30/08/2019 Bolsonaro Fans the Flames

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Bolsonaro Fans the Flames
Brazil’s Government Still Has One Faction That Can Douse Them
Oliver Stuenkel

OLIVER STUENKEL is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the Getulio Vargas

Foundation, Brazil. 

Thousands of fires have raged over the past weeks in the Amazon, devastating parts of the
rainforest and badly damaging Brazil’s global reputation. Since taking office in January, the
country’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has encouraged deforestation, a policy that
environmentalists around the world link to the forest fires and have loudly protested. But
Bolsonaro seems to revel in his role as environmental enemy number one, responding to
criticism from world leaders in the same way he reacts to his opponents at home: with
provocative disdain. He taunted French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor
Angela Merkel, called the fires and the deforestation of parts of Brazil’s rainforest an “internal
issue,” and repeated that “the Amazon belongs to Brazil.”

Bolsonaro views international concern over the fires in the Amazon as a threat to his country’s
sovereignty. He and a coterie of closely allied ministers and advisers—known collectively as the
“ideological faction” of the Bolsonaro government—ascribe the criticism to a globally coordinated
campaign to weaken Brazil’s territorial integrity and keep it from developing economically. During
the 1970s, when a military dictatorship governed Brazil, nationalists zealously promoted the
notion of an international conspiracy bent on undermining the country’s sovereignty. Bolsonaro
remains nostalgic for the era of the dictatorship. By striking its chords amid the environmental
outcry, he assumes the role of culture warrior, fighting the “globalism” and “cultural Marxism” of
international institutions and foreign-funded civil society organizations.

Bolsonaro’s ideological posture led him to dig in on the forest fires, and he was further
aggravated by a personal dispute with Macron. But as the fires and the opprobrium continued to
rage, worried advisers convinced the president to dispatch 43,000 soldiers to the forest. Moving
troops to the forest to fight the fires—a palliative measure—is unlikely to change the international
perception of Brazil. Safeguarding the Amazon will require a broad reversal of Bolsonaro’s
environmental agenda. 

Two of the three factions in Bolsonaro’s government—his associated ideologues and members
of the military—are unlikely to embrace such a reversal. These factions share the fundamental
view that environmentalists may threaten Brazil’s sovereignty. The third faction, composed of
liberal economists and business interests, still has an outside chance to convince Bolsonaro to
adopt necessary environmental policies by appealing to Brazil’s long-term economic and foreign
policy interests. 

THE IDEOLOGUES AND THE GENERALS

Forest fires occur every year in the Amazon. The year before Bolsonaro took office, from 2017 to
2018, Brazil’s Amazon forest lost nearly one billion trees. The current government is not the first
to neglect the problem. Nonetheless, its contempt for the environment is particularly brazen, and
this year’s deforestation will almost certainly surpass last year’s figure. 

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Bolsonaro and Ricardo Salles, Brazil’s minister of the environment, do not believe in climate
change. The president campaigned on promises to cut back government protections for the
rainforest. He has made good on that pledge in part by slashing the budget for Ibama, Brazil’s
environmental watchdog, which enforces regulations and imposes fines for illegal logging and
other encroachments. The government sacked the head of the National Institute for Space
Research, which publishes data on deforestation. (Scientists at the institute claim that fires this
year are up 35 percent from the average of the past eight years.) And the president has fostered
an atmosphere of impunity, encouraging loggers, ranchers, miners, and farmers to breach
regulations and cut into the forest. Government agencies have imposed far fewer fines this year
than in previous years.

The Bolsonaro government has made no secret of its hostility toward environmental NGOs and
international conservation efforts. Without providing evidence, Bolsonaro accused environmental
NGOs of having started the fires. And the government has questioned the value of the Amazon
Fund, an enormously successful conservation program financed by the Norwegian and German
governments. Over the past decade, Norway has committed more than $1 billion to the fund,
which supports hundreds of projects across the Amazon to reduce deforestation. NGOs play a
significant role in managing the fund—an arrangement the donors consider crucial to its
success. But in May, Salles demanded a reduction in the NGOs’ role—a deliberate provocation
that predictably led Norway and Germany to suspend their payments. “Isn’t Norway that country
that kills whales up there in the North Pole?” Bolsonaro quipped.

Ideologues in the Bolsonaro government, including the president’s powerful son Eduardo, the
Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo, and Salles, seem to welcome international ostracism.
Bolsonaro thrives on controversy and conflict, and the international criticism helps strengthen the
president’s narrative that powerful forces are at work to undermine him, even while it helps rally
his government’s most ardent supporters around the flag. The more hostile international rhetoric
becomes, the more Bolsonaro will embrace a “bunker mentality,” entrenching himself in
opposition to world leaders such as Macron. The Brazilian president may not even be that
bothered that his handling of the fires is threatening a major free-trade deal between Brazil and
the European Union. Unlike Paulo Guedes, Bolsonaro’s economically liberal minister of the
economy, the president is an economic nationalist who has favored protectionist policies all his
political life.

To the extent that the radicalism of Bolsonaro’s ideological faction threatens the country’s
economic interests, Brazil’s generals have acted as a moderating force. Vice President Hamilton
Mourão, a former army general, has shouldered this duty. In the months after Bolsonaro’s
election victory in October 2018, Bolsonaro and Araújo repeatedly attacked China, Brazil’s most
important trading partner. Mourão worked tirelessly behind the scenes to undo the damage,
traveling to Beijing to meet Chinese premier Xi Jinping in a show of goodwill. Bolsonaro
proposed transferring the Brazilian embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem last November.
Mourão again intervened, aware that such a move could affect Brazil’s important trade ties to the
Arab world. The vice president played a similar role in a recent contretemps between Bolsonaro
and the president of Argentina.

Environmental policy, however, is a different matter altogether. Those who expect the military
faction to act yet again as the adult in the room and provide a check to Bolsonaro are likely to be
disappointed. Mourão himself has expressed doubts about whether climate change is actually
man-made. The armed forces are fully aligned with the president’s views on sovereignty and
international interference. The former commander of Brazil’s army, the influential General
Eduardo Villas Boas, closed ranks with Bolsonaro when he rejected international criticism as a
“direct attack on Brazilian sovereignty.”

LIBERALS TO THE RESCUE?

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With both the ideological and military factions of the government shrugging off international
pressure, the government’s third faction, the neoliberals, has begun to mobilize against the
president’s environmental policies, reaching out to agribusiness and civil society. 

The liberal faction is led by Brazil’s minister of agriculture, Tereza Cristina, and by Guedes, and it
includes many skilled technocrats in the ministry of the economy. Both worry that Bolsonaro’s
posture on the forest fires will disturb trade negotiations and undercut efforts to liberalize and
restart Brazil’s sluggish economy. Brazilian diplomats privately concede that the furor is likely to
delay or even prevent the country’s long-sought accession to the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development. And the Europeans could still refuse to ratify the EU-Mercosur
trade deal, a pact that is estimated to add nearly $90 billion to Brazil’s economy over the next 15
years, and which Bolsonaro counts as one of his biggest foreign policy achievements.

The stakes are not lost on Brazil’s business leaders, particularly in agribusiness, which accounts
for more than 20 percent of the country’s GDP. The European Union currently buys $5 billion
worth of Brazilian soy per year. Marcello Brito, head of the powerful Brazilian Agribusiness
Association, recently warned that “it is only a matter of time” before the fires prompt boycotts of
Brazilian products. In such a scenario, Brito noted, Brazil would struggle enormously to “regain
confidence” abroad. 

In the contest among the three factions that make up Brazil’s government, the liberal pro-
business faction holds one trump card, and that is the parlous state of Brazil’s underperforming
economy and the swelling ranks of its 13 million unemployed. Unless he can manage a return to
significant economic growth, Bolsonaro will not likely see his low approval ratings recover. His
government has bowed to pressure from the business sector before. As president-elect in the fall
of 2018, Bolsonaro expressed willingness to withdraw from the Paris agreement on climate
change. Ambassadors from European Union member states coordinated a pressure campaign,
meeting one-on-one with Brazilian congressmen representing agribusiness. The European
diplomats told the lawmakers that if Brazil left the Paris agreement, consumers across Europe
would boycott Brazilian products. Days later, Salles, the environment minister, announced Brazil
would not abandon the commitments it made in Paris.

And yet European pressure may not make much of an impression on Brazil’s domestic policy.
Unlike the big agricultural associations, Brazil’s small farmers continue to support Bolsonaro’s
loosening of environmental protections. With less exposure to the international market, these
farmers tend to prefer lax environmental rules. They are often actively involved in deforestation
and disinterested in, or unaware of, its global repercussions. And Brazil will not be without
trading partners in case of a European boycott: China buys 80 percent of Brazil’s soy exports,
and this relationship has proved unresponsive to Bolsonaro’s shredding of environmental
protections. 

Bolsonaro certainly faces little pressure from the White House. At the G-7 meeting in Biarritz this
month, U.S. President Donald Trump, himself a climate skeptic, dismissed the Amazon
conflagration as a “niche issue.” Even European leaders are not united in their approach.
Macron has adopted an aggressive strategy, accusing the Brazilian president of lying and
insisting that he won’t ratify the EU-Mercosur deal under current circumstances. German
Chancellor Angela Merkel disagrees, arguing that refusing to ratify the trade deal will not prevent
“a single hectare” from being illegally logged in Brazil’s rainforest. 

Sending troops to the Amazon to contain the fires is laudable but insufficient. To really protect
the rainforest and take Brazil’s environmental responsibilities seriously, Bolsonaro must reverse
his government’s systematic weakening of its environmental protection agency. He must
explicitly recognize that climate change is real. And he should accept that NGOs make positive
contributions in combatting deforestation. 

Such an about-face is highly unlikely. Bolsonaro’s ideological anti-environmental views are

deeply intertwined with his entire political project. Economic liberals can raise the specter of a
scrapped trade deal with the European Union, consumer boycotts, and denial of OECD

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membership—but such pragmatic concerns may not sway a president so committed to defiance,
no matter the cost.

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