Portugal among countries invited to travel to the Amazon

The Brazilian Government has invited 10 heads of foreign diplomatic missions, including that of Portugal, to travel to the Amazon next week, to verify the “preservation of that forest”.

According to the G1 news portal, South Africa, Germany, Canada, Colombia, Spain, France, Peru, Portugal, United Kingdom and Sweden are the countries that will have their diplomatic representatives traveling next Wednesday to the Amazon rainforest, on a mission that will be headed by the Brazilian vice president, Hamilton Mourão.

In addition to these countries, the diplomatic heads of the European Union and the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), based in Brasilia, should also participate in the trip.

The vice president of Brazil, who heads the National Council for the Legal Amazon, an entity that coordinates several actions aimed at preserving what is the largest tropical forest in the world, indicated last month that he was preparing a diplomatic offensive to respond to Europe about destruction of the Amazon.

Mourão stated, at the time, that Brazil “does not deny or hide information about the seriousness of the situation” that affects the forest, such as fires and record deforestation, but stressed that the Government “does not accept simplistic or distorted narratives” which, in his opinion , prevail “in some parts of the world”.

Just last week, the President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, said that his executive was finalizing the details of a trip to take foreign diplomats to visit the Amazon rainforest so that they see that “nothing is burning or even a hectare of devastated jungle. “.

The trip began to be planned after eight European countries sent a letter to Mourão, stating that the increase in deforestation in the Amazon could make it difficult to import Brazilian products.

These criticisms, which have already been exposed to Brazil several months ago by representatives of some 40 global investment funds, join others made by powerful companies, which have turned against the environmental management of Bolsonaro’s executive.

On the trip to the Amazon, the Brazilian Government will be represented by ministers Tereza Cristina (Agriculture), Ricardo Salles (Environment), Ernesto Araújo (Foreign Affairs), Eduardo Pazuello (Health), Augusto Heleno (Institutional Security Office) and the head of the Armed Forces General Staff, Raul Botelho, in addition to Hamilton Mourão, according to G1.

The trip is expected to last three days.

Between January and September this year, the Brazilian Amazon recorded 76,030 fires, the highest number since 2010, when 102,409 fires were recorded in the same period, the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) reported last week.

Deforestation of the world’s largest rainforest reached more than seven thousand square kilometers from January to September, an alarming number, despite a 10% drop compared to the same period in 2019, the year in which all records were broken, according to the same public body.