Sunday, January 01, 2023

Brazil will have first Indigenous woman chief for key post

By FABIANO MAISONNAVE
December 30, 2022

Brazil's newly-named Minister of Indigenous Peoples Sonia Guajajara attends a meeting where Brazil's President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced the ministers for his incoming government, in Brasilia, Brazil, Thursday, Dec. 29, 2022. Lula will be sworn-in on Jan. 1, 2023. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)


RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazil’s President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced Thursday that Sônia Guajajara will head up a new Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, with a mandate to oversee policies ranging from land demarcation to health care.

Guajajara was elected to Congress in October. She is widely known as the leader of the main umbrella group for Brazil’s many Indigenous tribes and is a member of the Amazon Guajajara. This year she made Time Magazine’s annual list of the world’s 100 most influential people.

“This is more than a personal achievement,” Guajajara said. “It is a collective achievement of the Indigenous peoples, a historic moment of reparation in Brazil.” The creation of the ministry is “a confirmation of Lula’s commitment to us,” she said in a tweet.

Lula promised to create the Indigenous cabinet department during his presidential campaign. On Jan. 1 he returns to power, having previously governed Brazil from 2003 to 2010.



The appointment of Guajajara to such a post marks a 180 degree turn from Brazil’s current government. Outgoing president Jair Bolsonaro, defeated in October, is an opponent of Indigenous rights and land with a record of racist statements. In 1998, when he was still a fringe lawmaker, he spoke in Brazil’s Congress praising the U.S. Cavalry for having “decimated its Indians” and regretted Brazil had not done the same.

Bolsonaro’s promises to develop the Amazon and his defanging of environmental law enforcement led to a surge of illegal loggers, miners and land robbers into Native territory in Brazil. According to local Indigenous organizations, some 20,000 illegal gold miners now operate illegally in Yanomami tribal territory alone.

Guajajara fiercely opposed attempts to legalize these policies, and that opposition was largely successful. She also experienced the murders in 2019 and 2020 of five fellow tribe members who fought against illegal loggers.


After the official announcement of her appointment and 15 others in the capital of Brasilia Thursday, several Indigenous organizations, among them the Coordination of the Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon, congratulated her in social media for the nomination.

An organization of officials who work in Indigenous affairs also congratulated the future minister and the Indigenous social movement in general for the nomination.

The lands where Brazil’s Indigenous peoples live constitute one of the world’s most important carbon sinks. The Amazon rainforest acts as a buffer against climate change by absorbing large amounts of carbon dioxide.

About 13% of Brazil’s territory is demarcated as Indigenous areas, roughly the size of Colombia. Most of it is in the Amazon and covered by tropical rainforest.

Brazil’s Lula picks Amazon defender for environment minister
By FABIANO MAISONNAVE
December 29, 2022

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Brazil's President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and newly-named Environment Minister Marina Silva, smile during a meeting where he announced the ministers for his incoming government, in Brasilia, Brazil, Thursday, Dec. 29, 2022. Lula will be sworn-in on Jan. 1, 2023. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) —

Brazil´s President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced Thursday that Amazon activist Marina Silva will be the country´s next minister of environment. The announcement indicates the new administration will prioritize cracking down on illegal deforestation even if it means running afoul of powerful agribusiness interests.

Both attended the recent U.N. climate conference in Egypt, where Lula promised cheering crowds “zero deforestation” in the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest and a key to fighting climate change, by 2030. “There will be no climate security if the Amazon isn’t protected,” he said.

Silva told the news network Globo TV shortly after the announcement that the name of the ministry she will lead will be changed to the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change.

Many agribusiness players and associated lawmakers resent Silva. That stems from her time as environment minister during most of Lula’s prior presidency, from 2003 to 2010.

Lula also named Sonia Guajajara, an Indigenous woman, as Brazil’s first minister of Indigenous peoples, and Carlos Fávaro, a soybean producer, as agriculture minister.

Silva was born in the Amazon and worked as a rubber tapper as an adolescent. As environment minister she oversaw the creation of dozens of conservation areas and a sophisticated strategy against deforestation, with major operations against environmental criminals and new satellite surveillance. She also helped design the largest international effort to preserve the rainforest, the mostly Norway-backed Amazon Fund. Deforestation dropped dramatically.

But Lula and Silva fell out as he began catering to farmers during his second term and Silva resigned in 2008.





 Brazil's Marina Silva, a former environment minister, speaks during a session at the Brazil Pavilion at the COP27 U.N. Climate Summit, Nov. 12, 2022, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Brazil's President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva named Silva as environment minister for his incoming government, indicating he will prioritize cracking down on illegal deforestation in the Amazon. 
(AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty, File)


Lula appears to have convinced her that he has changed tack, and she joined his campaign after he embraced her proposals for preservation.

“Brazil will return to the protagonist role it previously had when it comes to climate, to biodiversity,” Silva told reporters during her own appearance at the U.N. summit.

This would be a sharp turnabout from the policies of the outgoing president, Jair Bolsonaro, who pushed for development in the Amazon and whose environment minister resigned after national police began investigating whether he was aiding the export of illegally cut timber.

Bolsonaro froze the creation of protected areas, weakened environmental agencies and placed forest management under control of the agriculture ministry. He also championed agribusiness, which opposes the creation of protected areas such as Indigenous territories and pushes for the legalization of land grabbing. Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon reached a 15-year high in the year ending in July 2021, though the devastation slowed somewhat in the following 12 months.

In Egypt, Lula committed to prosecuting all crimes in the forest, from illegal logging to mining. He also said he would press rich countries to make good on promises to help developing nations adapt to climate change. And he pledged to work with other nations home to large tropical forests — the Congo and Indonesia — in what could be coordinated negotiating positions on forest management and biodiversity protection.

As environment minister, Silva would be charged with carrying out much of that agenda.

Silva is also likely to face resistance from Congress, where the farm caucus next year will account for more than one-third of the Lower House and Senate.

Two lawmakers allied with Lula who come from the nation’s agriculture sector told The Associated Press before the announcements they disagree with Silva’s nomination given the conflict of her prior tenure. They spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisals.

Others were more hopeful. Neri Geller, a lawmaker of the agribusiness caucus who acted as a bridge to Lula during the campaign, said things had changed since Silva’s departure in 2008.

“At the time, Marina Silva was perhaps a little too extremist, but people from the agro sector also had some extremists,” he said, citing a strengthened legal framework around environmental protection as well. “I think she matured and we matured. We can make progress on important agenda items for the sector while preserving (the environment) at the same time.”

Silva and Brazil stand to benefit from a rejuvenated Amazon Fund, which took a hit in 2019 when Norway and Germany froze new cash transfers after Bolsonaro excluded state governments and civil society from decision-making. The Norwegian Embassy in Brazil praised “the clear signals” from Lula about addressing deforestation.

“We think the Amazon Fund can be opened quickly to support the government’s action plan once the Brazilian government reinstates the governing structure of the fund,” the embassy said in a statement to the AP.

The split between Lula and Marina in his last administration came as the president was increasingly kowtowing to agribusiness, encouraged by voracious demand for soy from China. Tension within the administration grew when Mato Grosso state’s Gov. Blairo Maggi, one of the world’s largest soybean producers, and others lobbied against some of the anti-deforestation measures.

Lula and Silva were also at odds over the mammoth Belo Monte Dam, a project that displaced some 40,000 people and dried up stretches of the Xingu River that Indigenous and other communities depended upon for fish. Silva opposed the project; Lula said it was necessary to meet the nation’s growing energy needs and hasn’t expressed any regret since, despite the plant’s impact and the fact it is generating far below installed capacity.

After Silva resigned, she quit Lula’s Workers’ Party and became a fierce critic of him and his successor, Dilma Rousseff. Silva and Lula didn’t begin to reconcile until this year’s presidential campaign, finding common cause in defeating Bolsonaro, whom they deemed an environmental villain and would-be authoritarian.

Caetano Scannavino, coordinator of Health and Happiness, an Amazon nonprofit that supports sustainable projects, said Silva “grew to become someone larger than only an environment minister.”

“This is important, as the challenges in the environmental area are even greater than two decades ago,” Scannavino said, citing growing criminal activities in the Amazon and increasing pressure from agribusiness eager to export to China and Europe. “Silva’s success is Brazil’s success in the world, too. She deserves all support.”

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AP writer Carla Bridi contributed from Brasilia and Diane Jeantet from Rio de Janeiro.

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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