The Brazilian government is using the COVID-19 outbreak as a distraction to pass through laws offering an amnesty on seized and deforested land and reducing the protection offered to indigenous people, climate activists said Wednesday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 29th April, 2020) The Brazilian government is using the COVID-19 outbreak as a distraction to pass through laws offering an amnesty on seized and deforested land and reducing the protection offered to indigenous people, climate activists said Wednesday.
According to Greenpeace's whistleblowing project Unearthed, Brazilian lawmakers are set to vote on new measures proposed by Jair Bolsonaro's administration that will offer an amnesty for the prior deforestation and the current occupation of forest land that was seized before 2018.
Additionally, plans are in place to strip certain areas of their designation in the land registry as indigenous. The whistleblowing project stated that this could potentially lead to further seizures of land inhabited by indigenous people.
The latest developments take place in the context of increased deforestation in Brazil. The project cited the country's space research agency INPE, which claimed that deforestation in March increased year-on-year by 30 percent.
The non-governmental organization Imazon estimates that the new laws could lead to the additional destruction of more than 6,000 square miles of Brazil's forests by 2027, Unearthed stated.
Bolsonaro has been slammed by environmental activists and critics for ignoring the issue of protecting the country's environment, especially the Amazon rainforest.
