The relationship between democracy and climate issues and the difficulties that the environmental sector faces in the National Congress were topics of debate this Wednesday (12) at , in Belém.
In partnership with the Record editorial group, the work brings together 41 articles written in the newspaper throughout the four decades of redemocratization, accompanied by another 40 unpublished texts, which comment and update the historical articles.
Authors of three texts participated in the debate: the indigenous leader and activist, the journalist and former federal deputy and the public policy coordinator of the Climate Observatory and former president of Ibama,. The mediation was by the reporter from Sheet
Alessandra Munduruku recalled that democracy is part of the reality of her people. “We carry out consultation, we talk to the elderly, with children, with young people. Nothing is decided by one or two people, but by a general assembly.”
In ‘The Word and Power’, the indigenous leader comments on an article by , published in Sheet in May 1996.
“Darcy spoke about the advancement of agribusiness. Today we have the even greater advancement of mining. And there is also the increasingly fragile, and the paralysis of the demarcation of indigenous lands.”
For Alessandra Munduruku, what is currently in the National Congress is not democracy. “Democracy is when we listen to the grassroots, think about who will be impacted. They [os parlamentares] They talk so much about compensation and indemnity, but since we first set foot in Brazil, we haven’t seen indigenous people with their lands demarcated without invaders.”
In the book, Suely Araújo comments on a September 2013 text written by , current Minister of the Environment. “The minister warned that the climate crisis was just around the corner [ficaria muito evidente em 2070]. What caught my attention in my text is that it arrived earlier than we all expected. We are already in the middle of the climate crisis,” he said.
According to the environmentalist, there was an advance in environmental policies during redemocratization. “The initial milestone was the Constituent Assembly, with the chapter on the environment and the insertion of other provisions in it”, he said. “We were at a time when we were still able to pass laws with environmental content. Today it’s complicated.”
Suely Araújo relates the “problem in the quality of democracy” in Congress to the “terrible results” in the approval of environmental protection measures. “The main example is the environmental licensing law, which has been the main tool in the country since 1981 for preventing damage to the environment.”
“Congress approved a very bad text, which implodes environmental licensing in the country,” she stated. “The Executive Branch made 63 vetoes, but yesterday [terça, dia 11] we had confirmation that the president of the Senate will plan to overturn these vetoes on the 25th”.
According to, the advance of the extreme right has changed the correlation of political forces in Brazil. “Not only did democracy retreat, but the environmental process also retreated. The presidency that emerged from there [Jair Bolsonaro] I didn’t want indigenous people to have their rights. The other perspective was to deny the process of climate change, to consider it a message of international Marxism.”
For the former federal deputy, “all of this also changed the composition of Congress.”
“Through a lot of negotiation and a lot of work, we achieved some progress [no Congresso]. Today we see that those achievements are already being called into question, such as the licensing process now”, says Gabeira.
He indicates the existence of a “new correlation of forces in environmental law, which largely favors people who want to destroy the environment.”
