Ibama - Brazilian Environmental Agency - In Full-On Collapse; No Enforcement, No Police Backup
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Brazil has strict environmental laws, but it has limited, and diminishing, ability to enforce them. Ibama’s work force of field agents has shrunk 44 percent over the past decade, down to 730 this year. In recent years, a vast majority of fines issued by the agency for violations of environmental laws have gone unpaid.
According to Rene Luiz de Oliveira, Ibama’s general coordinator, field agents face growing hostility and threats in much of the country. In 2017 and 2018, Ibama installations in remote towns in the Amazon were set on fire. And in June and July, Ibama was unable to carry out operations in the state of Pará, where deforestation has been soaring, because the local police officers would not provide backup.
Leaders of two employee associations described in interviews this week a demoralized, beleaguered work force that had been contending for years with budget cuts and a rise in illegal mining. Those challenges mounted after Mr. Bolsonaro took office in January, said Alexandre Bahia Gontijo, the president of the Association of Environmental Specialists, which includes workers at the ministry of the environment, Ibama and another conservation agencies.
“From the beginning of the Bolsonaro government, the change was drastic,” he said. He added that the political rhetoric has created an incentive for people to break the law without fearing any consequences. Mr. Gontijo said Ibama agents had become fearful of using the most effective tool at their disposal: destroying the equipment and vehicles of people caught working in protected areas. Ibama agents are legally allowed to destroy equipment found in protected areas such as indigenous territories.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/world/americas/amazon-fires-brazil.html