Jul 5th 2024 | Nº. 124

Editorial

The first half of this week was marked by a steep decrease in the value of the real in relation to the dollar. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s fiscal team expressed concerns that, among other issues, this accelerated trend could lead to an uptick in inflation later this year as imports become more expensive if Brazil’s currency is worth less on the global market. Lula has argued that the devaluation of the real is primarily the result of speculation of powerful interests seeking to maximize profits at the expense of the Brazilian economy. In turn, many analysts and even some within the administration, insist that Lula’s hostility toward the head of the Central Bank—who was appointed by former president Jair Bolsonaro—and seeming unwillingness to embrace spending cuts has made the situation worse. In the second half of the week, after meeting with Finance Minister Fernando Haddad, Planning and Budget Minister Simone Tebet, and Chief of Staff Rui Costa, Lula seemed to change his tone. Haddad told the press that Lula instructed him to do everything necessary to ensure the government stays within the self-imposed budgetary constraints passed last year. This will around to an almost R$26 billion spending cut for the 2025 budget.

News that the government would reign in spending by running a “fine tooth comb” through social spending helped to reverse the devaluation of the real. It also represented an internal win for Haddad, who had been facing resistance from other members of the Workers’ Party, including the president himself, when it came to whether or not the government needed to cut spending. This will not quiet market forces and opposition voices who insist the administration needs to do more on the spending front, but it does help shore up Haddad’s position as a serious fiscal steward who can shape Lula’s thinking. 

The real’s devaluation also has to do with the economic and political situation in the United States, where interest rates are not expected to go down in the second half of the year, as many had hoped. In response to concerns about President Joe Biden’s candidacy following his performance in a debate against former president Donald Trump, Lula emphasized this week that the U.S. election matters for the whole world. In an interview, he referred to Trump as a liar and insisted that the only person who knows if Biden is up for this campaign is Biden himself. As he has earlier, Lula says he is rooting for Biden.

Highlights

• Bolsonaro indicted. Former president Jair Bolsonaro was formally indicted this Thursday, July 4th, in the case involving the sale of jewelry that had been given as a gift to the Presidency of the Republic, but ended up being sold by his advisors on the market. The former president is suspected of having committed the crimes of criminal association (whose sentence ranges from 1 to 3 years in prison), money laundering (3 to 10 years) and embezzlement/appropriation of public property (2 to 12 years). The case will be sent to Alexandre de Moraes, rapporteur of this case at the Federal Supreme Court, who will be responsible for requesting an opinion from the Attorney General's Office, to take the case forward and make Bolsonaro a defendant. The Federal Electoral Court has ruled that the leader of the extreme right is ineligible to run for office until 2030 due to decisions in two other court cases.

   

• Dead and missing.  President Lula announced on Thursday, July 4 the re-creation of the National Commission for the Dead and Missing of the military dictatorship (1964-1985), which had been created in 1995 during the administration of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso but ended up being extinguished in 2021 by Bolsonaro. The commission’s mission is to identify, evaluate, and make reparations for the victims of crimes committed by the military regime. Bolsonaro, an apologist for the dictatorship, extinguished the body even before it had fulfilled its mission. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has ruled against Brazil more than once for crimes committed by the dictatorship. The Amnesty Law, created in 1979 in the twilight years of the regime, prohibits the punishment of state agents who committed violations of human rights, including torture, assassinations, and disappearances. The Court considers this law illegal, but its validity has been reaffirmed by the Brazilian Supreme Court. The Amnesty Law does not, however, prevent the Court from naming torturers as such, recognizing the obvious crimes committed by the Brazilian State, determining reparatory actions, implementing measures to prevent cases from recurring.

• Milei in Brazil. President Javier Milei of Argentina arrives in Brazil on Saturday, June 6 to participate in what is being called the Brazilian version of Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The meeting, which will take place over the weekend in Balneário Camboriú in Santa Catarina, will also be attended by Bolsonaro and the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, among other exponents of the extreme right. Milei says that he is coming to Brazil in a private capacity, not as head of state. He and Lula not met yet, although the two preside over the two largest economies in South America. The Brazilian president said a week ago that his Argentine counterpart owes an apology to Brazil and the Brazilian presidency for statements made about both. Milei, however, maintains a confrontational position in relation to Lula and a closeness in relation to Bolsonaro, who was at his inauguration as president in Buenos Aires and will be with him at the Brazilian CPAC.

   

• Police case. The Federal Police took another step towards those involved in falsifying former President Jair Bolsonaro's vaccination card. This Thursday, July 4th, search and seizure warrants were executed against political and health authorities in the municipality of Duque de Caxias, in the state of Rio de Janeiro. It was in this city that Bolsonaro's vaccination card received a vaccination certification against Covid-19 without the former president having been vaccinated. Bolsonaro, who is already being formally indicted in the case, campaigned against vaccination during the pandemic, but benefited from a counterfeit card to be able to travel to the United States after losing the elections to Lula.

• Biden and Lula. Bolsonaro published a post on his social networks this week in which he raises doubts about President Lula's “mental faculties.” The strategy of questioning the Brazilian president's mental health was put into practice shortly after the debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the United States. Just as the extreme right does in the United States, the Brazilian far-right also tries to attack a president on the left about factors associated with age and mental capacity. Lula is 78 years old, 11 years younger than Bolsonaro. Biden is three years older than Trump.
  

• New attack. American billionaire Elon Musk published a post this week on his X network (formerly Twitter) saying that “the law is violating the law.” The message concerns the decisions that have been taken by Brazilian Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes against far-right personalities involved in the frustrated coup d'état on January 8, 2023. Musk has been running a campaign against Moraes' decisions. The U.S. businessman echoes on his networks the criticisms that Bolsonaro and his supporters make towards the Brazilian judiciary in the name of defending freedom of expression. In the most recent chapter of this dispute, Moraes ordered the X network to remove videos relating to accusations made against the Arthur Lira, the president of the Chamber of Deputies (Brazil’s lower house), by his ex-wife, Jullyene Lins, who says she was attacked by the congressman.

News from the WBO, Organizations and Social Movements

Brazil-USA. The president of the WBO Board of Directors, James N. Green, along with WBO Board members Sidney Chalhoub and Barbara Weinstein, participated this Thursday in a round table on 200 years of Brazil-USA relations, at Casa de Rui Barbosa in Rio de Janeiro. The issue of the bicentenary of Brazil-USA relations was also the subject of an article written by Green in issue 114 of the WBO bulletin. The ambassadors of Brazil, Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, and the USA, Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, also discussed 200 years of bilateral relations.

Investigative journalism. The Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism will hold the 19th session of the International Congress of Investigative Journalism from July 11- to 14 in São Paulo. The meeting is the largest of its kind in the country and brings together national and foreign guests, who participate in debate panels and courses on topics, such as the environment, elections, human rights, public accounts, access to information, combating corruption, and more. Registration can be made on the Congress website.

Climate tragedies. Climate change has a detrimental effect on access to healthcare and medicines. To discuss this issue, a group of five civil society organizations – GTPI/ABIA, RS NGO/AIDS Forum, GAPA/RS and TB/RS Forum – are promoting on July 11th a virtual debate on “The Climate Tragedy of Rio Grande do Sul and its Impacts on Health, Access to Medicines and Human Rights” with members of organizations linked to the AIDS issue and representatives of the Judiciary. Registration can be done via the link.

Social media. On July 11, at 3pm, the event "The Challenge of Social Media Regulation in Democracy" will take place, sponsored by the Fernando Henrique Cardoso Foundation in partnership with the Pact for Democracy. The event is free and will take place in person in São Paulo (SP). Transparência Brasil participated in the public hearing of the Temporary Commission on Artificial Intelligence in Brazil. Held on July 2, the hearing discussed bill 2338/2023, which seeks to regulate the use of technology in the country. 


Indigenous people. Indigenous researchers from the Observatory of Indigenous Rights and Policies at the University of Brasília, in partnership with the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples in Brazil (APIB) and the Institute of Relational Policies (IPR), will conduct investigations into human rights violations against Indigenous peoples initiated by the National Truth Commission (CNV), an initiative announced within the scope of the National Seminar on Transitional Justice for Indigenous Peoples in which the executive director of the WBO, Paulo Abrão, participated.

Internet and health. Registration is open until Thursday, July 4 to participate in the Training Cycle in Digital Care and Wellbeing on the Internet, carried out by ABONG, IBASE and Ação Educativa. Civil society organizations and movements that work with technology can register to present proposals related to building a more inclusive and safe digital environment.

Feature Article

How Land Speculation Drives Environmental and Human Rights Violations in Brazil’s Cerrado 

By Jeff Conant*

With global temperatures breaking records year after year and wildfires, floods and extreme weather events ravaging countries across the world, there is little question that the climate emergency is the greatest threat facing the world today. The burning of fossil fuels is the leading cause of climate emissions, rightly placing the question of a global energy transition at center stage of environmental decision-making. But it is also critical to act on the second leading cause of climate change – deforestation. 

The loss of forest ecosystems is at the intersection of many issues: the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, the depletion of fresh water, and an epidemic of violence against environmental human rights defenders. With its vast forests and troubling history of conflicts over land and resources, few countries on earth embody these challenges more than Brazil. And while thought of Brazil’s environmental issues may immediately bring to mind the Amazon rainforest, widely revered as “the lungs of the earth,” a less well-known region, the neighboring Cerrado, is equally in need of attention.

The Brazilian Cerrado is a globally significant biome and the world’s most biodiverse savannah. It is home to Indigenous, quilombola (Afro-descendant), and other traditional peasant communities that have lived on the land for generations, as well as home to 5 percent of the world’s plant and animal species. Tragically, the Cerrado is also ground zero for Brazil’s soy industry, where vast areas of native vegetation have been destroyed and converted to industrial monoculture soy plantations. According to the National Institute for Space Research, more than 10,688 square kilometers of native Cerrado vegetation was destroyed in 2022 – an increase of more than 25 percent over the previous year, and the numbers continued to increase to over 11,000 square kilometers in 2023 – the first year in which deforestation in the Cerrado surpassed that of the Amazon.

Soy monocultures occupy more than 4 percent of Brazil’s territory, with half of that in the Cerrado biome, clearly making agribusiness the leading driver of the Cerrado’s deforestation. But in a series of recent reports by the Brazilian Network for Social Justice and Human Rights and Friends of the Earth U.S., we show that a more insidious cause lurks below the surface: financial speculation in land.  

As documented by the Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, the price of land used for soy production in Brazil has risen 127 percent on average over the past three years. This has fueled land speculation in the areas where the soy industry is growing, such as the Cerrado region in the states of Piauí and Bahia. Despite the fact that many corporations such as U.S.-based Bunge (the largest exporter of soy from Brazil), have adopted “zero deforestation” policies, such speculation drives a complex trend that we might term “farm laundering” – and continues to enable deforestation.

The process begins when politically connected but corrupt interests conspire with a notary office to create a false land title for a rural property, which is often claimed by peasant communities whose land rights are not fully recognized by the state. Then, the supposed “owners” evict the peasants, often violently, even though the peasants’ land rights are legally guaranteed by the Federal Constitution. The new “owners” then deforest the land, and, after a short cooling off period, offer the “new” farm for sale to rural real estate interests, who then lease it to soy producers. 

Corporations operating in the region include SLC Agrícola (the largest soy producer in Brazil), Insolo (formerly owned by Harvard University) and Radar/Tellus (a joint venture of Cosan, a Brazilian sugar company and TIAA, a U.S. retirement fund), and U.S.-based agribusiness giants like Bunge, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland.

The process of “farm laundering” is often further shielded by complex corporate structures. For example, a 2023 investigation found that “TIAA and COSAN used a complex network of companies to make their Brazilian land purchases,” purchasing more than 30,000 hectares of land from a real estate dealer who had been “charged with corruption and money laundering in which Brazilian judges were allegedly paid for favorable decisions in land disputes.”

In the face of intensifying environmental and human rights violations, advocacy groups like Friends of the Earth are calling on the Brazilian and U.S. governments to reign in land speculation and halt the expansion of soy plantations in the Cerrado, building on the successful Amazon Soy Moratorium. Companies active in the Cerrado should respect the land rights and self-determination of communities on the ground. And, as Indigenous peoples are often the best protectors of land, forests, and biodiversity, collective titling processes should be prioritized in order to protect the rights of Indigenous, quilombola, and other traditional communities in this globally important biome. 

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*Jeff Conant, Senior International Forests Program Manager, Friends of the Earth U.S.

*graduated in history from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). He has a master’s degree in anthropology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a doctorate in history from UFRJ . He did postdoctoral studies in social history at the same university and at the Ben Gurion Center for Israeli and Zionist Studies. He has publications in the areas of contemporary history, political history, political anthropology, studies on Zionism and Israel, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Middle East, and on the Far Right and Judaism in Brazil. He is currently a professor in the Department of Sociology at UFRJ in the Postgraduate Program in Social History, where he coordinates the Interdisciplinary Center for Jewish and Extreme Studies – Laboratory of Religion, Violence and Politics. He is also a collaborator with the Brazil Israel Institute.

**is an architect and urban planner from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). She holds a master’s degree in social anthropology from UFMG; a specialization in urban policy and planning from the UFRJ, and doctorate in urban and regional planning from the same university. She is currently doing a postdoctoral internship under the supervision of Michel Gherman at UFRJ where she researches the themes of the city and the extreme right in the twenty-first century with an emphasis on the Brazilian context and Bolsonarism, as well as issues related to language, space, and the public sphere. She works with themes of the city and culture, major urban projects and interventions, historical fascism and the contemporary extreme right-wing.

Feature articles express the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or WBO.