The reaction of several environmental protection organizations to the words of the President of Brazil at the UN was consensual. “Delirious” and “embarrassing” were the words used to describe Bolsonaro’s speech.
The WWF, a coalition of organizations created to discuss climate change in Brazil in 2001, was one of the first organizations to speak out after the speech: “Jair Bolsonaro did not escape the ‘script’ in the opening speech of the General Assembly of the United Nations “and in a speech” calculatedly delusional, the President once again exposed the country in an embarrassing way and confirmed the concerns of international investors thinking about leaving Brazil, ” they added.
According to Lusa, the organization went further and stated that “by simultaneously denying the environmental crisis and the pandemic, the President is providing the soundtrack for the divestment and the cancellation of commercial agreements at the critical moment of post-covid economic recovery” .
In a speech of less than 15 minutes at the opening of the debates of the UN General Assembly, the Brazilian President stated that his government is the victim of a “brutal campaign of disinformation about the Amazon”.
Recently, Bolsonaro praised rural producers, when visiting the state of Bahia, but took another opportunity to reiterate that “agribusiness remains strong and, above all, Brazil has and respects the best environmental legislation on the planet. Even so, we are victims of one of the most brutal campaigns of disinformation about the Amazon and Pantanal ”.
Jair Bolsonaro has made several statements about the forest fires, denying their existence, accusing the international press of being responsible for the narrative of the fires that have been devastating the Amazon Forest, but this time he admitted that the fires are real. Yet, he removes any responsibility from the loggers or agribusiness businessmen, to find other culprits. The people who caused the fires were the indigenous peoples and the traditional people of indigenous and white descent, the caboclos.
Gabriela Yamaguchi, director of Engaged Society at WWF-Brazil, considered that Bolsonaro delivered “a speech full of baseless accusations and lessons without a scientific basis that does not fit the role of a head of state”.
Yamaguchi added that “declaring that the fires are caused by the“ Indians and caboclos ”is the biggest one. As a fictional script, the speech united key words of the United Nations with descriptions of a Brazil that did not exist in 2020, in complete denial of the reality of the country and disregarding the urgency and seriousness of the global challenges that the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, he described it so well ”.
Greenpeace also expressed their views through a statement, stating that the President’s denialist speech “shames the Brazilian people and isolates Brazil from the world”.
The NGO recalled that the South American country has a considerable portion of the largest tropical forest in the world, the Amazon Forest, in its territory, in addition to the largest inland floodplain in the world, Pantanal, but it is not preserving these biomes that suffer from fires and deforestation actions in recent years.
“Since Bolsonaro took power, the country has become a world leader in deforestation. According to data from Global Forest Watch, Brazil was the country that most destroyed its forests in 2019, and this year, the data show that the situation has only worsened. The effects of such destruction are reflected in the fires that are advancing on some of the main Brazilian biomes, such as the Pantanal, the Amazon and the Cerrado ”, stressed Greenpeace.
The environmental organization concluded that “the world is seeing, horrified”, the way the Brazilian Government treats forests and the systematic dismantling of public structures and policies that promote environmental protection.
