Brazil Lost 1,330 Square Miles of Rainforest in Just the Last Six Months
When Jair Bolsonaro became the president of Brazil late last year, it was a major victory for the country's far right, and a potentially monumental disaster for the Brazilian Amazon.
To back up a bit: It was a shock when Bolsonaro claimed victory, not because his win came from nowhere—he was leading in the polls. But because his rhetoric drew comparisons to fascism (Foreign Policy claimed his propaganda campaign took a "page straight from the Nazi playbook."
And the man originally expected to win the election, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was jailed on corruption charges before the election. It's since come out that Sergio Moro, the presiding judge, was secretly directing prosecutors on how to conduct their case, and Bolsonaro subsequently gave Moro the second most powerful position in the Brazilian government—raising some eyebrows about the legitimacy of the charges.
Bolsonaro started out as an army captain when Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, and he's frequently praised the brutal regime that kidnapped, tortured, and executed suspected dissidents and communists. He's vehemently anti-gay, saying that if he saw men kissing in public then he would assault them. He told a woman politician she was too ugly to rape. He's vowed to criminalize social movements including his political rivals, the Workers Party. And he now leads a country of almost 200 million people, the second biggest in the Americas after the U.S.
Brazil is home to one of the most valuable resources on the planet, the Amazon rainforest. For decades, preserving the rainforest had been one of the main points of the environmental movement, and for a short while Brazil's conservation efforts were surprisingly successful. But Bolsonaro ran on a campaign that promised to free up as much of the Amazon as possible for logging and deforestation, which was an appealing promise to both Brazilian and international business interests that often butted head with environmentalists and conservation efforts. He vowed not only to put "an end to activism" in Brazil, but also swore that if he became president "not a centimeter more" of land would be protected for indigenous people.
Under Bolsonaro, the government has dramatically scaled back environmental enforcement efforts, including fines and the seizure of illegal equipment. In fact, a recent investigation by the New York Times found that over the last six months, enforcement actions by Brazil's environmental agency dropped by 20 percent compared to the year before Bolsonaro took the presidency, while deforestation of the Brazilian rain forest shot up by 39 percent. That means that so far this year, the Amazon lost 1,330 square miles of forest—an area the size Houston, Los Angeles, and Chicago combined.
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