Senate Dems warn Biden about aid to Brazil
More than a dozen Senate Democrats sent a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday complaining of a woeful environmental track record by his Brazilian counterpart, Jair Bolsonaro, and urging him to condition any support for Amazon preservation on significant progress reducing deforestation.
The letter was signed by senators including Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and Bob Menendez, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. It comes just days before Biden is expected to meet with Bolsonaro and other foreign leaders at a U.S.-organized climate summit that was a major plank of his campaign pledge to more aggressively fight climate change.
The letter seems aimed at curtailing a fledgling bid by Bolsonaro, a far-right climate skeptic who was a staunch ally of former President Donald Trump, to refashion himself as a willing partner of Biden on the environment in the hopes of securing billions of dollars in foreign aid to promote sustainable development in the Amazon.
The senators warn that failure to slow deforestation will also affect their willingness to support Brazil’s bid to join the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — a long-sought goal of Bolsonaro.
The 15 senators, who also include former presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, said they support cooperation on the Amazon between the U.S. and Brazilian governments, but questioned Bolsonaro’s credibility.
“President Bolsonaro’s rhetoric and policies have effectively given a green light to the dangerous criminals operating in the Amazon, allowing them to dramatically expand their activities,” the senators wrote in the letter obtained by The Associated Press, citing recent reporting on abuses by Human Rights Watch.
Bolsonaro has sided with powerful agribusiness interests, cast aspersions on environmental activists and snarled at European leaders who decried deforestation in the Amazon as destruction of the world’s largest rainforest has surged toward its worst level since 2008.
On the campaign trail, Biden proposed countries provide Brazil with $20 billion to fight deforestation and said the country should face repercussions if it fails. At the time, Bolsonaro labeled Biden’s comments as “regrettable” and “disastrous.”
Bilateral talks on the environment with Brazil began on Feb. 17, led by Biden’s special climate envoy, John Kerry, The two sides have held regular technical meetings in the run-up to the April 22-23 climate summit, which is taking place online due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Brazil is striving to show its shift in rhetoric amounts to more than empty talk.
In a seven-page letter addressed to Biden on April 14, Bolsonaro recognized that his government needs to boost its performance curtailing illegal logging. He also said he supports sustainable development with economic alternatives for the region’s impoverished residents and that he is committed to eliminating illegal deforestation by 2030.
To accomplish those goals, he said Brazil will require outside resources, adding that aid from the U.S. government would be “very welcome.”
Rubens Barbosa, a former Brazilian ambassador to the U.S., said it remains to be seen whether the tone of Bolsonaro’s letter will match his speech at the summit.
Brazil’s Environment Minister Ricardo Salles recently told reporters he is seeking $1 billion in foreign assistance to support efforts to reduce deforestation by 30% to 40% in 12 months and that, without that sum, he would be unable to set a target. Brazilian spending to protect the environment has been sliding for years, and under Bolsonaro the ministry’s budget outlook plunged another 25% this year.