Amazon fires, it is yellow about the release of arrested volunteers. The Italian Greens attack Bolsonaro

he points his suspicions on land grabbers, wild occupation and real estate speculation.
The story has an international political implication: police arrests in fact reinforce Bolsonaro's thesis, which has long accused Indios and NGOs of setting fires, and this happens – perhaps not coincidentally – just behind the 25th UN Conference of the Parties on climate change to be held in Madrid from 2 to 13 December, in which the Brazilian president himself will participate.Then there is a repercussion in Italy, with the leader of the Greens, Angelo Bonelli, which disputes "the inverted world theorem" of Bolsonaro himself who "accuses those who put out fires and not those who want to exploit them".

The news of the imminent release of the four volunteers – still unofficial – was relaunched by the site The Impact: "Justice releases those arrested in the operation Fogo do Saire"headlines the online network based in Prainha.

Here is the story. There are four volunteers of a note of the Amazon NGO, the Alter do Chão (Apa) of Saltarem, in the Brazilian state of Para, who ended up in prison because they were accused of being arsonists. According to the police indictment, they caused fires which they then extinguished to obtain funding from international environmental organizations.

Foreign

Amazonia: burned fires, 4 NGO volunteers arrested. But the left accuses: "Setting to give reason to Bolsonaro"

by ALBERTO CUSTODERO

But the police operation has perhaps non-random timing and curiously makes fun of the Brazilian president. Always hostile to NGOs, Jair Bolsonaro he immediately took the opportunity to stigmatize the Apa and support what he has always said: "The fire-makers are the NGOs". In all likelihood, he will support this thesis in the coming days precisely in Madrid.

The whole affair seems a real provocation. Because not only the prosecution's evidence, collected by the Civil Police, were confused and weak but it is suspected that the investigations were started precisely to divert attention to the real perpetrators of the series of fires that devastated the heart until last October of the rainforest. With a far from diplomatic statement, the Federal Prosecutor took to the field and immediately demanded all the investigation documents from the Civil Police.

The prosecutor's office was surprised at the investigation given that last September an investigation had been underway into the causes of the fires that were destroying the Amazon. "In the Federal Police investigation," reads a statement released in the morning, "nothing has indicated the participation of the brigade or civil society organizations.

On the contrary, the line of federal investigations, followed by 2015, points to its suspicions about land grabbers, wild occupation and real estate speculation as causes of the environmental degradation of Alter (the protected area involved by the fires, ed). Since it is one of the most famous places in the country, "recalls the note of the Federal Prosecutor's Office," the region is the object of greed by the tourist and real estate industries and is under pressure from the invaders of public lands ".

The four members of the NGO Brigade Alter do Chão, defined by Bolsonaro as "terrorist", allegedly provoked the burning of an area as large as 1,600 football fields. It took four days to narrow the flames. Applying and then extinguishing fires, according to the prosecution, would have allowed the NGO to obtain a series of loans, selling photos in which they appeared at work and other images purchased by the WWF. Funds would also have arrived from Leonardo di Caprio who last summer had intervened in the battle against the devastation of the Amazon.

The evidence offered by the civil police delegate, Jose Humberto Melo Junior, would be videos and wiretaps that have been made public but do not prove anything. The defense of the four explains that they show the training phases of the volunteers together with the firemen and the interceptions speak of the perplexities that some of the four arrested on the correct destination of the funds that were offered from all over the world.

The WWF denied ever having purchased images from the NGO and explained that the funds, 70,600 reais, about 16 thousand euros, were used only for the purchase of fire-fighting equipment. The intervention of the Federal Prosecutor, who is investigating a completely different direction, at this point could create a serious conflict and unmask the entire operation. His is a clear denunciation of those who have made the investigations and why he has directed them against someone who, with great difficulty and in a voluntary manner, has been transformed into a pyromaniac.

The goal is to divert the investigators' attention to the real potential perpetrators, already identified, and to support Bolsonaro's policy against NGOs, which are annoying obstacles to the privatization of the Amazon.

Bonelli: "We live in a reverse world"

Angelo Bonelli knows the NGO and its president personally. "The evidence brought by the prosecution – says the leader of the Greens – are videos made by the same arrested who resumed the fire while attempting to extinguish it non-existent accusations that comment on their own, while other accusations are the donations that the Wwf Brasil has volunteered through a 70,000 real contract (16,000 euros) and the donation of the American actor Leonardo Dicaprio of 500 thousand dollars always at the WWF. "

"The NGO – explains Bonelli – founded in 1987, operates in a part of Amazonia where the social and environmental conflict linked to deforestation and the interests of gold diggers, mining companies, soy farmers and traders of Wood, thanks to its activity, infant mortality has been reduced by 75% among the local populations, Indians, quilombolas and caboclo through two hospitals with which they provide social and health assistance, all year round, to forest populations ".

"At the September UN climate summit – recalls the ecologist – President Bolsonaro had severely attacked the Indian leader Raoni, Nobel Peace Prize candidate, while last October the government had accused the ship of greenpeace to be responsible for one of the most serious oil spills in the area of ​​the North East coast: in the meantime the Bolsonaro government has proposed to reduce all the conservation units, or parks, and indigenous reserves in the Amazon to authorize mining research " .

"As Italian Greens for over 15 years we collaborate and support the NGO and with it we want to eliminate a garrison of environmental defense and the human and social rights of Indians and forest populations, creating an absurd theorem: environmentalists and NGOs are the ones to destroy the forest: we live in an upside-down world ".