This month, protesters have taken to the streets in Brasília, the capital of Brazil, to march against a ‘death package’ of bills that will deregulate agricultural and industrial activity in the Amazon rainforest.
Popular singer Caetano Veloso issued a call to action that was answered by thousands of indigenous people donning traditional vestments, poster-bearing students, and even children dressed as animals endangered by the proposed legislation.
One of only seventeen countries designated as megadiverse, Brazil has long struggled with protecting its ecosystems and indigenous land. Predatory megacorporations and politicians alike have endeavored to exploit Brazil’s natural resources for private profit. By current estimates, over one-and-a-half million trees are cut down each day, feeding an insatiable logging industry enabled by government authorities who turn a blind eye to opportunistic corporations encroaching on protected (and often indigenous) land.
The proposed bills will enable mining on indigenous land, loosen environmental regulations like pesticide controls, and make it increasingly difficult for indigenous peoples to protect their land from loggers. These measures are backed by the transnational agricultural lobby, which has cultivated a friendly relationship with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and lined its pockets with the profits.
A former army captain under the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, Bolsonaro’s administration has drawn parallels to that regime through a rightwing populist platform that has elicited comparisons to the presidency of Donald Trump and other would-be strongmen like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte.
Bolsonaro’s mishandling of environmental policy, government corruption, and the COVID-19 pandemic have eroded the popular support that carried him to the presidency in 2018. In the face of increasingly bleak prospects in the looming 2022 presidential election, Bolsonaro’s support for the ‘death package’ indicates he is attempting to pass as much of his platform into law as possible before he is ousted from office.
Popular former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is Bolsonaro’s strongest challenger, and this year’s election will not be the first time the two have vied for the presidency. A former union leader and proponent of indigenous empowerment and sweeping social and economic reforms, Lula announced his candidacy for the 2018 presidential election but was arrested and convicted on charges of corruption by federal judge and Bolsonaro ally Sergio Moro. Because of a Brazilian law preventing convicted criminals from running for office, Lula’s running mate and
former São Paulo mayor Fernando Haddad assumed Lula’s candidacy and, lacking Lula’s immense popularity, he lost to Bolsonaro in October 2018.
A year later, leaked messages discovered by The Intercept revealed Moro’s prosecution was politically motivated and an attempt to prevent Lula’s candidacy. Following these revelations, Lula was released from prison in November 2019, and the Supreme Federal Court annulled the corruption conviction in 2021.
Once again in contention, Lula is now polling fourteen points above Bolsonaro, a gap that has been steadily widening. However, a change in leadership will not reverse the damage activists fear will be done by the ‘death package’.
Should Lula be elected, he will find it difficult to dislodge an agricultural lobby which has become increasingly entrenched during Bolsonaro’s tenure. In 2020, agricultural yield increased by 30.4 percent from 2019, a change caused by the Bolsonaro administration’s amenability to massive agricultural corporations like JBS and Ambev. These corporations have made hundreds of millions of dollars at the expense of indigenous peoples and the environment, and they are likely to fiercely resist attempts to regulate their activities.
While the political battle rages on, irreparable damage continues to be done to indigenous land and the ecology of the Amazon. As Veloso said in an interview with France 24, “Other things inBrazil are also being systematically destroyed, including cultural life and various other things.But on the environment, it's an affront to us all.”
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