Several Brazilian cities had protests during President Jair Bolsonaro's national television and radio address, made last night. Bolsonaro spoke about the government's plans to fight fires in the Amazon region.
People went to their windows and hit their pans (that is known in Brazil as "panelaço"), exactly as happened during the impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff. This demonstration points out that part of the middle class, which voted for Jair Bolsonaro, is very unhappy with the current government.
Brazil was also the scene of several street protests. Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Brasilia had thousands of people on the streets speaking out against the government's current environmental policy.
According to the agency Lupa, the largest fact-checking agency in Brazil, in its pronouncement on national television yesterday, Jair Bolsonaro, contradicted itself several times.
Bolsonaro said, at 21 of August, that "Spreading unfounded data and messages, inside or outside Brazil, does not help solve the problem and lends itself only to political use and misinformation." However, the Brazilian president himself accused, without any proof whatsoever, that Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are behind the fires currently occurring in the Amazon. All environmental protection experts in the country believe that this statement by the president was, at the very least, irresponsible, as it criminalized all organizations that have been fighting for environmental preservation for decades.
According to Lupa, the next day after making such a statement, Bolsonaro admitted that he had no proof, but still insisted that the NGOs were responsible.
Bolsonaro also said his government has "zero tolerance for crime and in the environmental area will be no different," but in April 2019, Bolsonaro himself criticized Ibama inspectors, the body responsible for environmental protection in Brazil.
Bolsonaro even exonerated an Ibama server who fined him for irregular fishing in 2012. The fine imposed on Bolsonaro was canceled in December 2018.
According to Veja magazine, loggers are using Bolsonaro government speeches to intimidate Ibama inspectors in the Amazon region. According to Veja, an example of this change in behavior occurred in the city of Espigão d'Oeste, in Rondônia. Where hooded men stopped an Ibama tanker truck, beat the driver and then set fire to the vehicle, which carried 8,000 liters of fuel. The cargo would serve to fuel a helicopter that would fly over indigenous reserves in the region, where timber theft was suspected.
The issue is also producing a genre of narratives in Brazilian social media. While the worldwide movement against the environmental policy of the current Brazilian government grows, there are a number of Internet users who continue to defend Bolsonaro. These defenders accuse French President Emmanuel Macron of lying about the burning of the Amazon.
Paradoxically, these Bolsonaro supporters, who accused Brazil of becoming a socialist country during the PT rule, are now in open confrontation on social media with the western world that they praised so much. Only this week, the Finnish government decided to study the possibility of a boycott of Brazilian meat. France and Ireland oppose the Mercosur and European Union agreement. The problems of burning in the Amazon region will be discussed during the G7 meeting. Norway and Germany have cut funding to the Amazon Fund. British Prime Minister Conservative Boris Johnson said he was "deeply concerned" about the current situation in the Amazon. Contradictorily, the Brazilian extreme right that supports Bolsonaro and called itself pro-Western is now calling Western European leaders liars.
