Brazil’s President is Slammed For Speech at United Nations

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL – Minutes after Brazil’s President, Jair Bolsonaro, finished his speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, thousands of people took to comment on the thirty-minute speech. While many of the comments congratulated Bolsonaro, the vast majority criticized what they regarded as an aggressive, erratic speech.

“The president once again embarrassed Brazil abroad by abdicating the country’s traditional environmental leadership in the name of its ideology. It has done nothing to reassure investors, nor to placate the growing cry for a boycott of Brazilian products. It endangers the very agribusiness that it claims to defend,” reads the statement issued by environmental group, Climate Observatory.

According to the environmental non-governmental entity, Bolsonaro’s policies bring ‘immediate risk to all mankind’.

Bolsonaro was also widely criticized when he blamed the international media and environmental organizations for ‘spreading lies’ about the fires ravaging the Amazon rainforest.

“Today, the Amazon continues to burn and may soon reach an unrecoverable tipping point due to Bolsonaro’s complicity with environmental crime,” said Amazon Watch’s program director, Christian Poirier. “Bolsonaro must be held responsible for the destruction of the Amazon and the brutalizing of indigenous peoples underway in Brazil today,” added Poirer.

Calling the news which indicated the Amazon was burning as fake news, Bolsonaro said Brazil continues to be one of the richest countries when it comes to biodiversity and mineral wealth. “Our Amazon is larger than all Western Europe and remains virtually untouched,” he said.

For the Socioenvironmental Institute (ISA) the Brazilian president continues to disregard scientific proof of the extensive burning in the Amazon region.

“Bolsonaro insists on fighting with the data, including official data, which repeatedly indicate the aggravation of deforestation and burning in the Amazon and other biomes in the country. Even Brasilia (Brazil’s capital) is shrouded in a dense cloud of smoke, which worsens the effects of the harshest dry season and sends hundreds of old people and children to hospitals in the federal capital. Bolsonaro and ministers deny the air they breathe,” read the statement issued by ISA.

Bolsonaro was also widely criticized when he said that indigenous leaders who denounce deforestation, such as Caiapó Chief Raoni Metuktire, “are used as a pawn by foreign governments in their information war to advance their interests in the Amazon”.

Earlier this month Chief Raoni Metuktire met with France’s President, Emmanuel Macron, and asked the European Union for help in preserving the forest.

“By addressing Raoni and other indigenous leaders as manipulable, the president exudes his prejudiced thinking and racism based on lack of knowledge in relation to indigenous peoples of Brazil or in his negative bias towards the subject,” complained Land Pastoral Commission president, Bishop Roque Paloschi.

“It’s Bolsonaro who still seems to live in the caves,” said Marivelton Baré, President of the Rio Negro Indigenous Organizations, an entity that represents twenty-three ethnic groups in the Amazon region in his social media account.

After the speech, President Bolsonaro himself commented on his discourse. “It was an objective, forceful speech. It was not aggressive, but we sought to reestablish the truth [about] the issues we were being accused of in Brazil,” Bolsonaro said in the hotel lobby.

Some Brazilian officials also blasted the attacks made by Bolsonaro on European and socialist leaders. “What we will always make clear to President Bolsonaro is that we need to tone down words. It is impossible to move forward in solving problems without maintaining diplomatic relations,” Amapa Governor Waldez Góes, told reporters in New York.

Governor Góes said that his state, along with other Amazon region states, was contacting foreign governments individually, without the support of the federal government, to negotiate accords.

“Brazil cannot turn its back on any debate about the Amazon. And the world cannot discuss the Amazon without the participation of its people. We continue to seek dialogue with all countries interested in preserving the forest, always with a view to generating sustainable opportunities for our people,” said Góes after speaking with France’s leader.

Once a Bolsonaro ally, now an presumptive rival for the Presidency in 2022, São Paulo governor João Doria also had harsh words about the Brazilian President’s speech at the UN.

“First, (it was) inappropriate. Second, inopportune. Third, without references that could bring respectability and trust to Brazil on the environmental, economic and political levels. Fourth, bad international repercussion. The whole world is badly echoing the president’s talk at the UN General Assembly,” said Doria.

There were some, however, who applauded the Brazilian President’s speech.

“President Jair Bolsonaro gave a speech “proud, courageous, true and sovereign, reaffirmed his commitment to values and principles such as freedom, democracy, family and religious freedom. He honored the Brazilian tradition at the UN” said Bolsonaro’s Chief of Staff, Onyx Lorenzoni, in his Twitter account.

“Congratulations to President Jair Bolsonaro for the speech in defense of our sovereignty. Our Amazon is larger than all of Western Europe and remains largely untouched. Proof that we are one of the countries that most protect the environment. A truth that the world needs to take in,” stated Senator Luiz Carlos Heinze.

But whether one applauded or criticized Bolsonaro’s discourse on Tuesday, political analysts agree that international trade negotiations between Brazil and most of its partners are likely to become more difficult after this General Assembly speech.