The Attack on the Amazon Accelerates under Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro

ENVIRONMENT, BRICS, LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN, CAPITALISM, 25 Mar 2019

Andre Cardoso | Tricontinental Institute for Social Research – Independent Media Institute

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research launches a dossier analyzing the advance of capital in the Brazilian Amazon.

19 Mar 2019 — As the largest tropical forest, biggest reserve of minerals, and main biogenetic reserve on the planet, the Amazon is among the most sought-after territories by global capital. As the attack against the Amazon advances under Brazil’s right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research launches its 14th dossier analyzing the socio-environmental impact on the region.

“Brazil’s Amazon: The Wealth of the Earth Generates the Poverty of Humankind” analyzes the advance of capital in the region, which has escalated a long history of deforestation, blockage of rivers, land grabs, and the genocide of indigenous peoples. In the wake of this attack, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research provides a critical and complex analysis of the international and national scope of mining and agribusiness projects, agrarian conflicts, and the devastation of biodiversity, as well as the challenges facing everyday people.

Click to Watch a Video on the Amazon Dossier by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

Key Information from the Report:

• The Amazon represents 61 percent of Brazil’s landmass, 98 percent of its indigenous lands, and 77 percent of preserved lands.
• The region is home to 170 indigenous peoples, 357 quilombo communities, and thousands of river communities, rubber tappers, and land settlements, among others.
• The attacks by capital and by the Brazilian state have caused deforestation, the exploitation of wood and illegal burning, and the uncontrolled expansion of livestock, soy, mining and energy projects.
• Latin America–especially in the Amazon—is a central part of the attempts of capital to escape the current economic, social, political, and environmental crisis. In this context, capital has increased its exploitation of raw materials, rendering the economies of Latin American countries increasingly dependent on agribusiness and mining.
• Since the 2016 coup in Brazil—further solidified by the Jair Bolsonaro administration—there has been an ideological discourse confronting popular movements, an intensification of the destruction of the environment and regulations that protected it, and an attack against labor, economic, and social rights of the working class.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s new dossier: “Brazil’s Amazon: The Wealth of the Earth Generates the Poverty of Humankind”

“The model that is leading to the death of the Amazon needs to be buried underground. It is the model of predatory development, the benefit of which goes to the very few at the expense of the many. When the planet is destroyed, even the very few will not be its beneficiaries. Another model, which serves the collective interests of society and nature, is necessary. This model is one built by the resistance of people’s struggles who have been wrung dry by a neo-extractivist model that, like a leech, sucks the resources from the earth and the vast majority of its inhabitants. Towards that end then, our struggle moves.” —Excerpt from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s new dossier: “Brazil’s Amazon: The Wealth of the Earth Generates the Poverty of Humankind”

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is an international, movement-driven institution that carries out empirically based research guided by political movements. They seek to bridge gaps in knowledge about the political economy as well as social hierarchy that will facilitate the work of their political movements and involve themselves in the “battle of ideas” to fight against the bourgeois ideology that has swept through intellectual institutions from the academy to the media.

All of their materials are produced in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French.

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Media Contact: andre@thetricontinental.org

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