Fire Sale: Finance and Fascism in the

Amazon Rainforest

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In a recent piece for Jacobin, climate writers Alyssa Battistoni and Thea
Riofrancos drew a connection between fires burning in Greenland and
those still ablaze in the Amazon rainforest: “They’re being sparked by
the rich and powerful, whether by agricultural conglomerates, complicit
right-wing governments, or fossil fuel executives who’ve lied to the
public so they can keep spewing heat-trapping carbon up into the
atmosphere for a quick buck.” The simplicity of the claim was
dumbfounding, and, to that end, haunting. Was it merely the rich and
powerful who lit the match?
Another writer for the magazine, Kate Aronoff, called for fossil fuel
executives to be tried for crimes against humanity. “Technically
speaking, what fossil-fuel companies do isn’t genocide,” she wrote,
clarifying that energy CEOs don’t target their victims based on racial or
ethnic animus. Yet genocidal land grabs are being carried out to expand
“the Red Zone” — the agricultural frontier — eking its way deeper into
the Amazon rainforest by way of roads and infrastructure backed by
global capital. The Amazon, or the lungs of the earth, as it’s often
referred to, is being seized from indigenous communities by mining and
agribusiness interests, gutting the resiliency of one of the earth’s last
great carbon sinks and producers of oxygen. But who is responsible for
burning it? Bolsonaro? Corruption in Brazil? The World Bank? U.S.
Financial Firms? Silicon Valley? Could the culprits be named, I
wondered? Tried?
In July, just weeks before the news of the fires went global, I wrote
an essay for this site about the connection between cattle ranching and
indigenous land dispossession. In it, I tried to draw a parallel between
how ranching shaped both the progression of westward expansion in the
United States during the 19th century and the cattle boom that’s clearing
the Amazon today. The connections are uncanny: from their mutually
shoddy justifications for land-grabbing to their eerily similar cowboy-
nostalgia–themed boom towns, 1880s Kansas resembles the Red Zone of
today. One of the connections I neglected to note was the role of
international finance in funding the frontiers’ forward momentum.
British firms invested in American ranching in the late nineteenth
century, and today, as The Intercept recently reported, American firms
are torching the rainforest for an easy return on investment.
“It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry hasn’t been as efficient as the
Americans, who exterminated the Indians,” Brazilian President Jair
Bolsonaro said in 1994. Since taking power in 2018, Bolsonaro has
rapidly pulled off the gloves protecting the Amazon and holds no pretext
of preserving it, exacerbating the plunder that has been in progress for
generations. “The Brazilian state now acts merely as the facilitator of
private extraction,“ as the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research
put it in their recent report on the Amazon, which traces mining in the
rainforest to the WWII era. “Mining in the Amazon dates back to the
discovery of manganese (essential to iron and steel production) in the
state of Amapá in 1945 by the mining firm Icomi. Icomi represented the
interests of the US transnational corporation Bethlehem Steel,” the
report notes.
Since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985, the era during which
Bolsonaro was an army captain and nostalgia for which he ran his
presidential campaign on, Brazil moved left, culminating in the Workers’
Party’s (PT) rise to power. The party ruled from 2003-2016, making
large strides for the working class — this resulted in cash transfers for
the poor, raising the minimum wage, and expanding access to education.
Converging factors — a car wash corruption scandal sinking PT’s
political prospects; neoliberal austerity, brought on partially by the
United States withdrawing investment in Brazilian bonds in 2013,
making PT unable to continue to deliver on popular social programs; and
rightward drift egged on, in part, by the adjustment of YouTube’s
algorithm flooding the country with paranoid right wing conspiracy
theories; among others — created a vacuum that made way for
Bolsonaro’s rise.
The following reading list attempts to make sense of the ongoing
pillaging of the Amazon rainforest. From global capital to YouTube,
carbon credits to indigenous land defenders in their own words, I tried
to figure out who lit the match and how the fire might be stopped. –WM

1. Bolsonaro’s Brazil (Perry Anderson, London

Review of Books)
In this epic 17,000 word tour-de-force, historian and sociologist Perry
Anderson takes readers through the ups and downs of Brazil’s recent
unravelling and rightward ascent. At once both gripping and dense,
Anderson leaves few stones unturned in understanding PT leader Lula’s
fall and his successor Dilma Rousseff’s pivoting failure, creating the
space for Bolsonaro to rise through the cracks of fringe obscurity onto
the national stage.
[Bolsonaro] is no enemy of foreign capital. His nationalism, in expression
hyperbolic enough, essentially takes the form of virulent tropes of anti-
socialism, anti-feminism and homophobia, excrescences alien to the
Brazilian soul. But it has no quarrel with free markets. In local parlance,
it offers the paradox of a populismo entreguista, a ‘supine’ populism –
one in principle at least, perfectly willing to hand over national assets to
global banks and corporations.