Used to export the production of agribusiness in Mato Grosso, BR-163, known as the “soybean route,” has become a “powder keg”. The highway is the most violent stage for protests held this month seeking the support of the Armed Forces to keep Jair Bolsonaro (PL) in the presidency after his defeat to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The “soy route” is the backbone of grain distribution in the country. The highway passes through towns that are among the largest agricultural producers, such as Sorriso, Lucas do Rio Verde and Nova Mutum. The off-season helps to explain the insistence in blocking the road.

“The paralysis is comfortable for the agribusiness producers because they have already received the inputs and planted the soybeans and corn for the next harvest. Now they will only need BR-163 as of January”, said Vivaldo Lopes, economic consultant for the Mato Grosso Association of Municipalities (AMM).

Despite the cooling off of the interdictions on BR-163, groups of Bolsonaro supporters continue camped out on the side of the road in tents, accentuating a climate of constant tension.

“These are the facts. I ask you to send it to friends who live abroad.” That’s how President Jair Bolsonaro rallied his troops in a video published on his official Twitter profile. The video narrated in English with false information about Brazilian environmental policy and deforestation in the country.

Bolsonaro claimed that the material tells “the truth of environmental preservation, when comparing Brazil to the world.” Among the lies present in the video is the claim that the country is “extremely preserved” and that it has 85% of its energy coming from renewable sources.

In the first quarter of 2022, the Amazon registered a new deforestation record, for example, according to monitoring data from the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) itself.

Two army officers have been identified as the responsible for a network of 14 fake profiles and nine Facebook pages, as well as 39 Instagram accounts, used for attacking NGOs and environmentalists and spreading lies about the Amazon and environmental issues in Brazil.

The information was shared by the company in its quarterly report on threats made by users. “We cannot share many details of how our investigation reached the military. The more we share, the more these networks are able to hide. We use technical and behavioral signals,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of global security policy, told the newspaper Estado de S. Paulo.

In a press statement about his talks with Hungarian President János Árder, Jair Bolsonaro lied once again about environmental conservation in Brazil by claiming that 63% of the country’s territory is preserved. 

According to data from the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe), in January, the Amazon hit a historical record of deforestation for the period, losing an area equivalent to 43,000 soccer fields.

Bolsonaro also questioned the country’s image as an “international villain” in the environmental agenda. “I had the opportunity to tell him what the Amazon represents for Brazil and for the world. And many times the information about this region reaches other places in a very distorted way, as if we were the great villains in on forest conservation and its destruction, something that does not exist,” he said.

Since 2019, under his administration, the country has registered successive records of deforestation in the Amazon, and became a constant target of international pressure around the issue.

President Jair Bolsonaro lied again at the UN General Assembly about the Brazilian socio-environmental policy and the reality of his administration. He was also the only G20 leader without the proper immunization.

At the meeting, which took place in New York (USA), Bolsonaro presented an unrealistic scenario. According to a fact-checking by Fakebook.eco, the president said he had doubled the resources allocated to federal environmental protection agencies, defended Brazilian agribusiness with false data and lied about the conservation of the Amazon.

While the president was speaking at the UN, an expedition of the Amazon on Fire Alliance, formed by the organizations Amazon Watch, Greenpeace Brazil, and Climate Observatory, recorded the destruction of the Amazon region with flights over areas affected by fire and illegal gold digging.

President Jair Bolsonaro took advantage of the trial of the “Marco Temporal” suit in the Federal Supreme Court (STF) that may validate the agribusiness “thesis” of the “temporal landmark”, which could halt or allow the demarcation of new indigenous lands, to spread panic and disinformation.

In an interview to Rádio Jornal de Pernambuco, Bolsonaro said that if the STF decides in favor of the indigenous people’s original right to land, overturning the thesis that they would only have the right to the areas they occupied in 1988, agribusiness will no longer have anywhere to produce and will cease to exist. “We simply will not have agriculture in Brazil anymore. Brazil will be doomed. I don’t know how we will live, perhaps importing food. Now, paying with what money? I don’t know either,” said the president.

But the data shows otherwise. According to Sonia Guajajara and Eloy Terena, coordinators of the Indigenous Peoples Network of Brazil (Articulação Nacional dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil), private land currently covers 41 percent of the country, while indigenous lands occupy just 13.8 percent. Pointing to the central role of demarcations for socio-environmental conservation, the leaders claim that degraded private territories could be recovered. “Around 22% of the national territory is occupied by pasture – but half of it with some degree of degradation- and 8% by agriculture, according to the MapBiomas project. In other words, part of the land could be prioritized for recovery, further reducing the demand for new occupations,” they explain in an article.

In her first live broadcast after assuming the presidency of the Chamber of Deputies Environment Committee, federal congressional representative Carla Zambelli (PSL) lied about the Amazon, attacked NGOs and defended gold digging on indigenous lands, according to a fact check carried out by Fakebook.eco. Zambelli also said that, until the inauguration, she did not know about illegal landgrabbing, one of the priority agendas of her commission. “I think I have little technical thinking, with little knowledge, so I’m still learning”, she said.

Among the untrue statements of the representative is the affirmation, as systematically propagated by the government, that the native peoples of the Amazon are the main responsible for the devastation of the forest.

While Pantanal wetlands face record breaking rates of forest fires, Agriculture Minister Teresa Cristina stated that the problem could be mitigated if there was more livestock activity in the biome. She also said that the devastation was because of the sizeable amount of “dry organic matter” in the region. The minister’s speech alludes to the “thesis” of the “firefighter cattle”, presented by the livestock leader Leopoldo Mário in an article in Folha de S. Paulo in September. The farmer stated that cattle would be the “fireman of the Pantanal” for cleaning up the pasture, and defended the permission of controlled burning as a measure to reduce fires in the region.

According to data from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), 14% of the Pantanal area was burned only in September, a historical record of annual devastation since the beginning of the monitoring work carried out by the agency in 2002. In addition to the drought that marked the period, data from the Integrated Multiagencies Center for Operational Coordination of Mato Grosso (Ciman-MT) point out that the fires recorded in the state were caused by intentional human action. According to an analysis by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), INPE’s partner in monitoring the region affected by the fires, the fires consumed 26% of the total area of ​​the Pantanal in 2020, from January to September.

On September 21st, on the eve of Bolsonaro’s speech at the UN General Assembly, Brazilian chancellor Ernesto Araújo refused to accept a debate, promoted by United Nations Human Rights Council, about the crisis in the Amazon.  According to reports by the website UOL, directly from the UN in Geneva, the diplomat was reacting to the fact that for the first time in its democratic period Brazil became the target of an official recommendation for an international investigation on the federal government policies for the environment and human rights in Brazil. 

It was amid this awkward atmosphere of attacks from the Brazilian diplomacy to the UN that president Bolsonaro took his pre-recorded speech to the opening ceremony of the 75th UN General Assembly on the 22nd. During a roughly 14 minutes speech, Bolsonaro defended his government’s performance on the environment, blamed indigenous and traditional communities for the record forest fires this season, and complained that Brazil was a victim of an international misinformation campaign about deforestation. He also claimed that the country has the best environmental legislation of the planet and is a leader on “forest conservation”. The president used the opportunity to defend the agribusiness sector and deny the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, which disproportionately affected indigenous and quilombola communities. 

Civil society organizations such as the Climate Observatory (OC) prepared to fact-check the president’s statements in real time, and detected a high number of lies and fake news. In a press release, OC said that “by simultaneously denying the environmental crisis and the pandemic, the president provides a soundtrack for divestment and cancelling of international trade agreements in a critical post-Covid 19 time of economic recovery”. WWF-Brazil said that Bolsonaro made unfounded accusations and anti-science conclusions that are not aligned with the role of a Chief of State.  Buzzfeed published a test about what was real and what was fake in the Brazilian president’s speech at the UN.

Fake news, misinformation and accusations of crimes against the homeland: that was how members of the Bolsonaro government reacted to campaigns and denunciations by civil society about deforestation and forest fires in the Amazon, Cerrado and Pantanal regions. President Bolsonaro set the tone of the reaction: in his weekly live broadcast on September 3, he compared NGOs working in defense of the Amazon to a “cancer”.

The president referred to the movement launched by Brazilian activists at the end of August with the motto “Defund Bolsonaro”, which angered government supporters. The campaign video says that Bolsonaro allows the destruction of the Amazon with the support of large companies and ends with the challenge: “Which side are you on? The Amazon or Bolsonaro?”. Civil society entities such as the Climate Observatory and the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil Network (APIB) helped to disseminate the material. There was an organized movement to bring down the initiative’s Instagram profile. According to a report in the newspaper O Globo, messages with instructions to report the campaign circulated in WhatsApp groups on September 6th.

On the 9th, the Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles, Vice President Hamilton Mourão and Federal Deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro shared a “video response” that declared that the Amazon was not burning, withheld data from National Space Research Institute (Inpe) and used images of the tamarin golden lion, an endangered species that lives only in the Atlantic Rainforest, thousands of miles away from the Amazon. The video had English narration and was signed by the ruralist association of Pará State. Part of the images that appear in the ruralist video were from the Greenpeace collection and, therefore, used without authorization. The NGO requested the takedown of the video for infringing copyrights and the piece ended up being removed from Twitter.

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio, meanwhile, retweeted the original “Defund Bolsonaro” video, generating a new wave of reactions. The government’s denialist speech was countered by NGOs and experts with data from Inpe who pointed out that the number of hot spots in the Amazon between January 1 and September 9, 2020, is the highest in the last ten years, with a 6% growth when compared to 2019.

On September 13, false posts on social networks accused NGOs of being responsible for the fires in the Amazon. The posts used a 2014 photo of indigenous people arresting illegal loggers as if the image was current and the detainees were members of NGOs. Several fact-checking agencies pointed to the posts as fake news.

The following week, it was the turn of General Augusto Heleno, chief minister of the Institutional Security Office (GSI) of the Presidency of the Republic, to attack Apib for supporting the Defund Bolsonaro campaign. In a post published on his social media profiles, Heleno accused Apib of being the organization behind the campaign website, whose objectives would be “to publish fake news against Brazil, to impute environmental crimes to the President of the Republic and to support a worldwide boycott against Brazilian products”. The general also affirmed that Sônia Bone Guajajara, coordinator of Apib, is linked to Leonardo DiCaprio, “a staunch critic of the country” and concluded by saying that “the Apib website is associated with several others who work 24 hours a day to tarnish our image on abroad and commit crimes against the homeland“.

In a note, Apib rejected the general’s statement, saying that “the biggest crime that harms our country is the government’s failure to curb the destruction of our biomes, aid protected areas, stop illegal fires, land grabbing, deforestation and the invasion of our lands and theft of our wealth. On the eve of the UN General Assembly, the whole world is witnessing this crime – too big to be concealed (…). The accusations, besides being frivolous and misleading, are irresponsible because they put at risk the personal safety of those mentioned. Apib will study the appropriate measures“.

During his weekly social media broadcast, president Bolsonaro once again said that the claims about his government not protecting the environment are “unfair” and that they are part of a “commercial struggle” that aims at jeopardizing Brazil agribusiness, calling Europe an “environmental cult”. He also blamed Brazilian indigenous people and traditional communities for provoking forest fires: “indigenous people, river dwellers, native Brazilians, caboclos, they constantly do that kind of thing.” Bolsonaro used fake information to defend himself, stating that under his administration forest fires and hotspots are at an all-time low.

After the minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles, and senator Flávio Bolsonaro posted an out of context video of the Brazilian medic Dráuzio Varella, Twitter determined that the tweets should be erased. Both suggested that Varella was downsizing the gravity of the virus. A Varella’s spokesperson said the usage of the video was “political” and promoted “disinformation”. 

This was not the first time that minister Salles used his social media profile as a medium to spread fake news. In 2019, he tweeted false information about a Greenpeace ship, correlating it to the oil spillage that struck Brazil’s coastline in August.

According to the newspaper O Globo, after signing the bill that aims to regulate mining and power plants  in indigenous territories, president Jair Bolsonaro said that he wished “he could confine those folks from the environment,” in the Amazon, “so that they would stop troubling the people who live in the region”.

While talking about the forest fires in Alter do Chão in an interview, president Jair Bolsonaro said that the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Leonardo di Caprio were behind the forest fires in Brazil. Once again, Bolsonaro didn’t present any evidence to back his statements. Di Caprio and the NGO denied the accusations.

Brazilian civil  society was taken by surprise when the Civil Police of Para State preventively arrested four volunteer firefighters in Alter do Chão, municipality of Santarém. The arrests were made as part of an operation that investigates the origin of forest fires that affected Alter do Chão back in September, which burnt an area the size of 1,600 football fields. According to the state civil police, investigations point that NGOs, among them the Alter do Chão Fire Brigade, acted to start the fires.  

The police also raided the office for Saude e Alegria Project (PSA), using a generic search warrant to apprehend computers and paperwork. Just last week, the NGO won a prize as one of the Best 99 NGOs in Brazil. Caetano Scannavino, coordinator for PSA, said: “It’s a nightmare. What we can clearly see is a political action to try to demoralise NGOs working in the Amazon. It’s very worrisome.” Caetano says he personally knows the 4 arrested people, and one of them works for PSA. “They all seem to be extremely committed people”.  

Later that day, a police sheriff with the Civil Police in Para said that they have plenty of investigative material on the alleged irregular work of NGOs in the state. He said that 3 local Santarém NGOs – Projeto Saúde e Alegria, Brigada Alter do Chão e Aquíferos Alter do Chão – received money from WWF Brazil to fight the fires, but that some of this money had been diverted. The information about money diversion was not part of the original denouncement that came to the public. 

All 3 NGOs published notes and denied irregularities, saying that were taken by surprise with the accusations and making themselves available for the inquiries. On the 27th, during a custody hearing with the judge, the 4 detained volunteers asked for the suspension of the preventive arrests, but the request was denied. Their lawyer is now taking the case to the State Justice Court where a request for habeas corpus will be filed.

When asked to comment on this case, the Minister of the Environment only said it is a Para State led investigation and that it’s necessary to wait for the findings of the inquiry.

The Public Prosecutor’s Office (MPF) asked for full access to the inquiry that led to the arrest of four brigadiers accused of forest fires in Alter do Chão, in the State of Pará. Opposed to what the Pará Civil Police established, the MPF pointed to the action of land-grabbers and declared “that there were no elements that pointed to the participation of brigadiers or civil society organizations”. The prosecutors algo pointed that as one of the most famous river beach destinations in the country, the area is coveted by the tourism and real estate industries, and is under threat of public land invaders.

A  day after declaring that deforestation is a “cultural  thing” in Brazil, President Bolsonaro ranted again when the press asked him questions about environmental issues. “How is Brazil now in the environment? 61% is still preserved. What other  country in the world has it? No other. So nobody can bother us about the environmental issue,” he said to journalists as he was leaving the presidential palace. “What is the forest in the margins of rivers in Europe? One palm? (…) We only have the machine of our economy which is agribusiness. Do they want to bury agribusiness? Want me to do what some leaders wanted in the first international meeting, to go from 14% to 20% of indigenous reservations. Do they want to finish Brazil? It ends, and you will eat grass. You from the press  will eat grass because there will be no more food in the fields”. 

On the same day, the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama), relaxed the rules for monitoring and fines against buyers of illegal wood. The measure makes it more difficult to punish sawmills that buy wood using fraudulent documents and may encourage illegal logging in the Amazon.

In a meeting with the press, president Bolsonaro was asked if he talked to the  Minister of  the Environment about the increase in Amazon deforestation in 2019 as reported by INPE a few days earlier. ‘You are not going to put an end to deforestation or to the fires, it’s a cultural thing. I saw Marina Silva criticising the day before yesterday. In her time, we had the highest level of illicit in the Amazon region,” declared the president. Marina Silva was Minister of the Environment between 2003 and 2008; in a tweet on November 18th, she said: “The President has no commitment to the truth. As Minister of the Environment, I implemented a Plan to Prevent and Control deforestation in the Amazon that reduced the deforestation rate in 80% from 2004-2012”.

The Minister of Environment took to Twitter to diffuse fake news amid the oil spill crisis. He posted a picture of the Greenpeace ship MV Esperanza along with a text that read: “There are coincidences in life…It seems that the #greenpixe ship was fitly sailing international waters in front of the Brazilian coast right around the time of the venezuelan oil spill…”. 

The infamous tweet generated a lot of backlash towards the Minister. Deputy Rodrigo Maia, President of the Chamber of Deputies, also used Twitter to challenge Minister Salles on presenting an official position about the accusation. Salles then responded Maia by attacking Greenpeace from a different angle: “the Greenpeace ship confirmed that it sailed close to the Brazilian coast by the time the Venezuelan oil showed up, and, just like their members on land, did not engage to help”. 

Later on the same day, Greenpeace  published a note clarifying that the ship was en route from the Caribbean to Uruguay and announced that the filing of a diffamation criminal complaint against Minister Salles at a Federal court.

Under increasing pressure to solve the origin of the oil spill and work harder on contention measures in the Northeast, president Bolsonaro chose irony to attack NGOs on a tweet about the matter: “Since September 02 our government is trying to identify who is responsible for the oil spill in the beaches of  the Northeast. We are worried about the unusual silence of the UN and the NGOs, always so attentive to the environment”.