On 1 January 2023, Brazilians and an international audience watched Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva going up the Planalto Palace’s ramp to receive his presidential sash from minority representatives after Jair Bolsonaro lost the 2022 turmoiled elections, had another of his tantrums and refused to pass the sash to the newly elected president.
This event triggered a reaction of hope for brighter days, grief, relief and celebration by ethnic minorities, Black communities, activists and scholars.
Since then, Lula’s administration has placed the social and environmental situation in the Amazon rainforest as one of the central considerations of his government, at times pointing to preservation practices and at others to economic concerns.
The Brazilian Amazon experienced increased extractivism and violence during Bolsonaro’s rule, as his far-right government sought to break Brazil’s fragile democracy.
Recent literature has shed light on the mechanisms Bolsonaro used to silence voices, keep stories untold and shape narratives according to the will of far-right leaders. This process can be understood through three case studies: the ongoing gold extraction in the Yanomami territory; the slander against fire brigade activists; and the murders of Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips.
The first case involves a long dispute between those who have lived in the Amazon for centuries – the Yanomami – and miners who had illegally extracted gold from Yanomami territory since the 1970s when Brazil’s military dictatorship encouraged such activity. The aftermath of this ongoing crisis acquired new and alarming contours under Bolsonaro, including the rape of Indigenous women, young people and children by gold miners; widespread illnesses and death; long-scale pollution; incalculable environmental damage; poor health; and famine. This resulted from a series of political choices that encouraged illegal mining, including the dismantling of federal agencies responsible for protecting the Amazon (FUNAI, ICMBio and IBAMA) which facilitated – mainly (albeit not exclusively) through negligence – environmental destruction in the region.
The second case shows how Bolsonaro’s administration used widely disseminated far-right approaches to suppress activism. In 2019, four Alter do Chão fire brigade activists helped to put out extensive fires in an environmentally protected area. In an unexpected twist, they were accused of having caused those fires in the first place, and were charged with arson by the local police. The police and far-right politicians alleged that their motivation was to attract international attention and funds for their non-governmental organisation (NGO). That same year, the Prosecution Service dismissed the case due to insufficient evidence. Still, Bolsonaro and his former environment minister Ricardo Salles seized this opportunity to spread disinformation and conspiracy theories affirming that NGOs and activists caused deforestation and fires in the Amazon. Weaponising information has been a very present political strategy in recent years, a tool repeatedly used by far-right governments.
Could a far-right government go further than that? Unfortunately, yes, as the third case shows. In June 2022, the indigenist Bruno Pereira and the British journalist Dominic Phillips went to Vale do Javari after being intimidated by gunmen and fishermen illegally entering the Indigenous territory. Soon the evidence showed Bruno and Dom had been victims of a gruesome murder because of their activism. Despite the calls for a thorough search, Bolsonaro’s government was slow to begin the hunt for the activists, only acting after intense international pressure. Additionally, in the middle of the investigation, Bolsonaro used victim-blaming narratives to suggest that Bruno and Dom were murdered because they should have known better and avoided that area, and that this crime could have happened anywhere in the world. Contradicting Bolsonaro’s claims, a report by Comissão Pastoral da Terra (CPT) showed that the Brazilian Amazon constantly deals with underreported rural violence. Bolsonaro’s argument was another blatant lie. The international attention received by Bruno and Dom’s remarkable stories is only the tip of the iceberg of the struggle routinely faced by local communities and Indigenous peoples. Here, it is important to note that Indigenous communities are carrying out ongoing activism to defend the forest, so threats to activists, the environment and Indigenous peoples cannot be understood separately.
These three cases show that the country retrogressed within the context of state repression, misinformation, uncontrolled natural resource extraction, violence, death and complete disregard for human rights and environmental justice. The nature and complexity of the systematic violence and resource extraction observed in the region demonstrate that Bolsonaro adopted ‘total extractivism’ practices intending to consume all available human and natural resources using authoritarian processes. Total extractivism is possible only in authoritarian contexts because it requires sustained political violence. During Bolsonaro’s government, a series of throwbacks to public policies – the collapse of environmental policies, cuts to spending in public institutions, attempts to erode environmental protections (including legislative amendments to the constitution), socio-environmental deregulation, open support to extractivists, lack of transparency of socioenvironmental data, and stoppage of Indigenous lands demarcation – have accentuated interconnected environmental and social harms.
However, several different social actors have mobilised to oppose this process. Some of the strategies adopted by these actors include protests, the setting up of a large camp right outside the presidential palace (‘the Struggle for Life Camp’), networking, public denunciations, direct actions to protect territory and life, and legal demands to state agents and the government.
The struggles for socioenvironmental justice existed before Bolsonaro and will continue after him. But the acceleration of human and environmental degradation under his presidency has left an enduring imprint. We must act now to try to rebuild regulations and support political mobilisation that seeks to stop more atrocities like these from happening in the future.
Victor Porto Almeida is a PhD candidate in Criminology at the University of Essex. His research includes green criminology, Southern criminology, socio-legal studies, human rights, and green harms in the Brazilian Amazon.
Guilherme Benzaquen is Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociology at Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE). His research focuses on political sociology, emphasising collective violence, social movements and social inequality.
Simone da Silva Ribeiro Gomes is an Associate Professor of Social Sciences at Universidade Federal de Pelotas (UFPel), Rio Grande do Sul. Her research interests include social movements, riots, gender theory and narco-trafficking.
Roxana Pessoa Cavalcanti is a Principal Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Brighton. Her research focuses on understanding violence, social harm and criminalisation. She uses feminist, decolonial and other critical perspectives to examine how power operates in socially unequal and violent contexts.
Political violence and mobilisation in Brazil’s Amazonian region during Bolsonaro’s government (2019–2022) by Roxana Pessoa Cavalcanti, Guilherme Figueredo Benzaquen, Simone da Silva Ribeiro Gomes and Victor Porto Almeida for Justice, Power and Resistance is available on the Bristol University Press website here.
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Image Matheus Câmara da Silva via Unsplash