Brazil minister probed for timber trafficking

IN THE DOCK: Brazil’s Environment Minister Ricardo Salles during a news conference in Brasilia yesterday. (Reuters)

Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered an investigation of Environment Minister Ricardo Salles as police raided ministry offices yesterday, targeting a timber trafficking ring allegedly involving him and other top officials in far-right President Jair Bolsonaro’s government. The ruling by Justice Alexandre de Moraes said federal police had evidence that Salles and other environmental officials were involved in an “extremely serious scheme to facilitate the contraband of rainforest products.” It suspended 10 officials from their posts, including Eduardo Bim, head of the Brazilian environmental protection agency, IBAMA. Salles, one of the most controversial figures in Bolsonaro’s government, has presided over a surge of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest since taking the post in 2019, and activists accuse him of dismantling Brazil’s environmental protection programmes. Brazilian media reports said police had searched his home in Sao Paulo. Moraes’s ruling granted police access to the minister’s bank accounts to look for evidence of illicit income. Some 160 officers also raided environment ministry offices in Brasilia, Sao Paulo and the northern state of Para, police said. The alleged scheme involved a 2020 IBAMA policy allowing the export of Brazilian wood without prior approval from environmental authorities, which the court ruling revoked. The policy “retroactively legalised thousands of wood shipments exported in violation of environmental regulations” to the United States and Europe, police said. Salles, 45, denied wrongdoing. “These alleged acts never happened,” he told journalists. The news was the latest blow to Brazil’s environmental track record under Bolsonaro. The destruction of the Amazon, a vital resource for curbing climate change, has accelerated in Brazil since the former army captain took office in 2019. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon surged by 9.5% in the 12 months to August 2020, destroying an area bigger than Jamaica, according to government data. Bolsonaro vowed at a world climate summit hosted by the United States last month to eliminate illegal deforestation by 2030, but has repeatedly pushed to open protected lands to farming, cattle ranching and industry. Activists and experts say Salles, the top official tasked with fighting environmental destruction, has in fact facilitated it. In April 2020, the minister was recorded telling a cabinet meeting the government should take advantage of the distraction created by the coronavirus pandemic to relax environmental rules. “Now that the media’s only talking about Covid, we need to use this moment of calm to ‘bring the whole herd of cattle through’ and change all the regulations,” he said. He later denied that he wanted to gut environmental protections, saying he meant only that the government should try to cut red tape. Salles came under fresh scrutiny last month when the federal police chief for the state of Amazonas, Alexandre Saraiva, was replaced after going to the Supreme Court to accuse the environment minister of helping illegal loggers. Saraiva celebrated the latest news as vindication of his accusations, though the two cases are not directly related. “Let all the trees of the forest sing for joy,” Saraiva wrote on Twitter, quoting a Bible verse. The suspended officials included IBAMA’s head of environmental protection, as well as a special advisor and an assistant secretary for biodiversity in Salles’s ministry. Environmental group Greenpeace called for Salles himself to be added to the list. “In the battle between protecting our forests and benefiting criminals, Brazil’s current government has made clear which side it’s on — and Ricardo Salles is a central figure in the effort to undermine environmental authorities’ ability to do their jobs,” it said in a statement. The Climate Observatory, a coalition of Brazilian environmental groups, said Salles had “acted against the environment from the day he set foot in his ministry.”