The has seen the purchase of parliamentary amendments that have been used by local governments.
Based on this finding, the Sheet traveled to understand how the Union’s resources have been implemented at the end by city halls in Amazonian states.
The scenario found was the spread of illegal works throughout the territory, which do not follow the proper environmental licensing rite and contribute to the degradation of the environment.
In this video report, part of the “” series, the paving of a state highway in the interior of Amazonas, made possible by , serves as a guiding thread to show how actions by public authorities and some of their representatives have helped to consolidate these illegal paths opened in the forest.
The production also heard from politicians and researchers who analyze the trend towards intensification of a development model based on roads, which has served as a vector for the increase in the Amazon.
In one organized by the Federal University of Acre (UFAC), for example, researcher Sonaira Souza da Silva – one of those interviewed in the video – identified a significant increase in the number of roads overlapping conservation units in the state in the last ten years.
According to the study, the construction of more than 50% of these paths is concentrated between 2019 and 2025, a period of intensification of federal transfers to congressmen.
“To open a branch, you think that heavy machinery will come in straight away, but there are phases. Initially they start with paths that the farmers, rubber tappers and the people who live there will open”, analyzes the UFAC professor responsible for the research.
“As they consolidate, they will ask the government – the state government, the municipal government – to expand that branch to improve access”, he concludes.
Another point addressed in the video is the lack of funds for environmental agencies and entities responsible for supervising this type of work.
Since 2015, when the share of the budget controlled by Congress began to grow, in the wake of the political crisis that weakened the Executive and brought down the government, almost R$300 billion in federal resources were committed through parliamentary amendments. But, of this total,.
Budget experts interviewed in the video report assess that the lack of funds for inspection, combined with the dispersion of resources among parliamentarians without unified coordination, created the perfect scenario for the execution of poorly planned works, which do not respect the environmental licensing procedure.
“We see that, in some ministries, amendments represent more than 50% of resources. And they follow the logic of meeting specific, particularistic interests of political groups, highly instrumentalized through works or equipment”, assesses political advisor at the Institute of Socioeconomic Studies (Inesc) Alessandra Cardoso.
For the president of Ibama, another interviewed by the production, the development model based on road transport, predominant in the rest of the country, has been gaining strength in the Amazon. “Most Amazonian cities were connected by rivers”, he recalls.
“Small cities, which normally do not have their own revenue, now have a large volume of resources to carry out large infrastructure works. In many places, this machinery is an instrument of crime. In the same way that someone uses a weapon to commit a robbery, the machine is the instrument itself for committing the environmental crime of deforestation”, he says in the interview.
