Bolsonaro puts sovereignty first
Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg is likely crying more angrily in the wake of this week’s speech by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Thunberg gave a tearful statement at the Climate Action Summit a day before the UN General Assembly (UNGA) opening session. She condemned world leaders for failing to take strong measures to combat climate change with a sharp, emotional, “How dare you.”
As is tradition, the next day, Brazil’s president gave the opening speech to the UNGA. Immediately, Bolsonaro, in a fierce speech, blamed the international media and environmental organizations for spreading “lies” about the fires that are ravaging the Amazon rainforest. Bolsonaro said the Amazon “remains pristine and virtually untouched,” claiming this was evidence that Brazil is “one of the countries that protects its environment the most.” Quite the contrast.
Earlier this year, Brazil shut down programs dedicated to defending the Amazon rainforest from deforestation for budgetary and political reasons. In response, Norway and Germany, the two largest contributors to the billiondollar Amazon Fund, froze tens of millions of dollars of funding. This contention fed into Brazil’s president giving a fiery, nationalistic speech regarding the country’s sovereignty in the face of global organizations because of the Amazon’s fires.
In his UNGA speech, Bolsonaro warned that the UN should not become “a globalist organization.” He praised US President Donald Trump, with whom he has formed a strong alliance against climate change, calling it a “globalist” conspiracy.
When Bolsonaro finished his UNGA speech, Trump immediately followed. The US president also spoke out against “globalists” at the world’s largest annual gathering of international leaders. Trump, too, attacked the media and academia for waging a supposed “all-out assault” on “free society.” The totality of these statements and their significance regarding sovereignty plays to the emergence of powerful anti-global forces.
This anti-globalist outlook is boosting nationalistic tendencies that are affecting Brazil’s view of the world.
The Brazilian president saved some of his most scathing comments against interference in the country’s sovereignty for French President Emmanuel Macron. Some nations, such as France, have suggested that Brazil should face economic consequences for failing to act to curb the fires. But Bolsonaro said that such countries, instead of helping Brazil, had “followed the lies of the media and behaved disrespectfully, with a colonialist spirit,” in specific reference to Paris.
Overall, Bolsonaro used the UNGA to project his view that he rejects climate change and outside opinions of the country’s internal matters, especially when discussing Amazon fires and the rainforest’s destruction. Brazil is using the idea of sovereignty as a tool against some UN member states to prevent interference in the country’s affairs, but is also using the fires as a political tool to gain leverage and capital. Some of you may cry now.