Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Monday ordered federal troops to be deployed to the Amazon rainforest to fight deforestation of the region as the dry season approaches, a time when farmers burn acres of trees to gain agricultural land.
According to the Associated Press, Bolsonaro announced the troops will be dispatched to the Para, Amazonas, Mato Grosso and Rondonia regions. The federal decree signed by Bolsonaro did not mention the length of the deployment or how many troops would be sent.
While Bolsonaro has called for the development of the rainforest, he’s been under pressure from world leaders including US President Joe Biden to protect the Amazon, which is known as the “lungs of the planet” because of the amount of oxygen it produces.
The deforestation of the rainforest hit the highest point in 2020 since 2008. Nearly all of it, 98.8%, was done either in illegal areas, near vital springs or without proper permits.
Environmental activists, however, call Bolsonaro’s action nothing but show. “The government has adopted a series of measures that simply destroys the state’s monitoring capacity, like stopping environmental fines,″ Márcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a network of environmental nonprofit groups, said. He added that the regulator has also ceased destroying machinery used for illegal logging.