Jair Bolsonaro to UN: Brazil Wrongly Portrayed as an Environmental Villain

“It is the same as last year: a mix of denial of reality and self-praise for promoting an environmental policy that does not exist,” said Rubens Ricupero, a Brazilian who was secretary-general of the UN Conference on Trade and Development for nearly a decade.

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In May, Jair Bolsonaro put the army in charge of protecting the rainforest. Two months later, he banned setting agricultural and forest fires for 120 days as the country entered the dry season.

Brazilian law requires permits for fires to clear brush and open land for farming, ranching or logging, but the requirement is widely ignored.

Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon region may have reached a 14-year high in the 12 months through July, according to preliminary data published last month by the country’s space agency. Final data will be released in the coming months.

Fires spiraled out of control in Brazil’s Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetlands, with the number of blazes surpassing 16,000 so far in 2020 — considerably more than any full year on record, since 1998.

Read also: This Year's Extreme Weather Consistent with Worsening Climate Change

Jair Bolsonaro also defended his government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic in front of the UN, highlighting the distribution of emergency cash for 65 million low-income Brazilians and financial support for small and micro businesses to keep them afloat amid a crushing economic downturn.

“Part of the Brazilian press also politicized the virus, disseminating panic among the population under the motto ‘Stay at home and we’ll see about the economy after,’ and almost brought social chaos to the country,” Bolsonaro said.

“Our government, in a bold way, implemented various economic measures that avoided the greater evil.”

Igarapé's Muggah pointed out that the Brazilian President initially opposed the pandemic aid until he perceived how it helped buoy his approval ratings.

And Thiago de Aragão, Director of Strategy for political consultancy Arko Advice, said Bolsonaro is bragging about results of the ongoing tragedy by claiming, without evidence, that a worse outcome was avoided.

Since the pandemic's onset, Bolsonaro downplayed the severity of the coronavirus, calling it “a little flu”.

Even as he himself tested positive for the virus this summer and had to quarantine, he has at times adopted fatalism, saying there’s no way to prevent 70 percent of the population from contracting the illness.

He has repeatedly said that shutting down the economy would inflict worse hardship upon the population.