Lula appoints staunch defenders of Amazon as ministers in Brazil | Brazil

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Two global defenders of the Amazon, Marina Silva and Sonia Guajajara, have been appointed ministers in Brazil’s new government in an effort to contain the intensifying assault on indigenous lands and the environment.

The announcement was made by incoming President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who will take office on Sunday four years after the country’s rainforests were devastated under his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.

Silva, 64, will return to her job as environment minister, which she held from 2003 to 2008 — a period when Brazil managed to dramatically reduce deforestation in the Amazon.

Guajajara, 48, will lead Brazil’s first indigenous ministry, created in response to the wave of violence and land invasions spurred by Bolsonaro’s dismantling of indigenous and environmental protections.

“[This is] “A landmark in our history of struggle and resistance,” Guajara said. “The creation of a Ministry of Indigenous Peoples is a testament to President Lula’s commitment to protecting our autonomy and the space to make decisions about our lands, our bodies, and our ways of life.”

Bolsonaro’s anti-indigenous and anti-environmental policies were exposed earlier this year by the killings of indigenous expert Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips in the Amazon, where deforestation has risen by 60% since 2019.

Marina Silva with the incoming president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who appointed her Minister of the Environment. Photograph: Adriano Machado/Reuters

Speaking after Lula’s election in October, Silva said the new government will strive to honor the memory of the rainforest martyrs by building a “new democratic ecosystem” in which environmental conservation, sustainability and climate emergency are its top priorities.

Born in a remote rubber-bugging community in the western Amazon in 1958, Silva became Brazil’s youngest female senator and an internationally respected environmentalist. She joined Lula’s government after his election in 2002, but resigned in 2008 after a series of political battles related to environmental policy.

Born in the Ariboya region of eastern Amazonia, Guajajara became one of the leading lights in Brazil’s burgeoning indigenous rights movement, as well as a prominent left-wing politician. In 2018, Guajara became the first indigenous woman to run for vice president in Brazil. She won a place in Brazil’s overwhelmingly white male Congress in the October elections.

During his recent trip to the Amazon, Guajara said the new ministry — which will represent Brazil’s 307 indigenous groups — demonstrates Lula’s true commitment to protecting the environment and standing up for indigenous communities who have been “threatened, weakened and weakened” by Bolsonaro.

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However, experts say that the next government will face huge challenges in its battle to rebuild the protection of indigenous people and the environment, given the deliberate dismantling of the Environment Ministry that took place under Bolsonaro.

The ministry is destroyed. no longer exists. “It will have to be rebuilt almost from scratch,” said Marcio Astrini, head of an umbrella NGO group called the Climate Observatory.

Astrini welcomed the return of experienced and knowledgeable environmental figures like Silva, but warned that powerful politicians and criminal gangs pushing the rainforest toward a catastrophic tipping point will not suddenly disappear. “The Amazon will not be wiped out overnight,” he said.

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