SECURITY AND ENVIRONMENT

By means of discourses, interferences in strategic bodies, revocations and proposals of new regulations, the Bolsonaro Administration has been dismantling environmental policies, legitimizing the engagement of army officers in those policies and providing a favorable environment for the expansion of violence in rural areas.  These practices directly impact indigenous populations, quilombolas and small farmers in rural settlements.

According to the Special Secretary for Land Affairs to the Ministry of Agriculture, Luiz Antonio Nabhan Garcia, “there are lots of people who criticize large landowners, but the largest landowners in Brazil are the indigenous populations”, as said in February 2019. Thereafter, several measures have been taken to guarantee the regularization of  landholders  in the Amazon region and, thus, opportunities created for illegal occupations of public lands by land grabbers (‘grileiros’), which may increase conflicts in rural areas. Using the excuse of fighting illegal deforestation and forest fires, the President has authorized the armed forces to take action by means of a legal operation known as Safeguard of Law and Order (‘GLO’) on indigenous lands, environmental conservation units and other Amazon regions. Actually, since last year, ‘GLO’ operations were authorized twice. The use of the ‘GLO’ put the operations of Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (‘ICMBio’) and the Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (‘IBAMA’) under the control of army officers, which is unprecedented. Bolsonaro has also announced his desire of implementing, under the GLO, the use of armed forces for property repossession operations in rural areas;  however, he has not taken this project forward until this moment.

Additionally, several normative regulations enacted since January 2019 have loosened the firearms licenses in Brazil. Among them, it is worth highlighting Law No. 13,870/2019, which was sanctioned without any vetoes and expands the concept of ‘household’ in rural areas to cover the whole property. Because of this law, rural producers and employees who are assigned to management positions are allowed to carry firearms on the entire property perimeter. Before the enactment of this law, firearms could only be carried in the headquarters of the property. Thus, this legal change may increase violence in rural areas, mainly in the region of the Legal Amazon. In this sense, in 2019, the conflicts in rural areas saw an increase of 20% when compared to the same period of 2018. Moreover, also in 2019, there was a record number of murders of indigenous people.

Check out below the main governmental measures that have contributed to the dismantling of the environmental conservation policies and to the increasing violence against indigenous populations, quilombolas and small farmers in rural settlements.