Lula’s interview in the light of the Amazon fires’

Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro made international headlines for all the wrong reasons. He publicly denied reports released by Brazil’s Space Agency (INPE), which indicated a steady rise in the Amazon’s deforestation, and then subsequently sacked the institute’s director Professor Ricardo Magnus Osorio Galvao. Bolsonaro replaced Professor Galvao with a former Airforce officer. The Brazilian president argued holding “suspicion” that Professor Galvao was “acting on behalf of some environmental NGO.” Then raging wildfires started sweeping through the Amazon’s rainforest, confirming INPE’s satellite evidence and fears of illegal logging, encroaching crop and livestock farming, gold mining and illegal occupations of Amazon’s indigenous reserves. In a controversial twist, the far-right president suggested that NGOs were behind the Amazon fires to embarrass the Brazilian government internationally, offering no evidence to back up his claims.