This year, at a meeting in Davos, representatives of the administration of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed an agreement that granted the green environmental management company Ambipar a major role in managing Brazil’s indigenous lands. “The unprecedented partnership,” as an Ambipar press release explained, “is part of [a] strategy to include the private sector in global accountability for the preservation of indigenous lands.” Although couched as a strategy for responding to “climate emergencies and sustainability,” the agreement looked to many like a de facto surrender of areas comprising 14 percent of the national territory to the control of a private entity.
There is a long history of suspicion among Brazilians that environmental activism is a Trojan horse that seeks to erode national sovereignty and create obstacles for development. The bible of opposition to environmental NGOs is the book Green Mafia, by Lorenzo Carrasco, Silvia Palacios, and Geraldo Lino, which was first published in Portuguese in 2001 and has since been translated into Spanish and English. The book argues that there is a neocolonial conspiracy to keep Africa and South America underdeveloped. In Africa, since the 1960s, huge ecological sanctuaries have been governed by private entities, and in South America, a similar privatized apparatus emerged in the 1980s. The authors describe how environmentalism and indigenous rights have been used as pretexts to undermine the sovereignty of nation states rich in natural resources, and to prevent the creation of infrastructure while shrinking the population (through poor living conditions, contraception, and abortion).
All this may sound like the stuff of a conspiracy theory, but there is a real basis for the concerns raised in Green Mafia. In a 1974 memorandum, the late Henry Kissinger presented population growth in a number of countries (including Brazil) as a risk to US national security and recommended, among other things, the promotion of abortion in these countries. This document is not about environmentalism per se, but it shows how a certain brand of Malthusianism has operated as the state policy of the most powerful country in the world.
Whatever the ultimate intentions behind their efforts, environmental organizations have long stood as a bulwark against modernization and economic growth in the Brazilian Amazon—often in defiance of the wishes of most inhabitants of the region. The most drastic case is perhaps that of the tiny state of Roraima, in which a once productive economic region was transformed into the Raposa Serra do Sol indigenous reserve in 2005, during Lula’s first presidency. The local rice farmers, who until then were operating legally, were expelled by the government, and economic activities were shut down. Today the region’s inhabitants rely mainly on state benefits.
“Environmental organizations have long stood as a bulwark against modernization.”
Plínio Valério, a senator for the state of Amazonas, is known for representing the interests of the northern region of Brazil against the environmental agenda. His greatest cause is improving BR 319, the only road that connects Amazonas to the rest of Brazil. Repavement of this highway, built by the military in the 1970s and last paved in 1988, has been blocked by environmental agencies. Marina Silva, Lula’s minister of Environment and Climate Change, recently declared during a legislative hearing that a project without “environmental viability” would not be carried out just because people want to “drive around.” (Ironically, a new road is now being built in the Amazonian city of Belém in advance of the COP30 climate that will take place there later this year, although local officials have denied it is for that purpose.)
There is a revolving door between environmental NGOs and the Brazilian state, especially in those agencies under Silva’s influence. It’s simple: NGO “experts” conduct “research” and give “technical” opinions that are always used to block construction of infrastructure, create more environmental or indigenous reserves, and expel Brazilians from Brazilian lands. They then contact the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which generally behaves like an NGO embedded in the Brazilian State. In fact, the bureaucrats hired to work for state environmental agencies are recruited from NGOs.
Meanwhile, under current law, non-indigenous Brazilians—even government officials—enjoy only limited access to indigenous lands, which constrains outside scrutiny of activities there. Aldo Rebelo, a left-wing politician who served as a minister in the first Lula administration as well as that of his successor Dilma Rousseff, has long denounced the fact that NGOs prevent the military from entering indigenous lands. But along with the rest of the nationalist left, Rebelo has been marginalized and lacks a position in the current government.
This brings us back to the government’s agreement with Ambipar. When news of the “partnership” appeared in January, media coverage treated it in a positive light, but soon critics began to present it as a handover of 14 percent of the national territory to the management of a private company. The government then published a note claiming this was “fake news”: The signed agreement was only a “preliminary document.” In addition, the government asserted that Ambipar will only be required to perform a few activities, such as providing “technical support for the prevention and response to extreme events and disasters such as fires, floods, among others”—that is, performing what would otherwise be state functions.
Another lawmaker to raise concerns about the Ambipar agreement was the right-wing congressman Filipe Barros, a supporter of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president. Barros was joined by indigenous congressman and army lieutenant Sílvia Waiãpi, also a Bolsonaro supporter. But they were largely alone; even other Bolsonaro supporters stayed quiet. The nationalist left in Brazil, once represented by Rebelo, has practically ceased to exist.
No tree or monkey should be worth more than the life of a poor Brazilian who needs economic development to enjoy better material conditions. But Lula’s government is taking the opposite position: that Amazonians should live in poverty and backwardness to ease the consciences of affluent North Americans and Europeans, while also enriching entities like Ambipar. And given the latter’s dubious track record—for instance, the Brasília newspaper Metrópoles reported that in April 2024 IBAMA, the main environmental agency, imposed three fines totaling nearly $4 million on Ambipar—there is little reason to even believe that environmental preservation is guaranteed. What we are left with, in the end, is transnational capital doing shady business at the expense of poor Brazilians.