Jonathon Shafi: The EU is complicit in a reckless system that puts money before people

This is not an isolated incident, but the latest in a pattern of violence and intimidation. Intimidation that is intensifying as a result of Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, and his policy of opening up the Amazon, the lungs of the planet, to further exploitation. The ancestral homes of the indigenous people are to be cleared.

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Will today be the day we reach 40 degrees? That was the question being asked on news and TV outlets in the UK last week, just as mining assassins had struck down an indigenous leader in the ever more desperate and rapacious pursuit of profit.

It is not a great leap to join these two dots. As the UN Human Rights chief Michelle Bachelet said, the mounting violence against indigenous communities is clearing the way for “further destruction of the rainforest, with all the scientifically-established ramifications that has for the exacerbation of climate change.”

As Emrya’s bloodied body was dumped in a river, a message was being sent. Move off these lands, or die. And with the death of the flourishing of these forests, the climate emergency ratchets up.

Bolsonaro is keen to steam roller new tracts of the Amazon. As the director of the Amazon Watch Program, Christian Poirer has said, “his regime’s reckless policies and its wanton neglect of threatened forest communities is directly linked to rising violent criminality”. When he is accused of pursuing mass deforestation, and of covering up for the violence against the peoples living in the Amazon, he simply says it is a lie.

But he also wants to disarm criticism – in a dictatorial fashion. Since coming to power, he has dismantled government departments who focus on climate change. He has promoted climate change deniers to the highest offices.

As soon as he came to power, he signed an executive order that handed the regulation of protected Amazonian lands to the Agricultural Ministry, which is dominated by agri-business interests.

Bolsonaro has also displayed a long track record of anti-indigenous sentiment, once commenting: “It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry wasn’t as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated their Indians.”

The disaster being visited upon Brazil’s 900,000 indigenous people is a disaster for the world. This is one consequence of the election of Bolsonaro.

Last year, I went to Rio and Sao Paulo during the election to speak to activists and to report back to meetings in Scotland on the situation there. I met with campaigners and watched the results come in with hundreds of Fernando Haddad supporters, the candidate up against Bolsonaro. People held on to one another as it became clear, as expected, that Bolsonaro was going to win.

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The very next day, tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Sao Paulo and cities across Brazil. In an act of courageous defiance, they made clear they would resist the new regime.

I spoke to activists about their plans. “The initial task is to survive, so we are organising solidarity networks,” said one. This response was unsurprising. Attacks against LGBT people were a result of the huge propaganda effort waged by the Bolsonaro campaign.

Marrielle Franco, a left-wing councillor in Rio, was shot dead months before. Her face now adorns walls across the city as a reminder of the violence of the forces of reaction in Brazil, as well as resistance unbowed in the face of aggression.

I noted two days after the election: “Gunmen have attacked an indigenous Bororo village in Mato Grosso do Sul. The attackers destroyed the whole village. This is to clear the way for mining and logging. Clearances for the corporations to move in.”

Thus, the response from the boardrooms and the ideologues of global capitalism to the election of Bolsonaro was quite different from that of the rainforest defenders. The Wall Street Journal backed him to the hilt. He was the choice of the international markets. And more recently, the EU struck a Mercosur trade deal that is catastrophic for the environment. The deal negotiated by the European Commission, has been lauded as historic by Bolsonaro.

The deal sees a trade in “cows for cars”, whereby the EU gains access to markets for cars and other products and services with eliminated export taxes, in return for Mercosur countries gaining access to markets for beef, sugar and other goods.

Cattle farming is the single biggest contributor to the deforestation of the rain forest. Some 63 per cent of deforested areas in the Amazon are a result of commercial animal pastures. The deal incentivises the destruction, and it legitimises and entrenches Bolsonaro’s approach.

But that is nothing that wordsmith advocates of corporate globalisation cannot make sound progressive. As the Commissioner for Trade Cecelia Malmstrom put it, the agreement “brings Europe and South America closer together in a spirit of cooperation”.

This is the internationalism of the neoliberal oligarchy. It is a faux internationalism that exists to perpetuate the elevation of corporate interests over the needs of people and planet.

Emrya Wajapi is his name. Found murdered in a river, he and hundreds of thousands like him, are the last line of defence in the Amazon. Ranged against them – the violence of men desperate for gold and treasure. A regime that sees them as a pest to be eradicated. And a world system that elevates short-term profit above all else.

But the rivers are rising. And as the temperatures rise with them, it is time to turn up the heat on capitalism itself. Then we might rediscover the kind of internationalist spirit needed if we are to prevent our own extinction.