In less than a month, Brazilian Army actions arrest 63 people for Amazon fires; the region recorded over 30,000 fires outbreaks in August 2019

Defense Minister Fernando Azevedo e Silva announced that 63 people had been arrested and $ 8.7 million were issued in fines during just one month of a military operation to fight fires in the Amazon. In August alone, the Amazon region recorded twice as many outbreaks in the same period of 2018.

According to ICMbio's environmental emergency coordinator, Christian Berlinck, the agency found that most of the Amazonian fire outbreaks originate from human action.

Brazil recorded more than 30,000 fire outbreaks in August 2019 in the Amazon region. Almost triple the total recorded in the previous year.

During a press conference, Minister Azevedo said the following paradoxical phrase: "the Amazon is burning, but not as serious as it was said."

One criticism of the current government was to act only after the fires reached very high levels. Activist Paloma Costa, a student at the University of Brasilia, asked during a UN debate, alongside Greta Thunberg at the Climate Summit: "Do we need to see the Amazon on fire to act?"

Costa said that since 2018, "half a billion trees have been destroyed in the Amazon, and people ask me if I'm afraid to defend the forest. Environmental advocates are at risk, but I'm not afraid. I'm afraid to die. "

In recent years, since 2017, Brazil has led the Global Witness ranking of killings of environmental activists. According to the report, in 2018 alone, Brazil had at least 20 murders of environmental and human rights activists.

Meanwhile, in his UN General Assembly address, President Jair Bolsonaro said the Amazon "remains virtually untouched." However, according to the MapBiomas platform, a project that monitors satellite land cover and land use in Brazilian biomes, the Brazilian Amazon has 411 million hectares of land area. Of this total, 14.4% or 59.1 million hectares is currently not covered by its original vegetation cover.

Cost of living in Brazil: the eighth consecutive increase in electricity helps to raise annual inflation preview; inflation in Brazil in the last 12 months was 3.22%

According to the Broad Consumer Price Index 15 (IPCA-15), a survey made by IBGE, the inflation pressured by the eighth consecutive increase in electricity, in September was 0.09%, close to that registered in August (0.08%). With the result, the inflation forecast accumulated high of 2.60% in the year and 3.22% in 12 months. The housing group accounted for the largest price change of 0.76%.

According to the website G1, Transport group prices also rose 0.09%, in August the same group came from a 0.78% drop in August. The result was influenced by the 0.35% increase in fuels. Ethanol and diesel prices rose by 2.15% and 0.58%, respectively, while gasoline fell by 0.06% in Brazil.

IPCA-15 numbers reinforce the favorable inflation scenario assessed by the Brazilian Central Bank in the Copom minutes. The 3.22% increase over the past 12 months is well below the center of the target.

This raises expectations that the Brazilian Central Bank will continue to reduce the basic interest rates of the economy, the Selic. High unemployment and controlled inflation require a policy of cutting interest rates for many economists.

Brazil continues to burn: Minas Gerais region, in the southeast of the country, suffers from more than 3,400 fires in September

According to the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe), Minas Gerais was affected by 6,553 heat spots in 2019 alone. The number already exceeds the total of 2018. In September alone, Inpe detected 3,446 fire spots in Minas Gerais.

The Minas Gerais government decided to set up a task force to fight fire in Rio Doce State Park. There is still no confirmation of the size of the affected area, but the State Forest Institute has received information that the fire started in a criminal way.

The team was formed by the State Forest Institute, Fire Department, Military Police, Brigades against fires, and volunteers. In total there are over 200 involved. The works are also supported by aircraft.

In another Brazilian state, in Mato Grosso, the Chapada dos Guimarães National Park is the target of arson. The state government has already declared an emergency.

A wave of violence in Rio de Janeiro has already led to the deaths of five children and gunshot wounded 11 others children in 2019, says NGO Fogo Cruzado; Friday, a Rio Military Police rifle shot, according to locals, hit the back of an 8-year-old girl, Ágatha, who couldn't resist her injuries and died

According to the Brazilian NGO Fogo Cruzado (Cross-fire, in English), last Friday Ágatha (8 years old) became the 16th child shot this year in the Greater Rio and the 5th who did not resist injuries and died. She was with her grandmother in a van when she was hit in the back yesterday at Complexo do Alemão.

Agatha's death sparked a wave of revolt in the country against the security policy of current Rio de Janeiro Governor Wilson Witzel, who is in the same political party as President Jair Bolsonaro.

Some Brazilian journalists are calling the Witzel government of necropolitical. Journalist Flávia Oliveira of O Globo wrote that "there is no shortage of complaints, images or figures confirming the escalation of state violence in the favelas."

The continuous scenes of children throwing themselves on the ground of Rio de Janeiro's public schools to avoid being the target of shootings is constant.

Politicians, journalists, artists and civil society institutions have condemned the security policy of the current governor of Rio de Janeiro. During the campaign, Witzel, in an interview with the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, even said: "The police will aim at the little head and ... fire!"

The current governor of Rio de Janeiro has already descended from a helicopter publicly celebrating when a sniper killed a man who had hijacked a bus on the Rio-Nitéroi bridge.

Then, the governor, when asked about the deaths of innocents during Rio Police operations in state slums, said that the responsibility for such killings rested with Human Rights NGOs, a very similar stance to President Bolsonaroc with NGOs who work in the Amazon because Bolsonaro accused NGOs of setting fire to the forest.

This absurd accusations only show that the PSL, the party of Bolsonaro and Witzel, is rooted in state violence, in the proximity to outlaws (loggers and prospectors in the Amazon; and the militia in Rio de Janeiro) and in condemning all that represents Western civilization and liberal democracy. To claim that innocent deaths are the fault of NGOs is as unrealistic and absurd as blaming NGOs for the thousands of fires in the Amazon.

Brazil continues to burn: on the day Twitter is overtaken by the , #ClimateStrike movement (#GreveGlobalPeloClima), part of Brazil suffers from the burning and another part from the massive arrival of smoke

Satellite images from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) show that the smoke from our Bolivian neighbors and from states like Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul has been covering São Paulo and Paraná cities since yesterday.

The thousands of fire and burn outbreaks that hit the Amazon region and the Cerrado produced a high concentration of carbon monoxide (CO) in the air of São Paulo and Paraná. This had already happened in August in Sao Paulo when the day was night due to the smoke.

In recent days, images of fire whirlwinds in Goiás have taken over social media in Brazil. Residents of several counties in this state have had to rush out of schools and workplaces because of the frightening advances of the fire.

The worldwide demonstrations scheduled for today want to alert the authorities to the current climate emergency facing the world. In Brazil, the protests will be against the policy of socio-environmental setbacks openly practiced by the current federal government.

Yesterday, in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, the Climate Coalition activists announced that the environmental movement in the country intends to claim 15 measures for the federal government, among them the application of resources foreseen for the Climate Fund, the Amazon Fund, the Environmental Compensation and the conversion of fines. According to the manifesto released by the group, by 2050 there will be 200 million climate refugees in the world.

The Coalition is made up of institutions such as Greenpeace, the Brazilian Indigenous Peoples Association (Apib), Fight for the Forest, Families for the Climate, Socio-Environmental Tide and political parties opposed to the government of Jair Bolsonaro.

UN vetoed Brazil's speech at the New York climate summit, according to Folha de S.Paulo's Ambiência blog

According to journalist Ana Carolina Amaral, Brazil "is not on the list of countries that will speak at the UN climate summit next Monday (23.10.2019) in New York."

The blog said UN Secretary-General Luis Alfonso de Alba said: "Brazil has not put forward any plans to increase its commitment to the climate."

To make matters worse for Brazil on the international stage, today a group of 230 investment funds, which together manage 16 trillion dollars, issued a joint statement urging Brazil to take effective measures to protect the Amazon rainforest against increasing deforestation.

According to the text, the process of destruction of the Amazon rainforest may have an impact on the fund portfolios. This could be exactly what Bolsonaro government and the agribusiness lobby in Brasilia most fear.

The current Brazilian government is turning the country into a kind of international pariah. The veto of Brazil's speech at the UN climate summit is severe and could greatly damage Brazil's exports and economy.

Brazil continues to burn: fires are advancing throughout the country and are already 52% more than in 2018; Inpe has registered 123,786 outbreaks of fires in Brazil in 2019

Favored by dry weather, forest fires continue to advance throughout the country. Brasilia, for example, completed 107 days without rain and is seeing the burnings approach buildings in the federal capital. From January until Tuesday, 17, satellites of the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) recorded 123,786 outbreaks of fires in Brazil, 52% more than in the same period last year, when they were 81,393. In just over half of this month, there are 33,375 outbreaks.

In the Pantanal, the largest flooded plain in the world, about 90% of the fire outbreaks come from Pantanal, according to environmentalists and the state government. For this reason, the wave of fires will be the subject of an investigation by the Corumbá MPF. The municipality, the most important urban area of the Pantanal territory, is the first in the country with the hottest spots.

So far, research has pointed to the difficulties encountered by public institutions in fighting fires. There is a lack of material resources and people.

American experts investigate the cause of fire in Chapada dos Guimarães park in Mato Grosso. The fires have already destroyed nearly 50,000 hectares of green area in the park region. In the state of Mato Grosso alone there are more than 16,000 fires in less than two months.

In Altamira, Pará, the Federal Police identified deforestation and land grabbing areas of over 15,000 hectares in Indigenous lands that belong to the Ituna Itatá people.

Jair Bolsonaro's two government ministers, Onyx Lorenzoni (Civil House) and Ricardo Salles (Environment), receive miners who act illegally in protected areas of the Amazon

According to a report in the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, men who do gold-digging operating illegally in Pará stated, in audios distributed in application groups, that demanded from ministers Onyx Lorenzoni (Casa Civil) and Ricardo Salles (Environment) the opening of an investigation against servers from Ibama and ICMBio who destroyed equipment caught by environmental crime enforcement in late August and early September 2019.

According to site G1, men linked to illegal mining responded violently to enforcement actions by the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama) in August 2019.

Several agents of the institute were shot at near an indigenous area in Pará on August 30. According to the Federal Police, criminal action was intended to intimidate actions to combat illegal mining in the region.

One-third of the areas affected by criminal fires in the Amazon were targeted for illegal deforestation between 2015 and 2017, according to MPF

A survey by experts from the Federal Prosecutor's Office (MPF) of Brazil, linked to the Amazon Protects Project (Projeto Amazônia Protege), indicates that one-third of the areas illegally deforested and mapped by the agency this year were burned between 2015 and 2017. Those areas correspond to a total of 170 thousand hectares. 

According to MPF experts, fire is being used in 2019 to consolidate or expand old deforestation.

According to a study by Human Rights Watch, the Amazon is a region marked by the presence of criminal organizations, violence, and impunity. The study cataloged bullying episodes involving illegal deforestation.

Human Rights Watch's work points to cases of killings of activists fighting for forest preservation and sustainable agriculture. One such case is Gilson Temponi, president of a farmers' association in Placas (PA), who was shot at home in December 2018, according to the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo.

According to the Human Rights Watch report, in the last 10 years, there have been over 300 people killed in the Amazon alone. Mostly local leaders and environmental advocates. All killed violently. The report points to a region dominated by illegal logging and the omission of authorities.

Petrobras shares (PETR3; PETR4) may be highlighted in the coming days at Bovespa (B3)

According to Credit Suisse, Petrobras (PETR3; PETR4) could benefit from the soaring oil prices. This may benefit the company, but Petrobras may also raise fuel prices in Brazil.

Meanwhile, according to the Relatório Reservado website, the Russian company Acron broke Petrobras' monopoly on gas. The group, which bought the state's own nitrogenous unit in Três Lagoas (MS), will be heavily involved in the acquisition of the input directly from Bolivia, without intermediaries. Gas is the highest estimated cost of the venture, whose works will still be completed by Acron.

Today, Petrobras reported that the FPSO P-68 platform left the Jurong Aracruz shipyard for the Berbigão and Sururu fields in the Santos basin pre-salt in São Paulo. The Brazilian state anticipates that the start of production of FPSO P-68 will occur in the fourth quarter of 2019, according to a statement published today (16.09.2019).

Brazil continues to burn: fire destroys an environmental protection area in Alter do Chão, at the state of Pará, in the Amazon region

A major fire that struck an area of environmental protection in the Ponta das Pedras community in the municipality of Santarém, in Alter do Chão, one of Pará's main tourist destinations, prompted the government of the northern state of Brazil to urgently request that Northern Military Command send aircrafts and National Force reinforcements to assist in combat near the village of Alter do Chão.

The fire gained great proportions yesterday. Today, the forest known as Capadócia, struck by fire, is targeted by the Fire Department, in partnership with the Northern Military Command of the Brazilian Army. The fire has been controlled.

Meanwhile, fires in the Brazilian Midwest cause millionaire damage to farmers. Because of the burnings, Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul declared an emergency situation hoping to receive more assistance from the federal government.

In this region affected by the fires is also located the Pantanal, the largest continuous floodplain in the world. Since January, Corumbá, the largest city in the Pantanal, has recorded over 3,100 fire outbreaks.