Without presenting any evidence, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro accused NGOs of being responsible for the Amazon burning.
In his Twitter account, opposition deputy Marcelo Freixo said: "Bolsonaro is a cynic. But you can't just attribute cynicism to the statement that NGOs are burning the Amazon. The president's goal is to disqualify and criminalize organs and movements of environmental preservation. Burning paving the way for barbarism".
The statement was very much criticized. In Salvador to attend Latin American and Caribbean Climate Change Week, Greenpeace senior forest strategist Paulo Addario said that "criminalizing NGOs is criminalizing citizenship". WWF-Brazil Executive Director Mauricio Voivodic said that Bolsonaro's speech "it does not support itself at all."
Paradoxically, Environment Minister Ricardo Salles, in a post on his Twitter on the 20th, said that the fires that hit the Amazon are due to drought, wind and a strong heatwave in the region." Salles, by the way, was booed yesterday at the same Latin American and Caribbean Climate Change Week Climate Week in Salvador, Bahia.
In an interview with BBC Brazil, Professor of the Environmental Sciences Department of the Institute of Forests of the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ), Jerônimo Sansevero, said that Brazil will take at least 20 years to recover the destroyed part. But there are, he said, other "areas that have already lost their [recovery] capacity because they already have large-scale deforestation."
Yesterday, the hashtag #PrayForAmazonas has become one of the most talked-about topics on Twitter worldwide, even topping the list with hundreds of thousands of publications on the topic.
It is undeniable, however, that the arrival of Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency was accompanied by the also undeniable growth of burning in the Amazon. For many analysts, Bolsonaro's talk about the legalization of mining in the Amazon and indigenous lands, his undeniable proximity to the ruralists, his defense of landowner weaponry increase one right goes all in the region.
