Bolsonaro's Anti-Indigenous and Anti-Environmental Policies in Brazil

Abstract

Bolsonaro's Anti-Indigenous and Anti-Environmental Policies in Brazil Luciene Cristina Risso and Clerisnaldo Rodrigues de Carvalho Translated by Liz Mason-Deese In the thirty years following the enactment of the 1988 Brazilian Constitution, Indigenous and environmental rights advanced through policies and actions that led to important results, as shown by the decrease in annual deforestation rates. It is worth pointing out that providing socio-environmental protections and development has always been an arduous and, at times, paradoxical task for the Brazilian state, as there are copious economic interests fighting against and overriding the rights in question. However, previous governments never gave up and were successfully able to reduce deforestation and comply with international treaties and programs, in which Brazil played a prominent role. Since 2019, when Bolsonaro's government—characterized by a reactionary posi tion in relation to those issues, including a pronouncement against environmental conservation and the demarcation of Indigenous lands and in favor of economic sectors interested in exploring the Amazon—came to power, problems related to these matters have intensified. To achieve its objectives, the government elaborated a series of anti-policies connected by omissions, negligence, and the dismantling of environmental and Indigenous institutions. That scenario of devastation favored groups and individuals that felt they had the right to invade Indigenous lands and deforest the Amazon rainforest. Government actions converged to make those protected lands available for land grabs, agribusiness, and mining, similar to what happened during the period of military rule (1964-1985). Bolsonaro was trained by the [End Page 183] Brazilian army, has publicly expressed nostalgia for the dictatorship era, and has never hidden the fact that he considers the regime's torturers and other human rights' abusers to be heroes. The government's support base includes a large wing of the armed forces. It could be considered an extreme right-wing government, with indicators of authoritarian behavior such as rejecting the Constitution, promoting anti-democratic acts, restricting environmental and Indigenous rights, denying political opponents' legitimacy, promoting violence (including praising dictatorial governments and favoring arming the population), and the propensity to restrict opponents' civil liberties, especially those of the media (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p. 33-34). Its political economic management continues to be based on the primary sector, the export of natural resources to the global market, which redirects the political economy in general toward a process of re-primarization and deindustrialization. Within the framework of the international division of labor, it is nothing more than a neocolonization of the world in which, in exchange terms, nation-states appear as commodity producers. This approach is not exclusive to the Bolsonaro government, but the intensification of this process in an extended state demonstrates the fact of a new political and economic framework of the capitalist periphery, orchestrated by capitalist accumulation schemes in the global hierarchy. The weakening of the nation state, privatization, and financialization are this framework's conduits of leverage on a vector scale, given the capitalist crisis and the new ordering of the global economic power hierarchy. The result and effect of this is that Brazil has become a zone of primary neocolonization of its economy, following the more general interests of the dominant Brazilian classes subordinated to global capitalism. It is well-known that the State under capitalism is a central element of capitalist accumulation and, in order for it to survive, it requires the existence or the creation of a new space for accumulation because "the internal contradictions of capitalism are expressed through the restless formation and re-formation of geographic landscapes. That is the tune to which the historical geography of capitalism must dance without cease" (Harvey, 2001, p. 333). That is the meaning of accumulation in Brazil today, with the support of the Brazilian nation state tied to orbits of capital reproduction. In this sense, with the support of the international extreme right, neoliberal finance, and economic agents that destroy the environment, which are symbiotically associated with internal/external cleavages, the Brazilian state infringes upon the constitutional rights of the environment and Indigenous peoples, especially in the Amazonian region, as well as forests (the loci and natural habitats of those peoples and other communities). It does so...