro defended the extermination of opponents, attacked homosexuals and women, blacks and indigenous people, or paid tribute to a torturer and nothing happened to him, it was a victory of barbarism, because language was leaving fraying and the level of acceptance of violence fraying with it. At the same time, the capacity (or the will) of the institutions to respond to the violation of rights was put to the test. The impact on the streets was direct and, thus, the country was prepared for another type of coup and dictatorship.A blow within the blow, because this blow has been brewing long before. And it will continue even without Bolsonaro.
Your people, Eduardo, did not vote for Bolsonaro. Your people know that the blood shed by the weapons that Bolsonaro defends so much is theirs. Your people were already burying the victims long before Bolsonaro used covid-19 as a biological weapon to “cleanse” the Amazon of those who protect it. Your community belongs to one of the biggest conflict zones in the jungle. Anapu's name became known to the world when, in 2005, the American missionary Dorothy Stang was killed with six shots for defending communities like yours and denouncing the atrocities committed by the grileiros in the region. Eduardo, between 2006 and 2014 no one was killed. Between 2015 and 2020, five years, in your city alone, 19 peasant leaders and people linked to the agrarian reform movements were executed.
If you look like your father and mother, you will be a very intelligent person, Eduardo, and you will ask me what happened in 2015. Then I will explain to you that, in 2015, the ruralistas - whom some call representatives of the "agribusiness", a word clean that does not represent anywhere near the destruction that most of them promote on the ground - they had already taken the government of Dilma Rousseff, of the Workers' Party (PT). For many years, the PT governments made many concessions to their original project, claiming that they needed to maintain governance. The National Indigenous Foundation was already heavily dismantled, land reform never made any significant progress, and environmental controls received much less support than they should.
Your father Eduardo, who raises chickens to feed your family, knows that you cannot keep a fox under control once the door of the hen house is opened. But there are those who believe themselves to be more fox than the fox and, thus, in 2016, despite all the concessions, to the point that voters felt cheated when they saw that another project was imposed instead of the one they voted for, the first woman President was overthrown by a crazy impeachment, the finish of the coup that was already advancing from within. Learn now, Eduardo, an important lesson, so that they do not fool you. The victims of the coup, Eduardo, are not the rulers or the party they remove from power or their entire entourage. The victims, Eduardo, are the ones who bleed even when everyone I just mentioned says that abnormal is normal.It is enough to see who are bleeding in Brazil to find the real victims.
And then Michel Temer, from the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), the coup vice president, assumed power, and your people continued to be assassinated. And then Bolsonaro arrived (currently without a party) and your father had to leave his community for the first time. It was almost Christmas 2019, the first year of the far-right government, and the grileiros felt so at ease that there was open talk of a list of people who would be killed in the Anapu region. Since the year before, the year of the elections, people were going to ask the head of the hitmen if they were on the list or not. "I'm not on the list, Mom," farmer Leoci Resplandes told his mother. But it was. And he was shot to death - "23 12-gauge shotgun shells," according to his mother - inside the house,becoming the third person from the same family to be assassinated for fighting for agrarian reform. His mother is still on the run. The whole family flees.
In 2019, Eduardo, after they tried to kill him, your father had to flee. In recent years, this happens every Christmas. Institutions that still represent some kind of protection and socio-environmental and human rights organizations go on vacation. The people who are on the front lines in the fight to keep the jungle standing, like your father and others, are forced to disappear and only come back when the holidays are over. I witnessed the suffering of your father and your mother, confined in a small space, in another city, alone and threatened, while most of them went to meet their families to celebrate the holidays. They returned to Anapu shortly before the ceremony for the 15th anniversary of Dorothy Stang's execution, on February 12, 2020.Your father looked at the cross where the names of the shot are accumulated without knowing if the following year he would be looking at the new names or if his would be engraved on the cross.
When the following year came, the situation was so worse that your father could not return to celebrate the 16th anniversary of the missionary's martyrdom. Erasmo and Natalha had been forced, once again, to leave Anapu, this time also to protect you, Eduardo. Your father had already escaped three assassination attempts, it would be unwise to trust that the fourth would also fail. Once again, they left before Christmas. If you become a Christian, Eduardo, you will find similarities between the biblical account of the birth of Jesus and your true story. The difference is that you, Eduardo, were much more threatened. But, although many of the people who celebrate Christmas like storytelling, they ignore the life that unfolds before them and therefore requires a commitment.
As your mother struggled to keep you alive, first inside her womb and then outside, a judge gave a favorable sentence to a grileiro. The community that your father leads occupies plot 96 of the so-called Gleba Bacajá, a public land destined for agrarian reform. But in the legal dispute between the grileiro and the 54 families that intend to implement an agroecological project, the judge agreed with the delinquent grileiro. This type of "justice" is what your father's people have to face, a justice that is often just another form of violence.
But your people, Eduardo, resist. You represent the newest generation of a monumental process of resistance that has lasted for centuries. Bolsonaro is the last scourge and possibly the worst of all. But don't be fooled for a second: those who support Bolsonaro were already in power before him. They used Bolsonaro both to prevent the advances that your people achieved with much struggle and to advance themselves on nature, privatizing public lands by force, for individual benefit to the detriment of the collective. Bolsonaro and his gang do the dirtiest service as long as possible. At some point, which may be near, he will be taken out of the way so that the larger project can continue. I remind you of this point, Eduardo, so you know that your fight will not end when Bolsonaro leaves power.
At this very moment, Eduardo, the climatic collapse offers us in the northern hemisphere an eloquent sample of things to come. In Lytton, Canada, thermometers read 49.6 degrees Celsius. This temperature, Eduardo, speaks for itself. But even more important is the fact that 49.6 degrees Celsius is five degrees higher than the previous record for the country. It's not just a raise, it's a jump. And it has caused Canada, in the extreme north of the globe, a generally cool and pleasant place, to be hotter than in the Sahara desert. So hot that the forests and the city literally caught fire.
Wednesday July 21 was the hottest day in the history of Turkey, ruled by another despot almost as noxious as Bolsonaro, Recep Erdogan. Temperature records have also been broken in many parts of the United States in recent days. In June there were temperature records in Russia, Finland, Estonia and Siberia. Between 2014 and today, we have had the seven hottest years in human history since temperatures were measured. In Brazil, the Amazon burned more than at any other time in the last ten years, part of the Pantanal turned into fire, smoke and ash, in scenes of apocalypse. Rich Germany has been underwater in recent days. Poland, also ruled by the predatory right wing, was under water. A part of China, the largest emerging power,that competes directly with the United States for world hegemony, is under water.
I know, Eduardo, I know. It is not fair what your generation will have to face, but it is so. And your choice is fight or die. So fight, Eduardo. Learn to fight with your father, a warrior with a bullseye on his head, and teach others to fight. The future of humans depends on the survival of the Amazon and also that of most other species, as important as humans and who have done nothing to destroy the planet on which they live. Although most people still do not understand it, because it is not taught in schools, the Amazon is the center of the world, the Amazon is one of the centers of the world.
The jungle, Eduardo, is not the lung of the planet, as they say. It is its heart, which pumps the humidity through an extensive circulatory system above our heads, formed by the so-called “flying rivers”, which cross the skies fed by the perspiration of the trees. On land, the rivers of the Amazon represent 20% of the world's fluvial flow to the oceans. This means, Eduardo, that without the jungle being jungle, the planet collapses.
Although many people still cannot or do not want to connect the dots, you and communities like yours, along with the indigenous peoples and traditional populations of the Amazon, are the ones who are at the center of the future of the present. When your father moves his chair through the jungle and faces the grileiros, he is fighting for everyone, human and non-human. We owe him and all the defenders of the jungle an unpayable debt of gratitude, but even so, your father is still in the crosshairs of the bullets of those who are condemning life on the planet.
At this moment, Eduardo, you have left your hiding place and have returned to your community. Your grandmother, such a strong woman, has been able to lull you for the first time. This letter is for you, Eduardo, and it is also to tell Brazil and the world, in several languages, that one of the defenders of the Amazon threatened with death has returned to Anapu, with his son in his arms. He has returned to fight for a jungle that is fast approaching the point of no return. It is the duty of the Brazilian State to protect it, it is the duty of the institutions that still deserve that name to oblige the State to protect it, it is the duty of the Judiciary to deliver justice, and it is the duty of the world community - if it exists - to ensure its safety.
Protecting the life of your community, protecting the life of your mother and your brothers, protecting the life of your father, the Amazonian peasant leader Erasmo Theofilo, and protecting your life, Eduardo Theofilo, is the responsibility of every Brazilian and every Brazilian, of each and every citizen of this planet.
You and your father cannot have the same fate as Dorothy Stang and so many others.
We are all responsible for your father's life and yours.
And we are attentive.
Eliane Brum
is a writer, reporter and documentarian.
Author of seven books, including Brazil, builder of ruins: um olhar sobre o País, from Lula to Bolsonaro.
Web: elianebrum.com.
E-mail: elianebrum.coluna@gmail.com.
Twitter, Instagram and Facebook: @brumelianebrum.
Translation by Meritxell Almarza.
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