On August 10th and 11th it was promoted the “Day of Fire”, a political action of the bolsonarist landlords that has devastated peasants’ and small producers’ harvests and covered up several regions of the country with smoke clouds.
In an interview to the newspaper Folha do Progresso the landlords said the objective was to promote burnings in huge areas of the country in a coordinate support to the government. Specifically, the goal was to destroy forests and preservation areas to take ownership of them and justify the militarisation of the region, suffocating the struggle for the land, restraining it and repressing the peasants in their fight for the Agrarian Revolution.
The fires have taken areas from Pará, the whole Amazon region and even the Centre-West and the tri-border area with Bolivia and Paraguay.
In Rondonia, on August 13th, the fire spread along Line TB-14 and reached tens of houses including the settlement Galo Velho, in Machadinho do Oeste. After the fire extinguished, the peasants returned to their places and found, besides their houses burned and their belongings destroyed, a couple who died embraced and was charred.
Imperialist and landownership interference
Because of the negative international repercussion of the burnings, heads of the imperialist countries as Emmanuel Macron (França) felt encouraged to intervene in our domestic internal affairs and have threatened to boycott the agrobusiness and block the European Mercosul-Union agreement. They were calling the Amazonia “our house”; Macron painted himself as an “environmentalist” while plundering the natural wealth of the oppressed countries.
The imperialist countries in Europe are opposed to the expansion of the Brazilian landownership, not for “humanitarian” interests, but for colonial pretensions to take possession of the natural resources of the oppressed countries.
On the other hand, they are opposed because, after the agreement signed by the blocks, the production of the Brazilian landownership will gain access to the internal market of the old continent and that could ruin the subsidised French farmers, an important social basis for the French domestic policy.
In Brasil, in turn, the division of what to do permeates the landownership rank. Part of the landlords, linked to the extreme right-wing pushes the government into advancing on the forests so that they can become richer at the expense of the people’s and Nation’s backwardness while some other important representaives of their class, more on the right-wing, are positionned contrary to the advance, afraid of the negative implications at the exports.
Law and Order Guarantee (GLO) in the Amazonia
On August 23rd, taking advantage and trying to respond to the international pressure, Bolsonaro’s and the generals’ government permitted, via a decree of Law and Order Guarantee (GLO), the use of troops of the Armed Forces and other federal forces to “combat the fire” all over the Legal Amazonia area.
Up to this edition deadline, the federal troops are operating in the Amazon, Acre, Rondonia, Roraima, Mato Grosso, Para and Tocantins rural areas. The scenery of the region militarization puts on alert the poor peasants, mostly those who are struggling for the land.
In the Legal Amazon Region are located two states – Para and Rondônia – where a greater number of persons died in conflicts between the peasants and the landlords in recent years.
