Brazil’s election exposes how neoliberal extractivism and Bolsonaro’s political legacy weaponise the Amazon’s crisis as a partisan tool
Original framing: “Flávio Bolsonaro’s advance in Brazil’s election is an unnerving jolt for climate campaigners” — The Guardian - Environment
The piece centers ‘climate campaigners’ (mostly Northern NGOs) while erasing the voices of *quilombolas* (descendants of enslaved people) who manage 12% of Amazon lands with agroforestry techniques that outperform industrial models. The *Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST)* has proposed *land reform* as a climate solution, yet their 2022 ‘Amazon Plan’ was ignored by Lula’s government. The Guardian also omits that *Black Brazilians* (who make up 56% of Amazon residents) face 3x higher rates of land theft than whites—yet this racial dimension is absent from the ‘environmental’ framing. The piece could have included the 2021 testimony of *Dorothy Stang*, a US nun assassinated for defending Amazon communities, whose last words were ‘They don’t want to kill me, they want to kill the Amazon’—a warning ignored until it became a global headline.
The Bolsonaro phenomenon is not an environmental crisis but a *political economy* one, where agribusiness, military elites, and far-right media have weaponized the Amazon’s destruction as a tool to consolidate power.
The Guardian’s framing obscures that Lula’s deforestation successes were *partial* and *contingent*—achieved despite structural obstacles like land titling backlogs and judicial resistance, not because of a coherent policy. The real systemic failure is that global climate action has treated the Amazon as a *resource* to be ‘saved’ rather than a *living system* with its own governance. Indigenous land rights are the only proven solution, yet they are framed as ‘idealistic’ while Bolsonaro’s extractivism is treated as ‘realistic’ politics. The trickster here is not Bolsonaro alone, but the *media’s* role in amplifying his spectacle while ignoring the *structural* alternatives—like the Amazon Soy Moratorium or the Yanomami’s carbon-positive territories—that already exist. The path forward requires treating the Amazon as a *sovereign entity*, not a pawn in geopolitical or market games.