Flames in South America. The continent is burning like never before. In 2024, over 15 million hectares of forests have already become ash in Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru and above all Brazil. 76 percent of the fires started right here, in the country that saw Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva return to the presidency on January 1, 2023, invoked by the Western media as the great savior of the Amazon after four years of Jair Bolsonaro, defined as “ecocidal” by the scientific journal Natureby Greta Thunberg and Hollywood stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo. And that Greenpeace had dedicated a report to him, “Dangerous man, dangerous business”, which held him responsible for an increase in Amazon deforestation of 75.6 percent (using data collected by the Brazilian Institute for Space Research, Inpe).
Lula’s current Environment Minister, Marina Silva, even had compared Bolsonaro’s environmental policy and the fires in the green lung of the planet during his mandate, to the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis. He did so in an article published by the Spanish newspaper El País on August 24, 2019. Unambiguous title: The Amazon Holocaust alarms civilization. It’s just a shame that with her defending the forests, August 2024 was the worst month for the number of fires in the last 14 years in Brazil: 68,635. An increase of 144 percent compared to the same period in 2023. And September has already surpassed the August record with the figure monsters of 75,051 at the date of writing (September 25). The worst month since 2007, when the president was Lula and the minister of the environment and climate change was Marina Silva.
Things are no better in Bolivia governed by the Movement to Socialism, the Mas of president Luis Arce and his former friend “cocalero” (president of the coca production unions) Evo Moralestoday engaged in a no-holds-barred war for the leadership on the left in view of next year’s presidential elections. Three months after the first fire outbreaks recorded at the end of May in the Chiquitanía, a tropical forest on the border with the Brazilian Amazon and the Paraguayan Chaco more than half the size of Italy, the fire in Bolivia has already destroyed four million hectares. Three million in the department of Santa Cruz alone, the most populous city in Bolivia, with over 2.1 million inhabitants and whose air is unbreathable. For the IQAir system, which monitors pollution in the world’s large cities, Santa Cruz was the city with the most carcinogenic air in the world for almost a month, surpassed only by Sao Paulo, in mid-September, which for a week took away the unenviable record. Both exceeded by more than double the levels recorded in metropolises with a long history of pollution such as New Delhi in India and Lahore in Pakistan.
The Venezuela of the Bolivarian dictator Nicolás Maduro, even if no one talks about it as the media attention is focused on the fraud of the presidential elections of 28 July, is the third South American country to record the most fires this year: 39,192 according to the satellite system of the Brazilian Aerospace Institute (Inpe) which monitors the region, equal to 10 percent of the total number of fires in South America. The situation in Peru is also dramatic. To the point that Parliament refused President Dina Boluarte (incidentally: former head of the Marxist-Leninist Peru Libre) from leaving her office to fly to New York and participate in the latest United Nations General Assembly. According to the rules of that country, in fact, a head of state cannot travel abroad without the permission of the legislative power. At that moment the flames were devouring thousand-year-old forests, causing the death of more than 20 people, but Boluarte still wanted to go to Manhattan, explaining that she could manage things “remotely”. Nobody believed it. For his part, the president of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, the only centre-right, was forced to leave the annual UN meeting in a hurry due to an arson attack which, on 24 September last, consumed the northern part of the capital Quito.
If the fire that is destroying South American forests is “in 99 percent of cases caused by human action” (fires are often set by those who want to free up land for crops and livestock), as scientific observers explain, it is paradoxical that Lula insinuated that the arsonists were all supporters of former president Bolsonaro. According to the president, it is a plot to weaken him politically before COP-30, the UN climate change conference to be held in the Amazonian city of Belém, in 2025. And it is precisely from this city that it is good to propose an image that is worth more of many words: the photo of the Amazon Summit organized by Lula on 8 August 2023 with the heads of state that make up the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (Acto), with the aim of «saving, conserving and protect” the green lung of the world. One year later, despite the many beautiful words, the results are there for all to see. In the official portrait there is Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia, former Marxist guerrilla and former political advisor to Hugo Chávez. With him in power the country has achieved the unenviable world record of environmentalist leaders killed in the last 12 months, 79, followed by Brazil (25 activists killed), Honduras and Mexico (both with 18 victims). Here too, all nations governed by the left.
In the Acto photo, then, there were the aforementioned Luis Arce, president of Bolivia, and Dina Boluarte, of Peru. To explain that useless and paradoxical Amazon Summit, what was written at the end of September by the Brazilian newspaper helps State of São Paulo: «For years Lula has sold himself to the world as a sort of elf guardian of our forests, our seas and our rivers» and does not like «that it is written that he was absolutely incompetent in dealing with the fires, especially on the eve of G-20 summit”, scheduled for Rio de Janeiro on 18 and 19 November. An environmental marketing which, when tested by facts, is proving to be a boomerang for the president of Brazil who at the UN General Assembly at the end of September focused his speech on climate change and on the money that rich countries must give to his « save the planet”, while the Minister of the Environment Marina Silva spoke of “climate terrorism”.
It should be recognized that the unprecedented increase in arson in Brazil is favored by the worst drought in 44 years, according to the Center for Monitoring and Warning of Natural Disasters, Cemaden, linked to the green-gold Ministry of Science and Technology. With it, Enel signed a collaboration agreement last September 12th to strengthen the predictability of climate events and their effects on critical infrastructures, starting with energy distribution networks. But this does not justify the greenwashing (when sustainability is used as a facade to cover polluting or, in some cases, illegal activities) an increasingly present risk in Brazil, especially in the recent race towards what is ecologically correct, well embodied by Lula. Furthermore, it would be necessary to explain why the Canadair planes, very useful for putting out fires, which Justin Trudeau had stopped producing as soon as he became president of Canada in 2015, have disappeared from the South American skies in recent years. Then, goodness of his, he changed his mind, put in the face of evidence that they are needed to fight the war against the flames that were also destroying Canadian forests.
