The Brazilian government’s drug policy chief has admitted that the rapid advance of drug factions into the Amazon rainforest has produced a “a very difficult situation” in the region, as a UN report warned that flourishing organized crime groups were driving a boom in environmental devastation.
Marta Machado, the national secretary for drug affairs, said the previous administration’s intentional dismantling of Brazil’s environmental and Indigenous protection agencies had created a dangerous vacuum in the Amazon which had been occupied by powerful crime syndicates from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
“Weakening the mechanisms of monitoring and surveillance for organized environmental crime has opened this space that was occupied by the drug cartels,” she warned, adding: “The problem in the Amazon is clearly a consequence of … the deliberate omission of the previous government and [its] almost [encouragement of] environmental crimes in the Amazon.”
Machado was speaking during a three-day congress organized by the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety that was attended by senior security chiefs and government officials as well as environmentalists, Indigenous activists and intelligence analysts.
For the first time, the event was held in the Amazon, in a sign of mounting concern over the impact organized crime groups are having on the sprawling rainforest region where illegal deforestation and mining exploded during Bolsonaro’s 2019-2023 presidency.
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Le journal du peintre 2 