What course should we take to stop the unfortunate sequence of murders in the Amazon, such as that of Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips? There are at least two ways.
The first is to insist on the current model of combating deforestation and other illegalities. Create even stricter licensing laws, intensify repression against riverside dwellers who cannot become legal, spend another million reais on Federal Police and Ibama operations to set fire to equipment, trucks and ferries.
This alternative involves handsome speeches by celebrities and many politicians promising tough measures.
It involves pretending that the bioeconomy and ecotourism are viable solutions for everyone, and that a village installed on the largest diamond mine in the world will prefer to pick açaí because that’s what the hipsters of Leblon and Pinheiros decided to do.
If we insist on this model, much more blood will be shed. There will be more bribery from inspectors and politicians, more misery, more resentment against environmentalists. More violence — and as effective as combating drug trafficking in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
We can predict more conflicts between Indians and gold miners, increasingly heavy weapons — people shooting at PF helicopters to avoid having their equipment destroyed.
But there is a second option: trying to see the problem from the point of view of poor people in the Amazon. Understand why local populations resent environmentalists and stone so many Ibama and Funai offices.
Recognizing that the non-indigenous poor population cannot regularize land, cannot mine, takes years trying to obtain a simple license.
In this second line of action, Greenpeace would not celebrate when General Mourão wages a “green war” against the Madeira river garimpeiro ferries, leaving hundreds of cooks and ferry operators out of work overnight.
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Instead, Greenpeace would help Madeira River miners adopt more sustainable or mercury-free techniques. Bureaucrats would facilitate the legalization of activities and stipulate easy-to-follow sustainability rules, contrary to what they do today.
A Sheetin editorials and reports, blamed the “absence of state” for the fact that the Amazon had become the new center of organized crime in Brazil.
“If criminals act freely in that corner of the Amazon, it’s because the state has left there,” said the editorial. But a previous question needs to be asked: why are there criminals in a place where we would expect fishermen?
Organized crime doesn’t just need disastrous rulers to develop. It needs an institutional environment that, as in the war on drugs, prohibits or hinders legal activity and gives corrupt and violent agents an advantage.
In one of the last audios he sent before he was cruelly murdered, Bruno said that fishermen were outraged because they would lose their fishing license. “They will lose the management of arapaima that took 10 years for them to harvest.”
To avoid more tragedies like that of the indigenist and the reporter Dom Phillips, it is necessary to deal with the excess of laws, prohibitions and bureaucracy that give strength to violence and organized crime in the Amazon.
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