BRAZIL
Army Crackdown
Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro responded to widespread international criticism of his management of the fires ravaging the Amazon rainforest by sending in the military on Saturday.
Bolsonaro deployed military aircraft and about 44,000 troops to fight the flames across six Brazilian states struggling to contain the fire, Vox reported.
The move came two weeks after the fires began, but almost immediately after French President Emmanuel Macron threatened to stymie a trade deal with a South American bloc that includes Brazil over Bolsonaro’s blase approach to the crisis, the news site noted.
Earlier, Bolsonaro blamed nonprofit organizations for starting the fires and claimed Brazil lacked adequate resources to fight them effectively. Though such fires occur regularly, they’re especially intense this year due to drought, extreme heat and deforestation, drawing comparisons to the large-scale forest fires that have hit Russia, Alaska, Greenland, California, and elsewhere this year.
Meanwhile, Bolsonaro has been busily working to roll back the country’s environmental protection policies, and its main environmental agency’s efforts to fight deforestation reduced dramatically over the first half of 2019, the New York Times reported.
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