Brazil Burning

Following a prolonged drought, smoke from wildfires in the Amazon basin is choking people over an enormous swath of territory in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Peru and Bolivia. The fires pose a direct threat to the social reproduction of Brazil’s 1.7 million Indigenous people, 75 per cent of whom live in the north and north-east, with the states of Amazonas and Bahia accounting for 42.5 per cent of the total. Only 21 per cent of Brazil’s Indigenous people still live in Indigenous territory, which illustrates the extent of their dispossession, including language loss.

In the north, according to one Ka’apor leader in the Alto Turiaçu Reserve in Maranhão, fire has surpassed illegal mining, logging, ranching and poaching as a threat to his people’s survival. In 2013, the Ka’apor expelled the Fundação Nacional dos Povos Indígenas (the federal agency that is supposed to protect them) and appointed a new generation of leaders, represented by Sarapó Ka’apor, who died two years ago: the Ka’apor say he was killed by poison.

They have relocated their settlements to the edges of their reserve, which begins across the Gurupí river from the Alto Rio Guamá Reserve in Pará and extends nearly to Federal Highway 316 in Maranhão. They established a forest guard, armed with bows and arrows, to police it. Rifles are used only to hunt wild game, mostly by young men on motorcycles. They communicate via WhatsApp, use drones to monitor the activity of outsiders and are on constant high alert.

Only the coastal strip of the north-east has been unaffected by the smoke from the fires. In São Paulo last week the air quality was among the worst in the world, putting children and elderly people at risk of respiratory infection. The metropolitan region has 21 million people, the state 48 million. Power and wealth are concentrated there.

A new leader of the far right, Pablo Marçal, topped a recent poll ahead of the first round of the city’s mayoral race next month. He wants to introduce corporal punishment in primary schools. One of his rivals hit Marçal with a chair during a TV debate on Sunday night. From his hospital bed, Marçal compared himself to Trump. He aims to become the next Bolsonaro.

Lula’s government in Brasília – mired in scandal with credible allegations of harassment against the former human rights minister Silvio Almeida (he was fired earlier this month) – has so far been unable to respond, just as it failed to respond to the floods that devastated Porto Alegre and Rio Grande do Sul in April and May. According to the climate scientist Carlos Nobre, if the country continues down its current path of mining and agribusiness, aided and abetted by high finance in São Paulo and politicians at every level from the federal to the local, most of Brazil’s cities could be uninhabitable by 2050.

All of its biomes will be transformed. According to one climate model, Belém de Pará, where the Amazon meets the South Atlantic, is projected to go from 130 days of extreme heat in 2030 to 222 in 2050, up from 50 at the turn of the century, while Manaus is projected to go from 200 to 258, as jungle becomes savannah. Semi-arid areas of the north-east, known as the sertão, will become arid. And the fertile mountains and valleys of Rio, São Paulo, Santa Catarina, Paraná and Minas Gerais will become semi-arid.

For Brazil’s impoverished plurality, particularly in its densely populated urban peripheries, where few public services are available, the air will be too hot, the land too parched, the forest cover too thin and the water too scarce to sustain human life. Brazil is projected to have millions of climate migrants.

At a ceremony in Rio de Janeiro last week to commemorate the return of a priceless artefact from Denmark, a cloak made from four thousand scarlet ibis feathers that had been in Copenhagen since 1689, one Tupinambá leader went off script and lambasted Lula’s government for being weak and ineffectual in defence of Indigenous rights; the minister of Indigenous affairs, Sonia Guajajara, has been largely silent and missing in action. Lula’s attempt at self-justification missed the target; it was tone deaf, at best.

All the same, Lula’s government has made major strides in slowing deforestation, which reached new heights under Bolsonaro: more than ten thousand square kilometres were cleared in 2022, and around half that in 2023. In August, fires were at their lowest since 2018. Among other things, the fires may be a criminal conspiracy to erode the government’s legitimacy and reverse those achievements. Indigenous peoples like the Ka’apor and Tupinambá accuse mining and agribusiness firms of using arson to drive them from their lands. Organised crime – especially the PCC in São Paulo – is involved.

The finance minister, Fernando Haddad, has complained that only big business has lobbies in Brasília. Poor people – which includes more than 60 per cent of children, according to a Unicef report last year – have none; this goes double for rural workers and triple for Indigenous people; the fifth of the population that still lives in ancestral territories is rural and poor, as are an untold number of the dispossessed.

Brasília, meanwhile, peddles tales of success as measured by macroeconomic GDP growth (2.9 per cent last year), the rise of the average real wage by 12.5 per cent and the reduction of extreme poverty through revamped assistance programmes like Bolsa Família. When the Supreme Court judge Flávio Dino authorised emergency credits this week, as he had done in April, the Office of Budget and Planning refused to consider the plan because it might unbalance the budget.

This is developmentalism in its senescence. The contradictions between business as usual, with interest rates sky high and the far right on the march despite Bolsonaro’s fall from grace, and what amounts to a Brazilian version of the US Democratic Party under Lula, with empty spectacles of celebration, cannot hold. The wall of contention is too thin.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, capitalist development in Brazil was coupled with industrial investment and expansion. But since neoliberalism was implemented under Fernando Henrique Cardoso in the late 1990s, with the privatisation of state enterprises and deindustrialisation, speculative rent-seeking in both rural land and urban real estate, along with mining, agribusiness, and organised crime, have become the foundations of the country’s political and economic geography.

On the other side – the side of life and environmental preservation – the Ka’apor work with the Popular Peasant Movement, which has roots in Maranhão’s numerous quilombola communities descended from runaway slaves, and with an urban agriculture and regional autonomy movement among young people from Belém de Pará’s peripheries. So far, the Ka’apor have succeeded in protecting their territory, just as they succeeded at expelling loggers and holding miners and hunters at bay. But the odds are stacked against them, and the question is how long they can hold out without significant reinforcements.

Except for minuscule and ineffective communist and socialist parties, the Brazilian left, led by the PT, is busy discussing identity, diversity and the allocation of public-private sector posts and resources. If the fires don’t refocus attention where it matters most, what would?