Brazil’s world war
Bolsonaro took no prisoners in his blitz on the Amazon. Review: The Amazon in Times of War, Marcos Colón, by Gavin O'Toole
The Amazon in Times of War, Marcos Colón, 2024, Practical Action Publishing/ Latin America Bureau
Donald Trump’s return to the US presidency makes it urgent to consider one of the main Latin American victims of climate denialism and the renewed threat this poses.
The Amazon will take years to recover from the policies of Trump’s acolyte, Jair Bolsonaro—if it ever gets the chance, as the former Brazilian president has indicated his determination to return to office in 2026.
Although currently ineligible, Bolsonaro, stated soon after Trump’s re-election that this was an “extremely important step” for his “dream” of regaining the top job. It is not for nothing that he wallowed in his description while in office as the “Trump of the Tropics”.
Bolsonaro was convicted by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court in 2023 for abuse of power and barred from standing for office for eight years, alongside which he is also still under investigation in cases that include accusations of plotting a coup.
Nonetheless, it is clear that he and his far-right supporters regard Trump’s re-election as proof that a blizzard of legal hurdles, including ineligibility itself, are not insurmountable obstacles to a comeback.
Therefore, this is a possibility that we must take seriously, not least because Bolsonaro now has very powerful friends in the White House—and not only Trump himself, but his new lieutenant Elon Musk, whose own run-in with Brazil’s judiciary has left him smarting.
The return of Bolsonaro, or even one of his ilk, could prove fatal for the Amazon rainforest which, as journalist and academic Marcos Colón writes, is fighting for survival in a war of extermination.
Indeed, it could even prove fatal for non-Amazonian regions of Brazil given the visible impact of climate change—in the past year, Rio Grande do Sul has endured one of the worst environmental catastrophes in history, with global heating blamed for a biblical deluge displacing more than 420,000 people.
But ultimately, this is a war that affects us all, because the ecosystem services provided by the forests and rivers of this vast, unique region of the world are of existential importance to the survival of nature itself on a planetary scale.
Amazonia’s impact on weather systems is vital for South American agriculture, its tree cover essential for sucking carbon from the planet’s atmosphere, and its ecosystem the richest biome for biodiversity anywhere.
Colón’s collection brings together essays he has published since 2018 tracing the terrifying scale of violence and destruction visited upon this region by the Brazilian state and its allies in international capital.
That violence long predated Bolsonaro, but his accession to the presidency brought with it a zeal to erase this natural wonder in the service of neoliberal developmentalism that had not been experienced hitherto, one that was turbocharged by the Covid pandemic.
It seems clear from Colón’s book that this was a matter Bolsonaro took personally, as if the Amazon was the incarnation of everything he hated about his own country, liberal democracy and the rule of law.
Colón writes: “The start of the Bolsonaro administration was a unique moment in which this political plan invoked, reinforced (often with a fascist bias), and made visible the power exercised over the Amazon and its peoples throughout Brazil’s history. Bolsonaro became the avatar for the exercise of explicit violence…”
Beginning in 2018 when Bolsonaro was on the stump vying for office, Colón traces his subsequent assault after becoming president on multiple fronts against the ecosystem and Indigenous people of Amazonia on behalf of agroforestry and mining interests.
To this must be added the institutional sabotage of protections for the Amazon and its people: cuts to Brazil’s environmental protection programmes and policy on climate change; the hobbling of environmental surveillance agencies; and the undermining of the National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI), responsible for protecting native lands.
The siege began the very moment Bolsonaro announced his candidacy, declaring at a business meeting that he wanted to exploit the region’s natural resources, including minerals and oil, which have been valued at up to US$5 trillion. This would be aided by his toxic right-hand man, environment minister Ricardo Salles, his very title an oxymoron if ever there was one.
Ignorant, ill-informed and crass, in this period Bolsonaro singled out the Indigenous people as obstacles to progress in a racist narrative that often veered on the farcical in which he glorified the US cavalry for its ruthless erasure of Native Americans in the 19th century.
As if to underline the scale of rapidly renewed burning of virgin forest once he had taken office, by August 2019 weird darkness in São Paulo was attributed to smoke from out-of-control fires burning in Central-West Brazil and the Amazon—and the world, or at least Europe, began to take notice.
This event was symbolic only, and the sheer scale of fires set in the Amazon during the Bolsonaro interregnum had become catastrophically clear by the end of his four-year term in a day historic for the scale of destruction—22 August 2019, when Brazil’s space agency, INPE, detected 3,358 fires in the Amazon, the highest number recorded for any 24-hour period since 2007.
Colón also examines the human cost of the new disdain for the Amazon nurtured by the regime—escalating food insecurity among Indigenous people, the invasions of their lands, the expansion of criminal cartels in their territories, the murder by logging interests of those who got in their way, and a proliferation of violent conflicts that resulted between state agents, landowners, squatters, fishermen, farmers, Quilombolas, and Indigenous peoples.
The author reflects on the shocking murders of the British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira in June 2022—to whom this book is dedicated—victims of Bolsonaro’s war on the Amazon who may finally secure justice with the charges laid against the alleged mastermind of the killings this month.
Colón unpicks the “stampede” of deregulation across a number of ministries with a mandate to safeguard the Amazon that was engineered by Salles under cover of the Covid outbreak. The pandemic’s “invisible companion”, the author writes, was growing hunger in the region and an increased dependence on commercial goods by riverine communities.
Bolsonaro’s facile and puerile response to the disease was bad enough—a senate inquiry urged that he be prosecuted for “crimes against humanity” for his reckless failure to take seriously a virus that laid waste his country—but it was greatly exacerbated by his policies of deregulation, deforestation and environmental degradation, which made the disease far more lethal to communities that were already vulnerable.
As Colón writes: “Bolsonaro’s genocidal experiment successfully employed the Covid-19 virus as a biological weapon, creating a death toll of more than 700,000 in Brazil, massively concentrated among the country’s poorest populations.”
The Yanomami are illustrative of this toxic cocktail of state disdain and impunity, enduring rapid transmission of Covid due to illegal incursions into their land by prospectors who had been given the green light by the Bolsonaro regime. As the author explains, the pandemic ravaged the region so badly it pushed Indigenous healthcare coverage to the brink of collapse.
Colón’s book makes for a sober read, leaving us in no doubt of the scale and urgency of the threat faced by Amazonia—but it is not despondent, and he tries to cling on to hope by the fingernails.
The Amazon in Times of War not only tells stories of the destruction and violence of state development policies and their more recent neoliberal manifestations, but also listens to the voices of the region’s people for clues as to how, as the Indigenous writer Ailton Krenak has said, they might “postpone the end of the world”.
It makes sense that the crisis of civilisation in which we find ourselves—wholly emblematic in the destruction of the Amazon—is best understood by those who do not participate in it.
Colón has done more than most in trying to articulate those perspectives through, for example, his film Stepping Softly on the Earth, understanding that in the final analysis only a change in philosophy can reverse the “ruinous paths chosen by Western society”.
It is with trepidation that he asks, after the nightmare of the “Trump of the Tropics”, whether the Amazon has seen its worst days, not least given worrying signs of a revival in fortunes of Bolsonaro, and the clear tightrope that’s been walked by his successor, Lula da Silva.
If there is to be a solution, Colón argues, it lies in collaboration with the Indigenous world.
He writes: “Contrary to common misconceptions, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas do not see themselves as ‘saviours’ of the environment. Instead, their message is clear—without collective efforts and collaborative alliances, humanity will certainly fail to address the environmental challenges we face as a species.
“While many Indigenous communities are in the vanguard of various environmental movements, it’s critical to acknowledge the social wisdom informing their repeated calls for unity and solidarity... Who is willing to join forces with these peoples to think, feel, and imagine our way toward something better?”