Bolsonaro administration wants to control NGOs in the Amazon

The Amazon Council plans, through a regulatory framework, to have full control over the activities of non-governmental organizations in the Amazon by 2022. The proposal aims not only to control the work of NGOs, but also to limit the actions of those that violate “national interests”, according to documents obtained by the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo. The text, however, does not specify what would be the criteria to be fulfilled by the organisations and what are such interests.

The organizations heard in the report criticized the proposal, and pointed out in the initiative the lack of social participation and authoritarianism that mark the environmental policy of the Bolsonaro administration. “They don’t want to go through the people’s scrutiny and intend to impose themselves without dialogue with the society,” said Ariana Ramos, coordinator of the Instituto Socioambiental [Socio-environmental Institute] (ISA), an organization that has been working since 1994 to defend the environment and indigenous rights.

For the Climate Observatory (OC), the measure is unconstitutional and is part of the “insistent and repugnant campaign of defamation of NGOs by government agents”. In a note, the OC warned about the existence of a device that already has the function of regulating the work of the institutions - the Regulatory Framework of Civil Society Organizations (MROSC), via Law 13.019/2014 - and recalled the attempts of coercion against NGOs by the government of Bolsonaro. “The attacks and persecutions of Bolsonaro’s administration against civil society are a regrettable constant in its political action. Initiatives aiming to control the NGOs have been previously presented by the Executive Power and rejected by the Brazilian Parliament - as in the case of the Provisional Measure (MP) 870/2019. Also in December 2019, agents of the National Intelligence Agency (Abin) went to the Climate Summit (COP25) to monitor (spy) Brazilian NGOs present there”.

The vice-president Hamilton Mourão, who is in charge of the Council, said he didn’t know the proposal, although he signed a memorandum calling servers to discuss the group’s guidelines, including the NGOs control.

The new initiative of the Amazon Council comes to public two months after General Augusto Heleno, chief minister of the government’s Institutional Security Office, publicly attacked, under the pretext of “the crime against the homeland,” one of the most respected Brazilian indigenous organizations, the Indigenous Peoples Network (APIB). Heleno accused the APIB of “publishing fake news against Brazil; imputing environmental crimes to the President of the Republic; and supporting international campaigns to boycott Brazilian products”. In response, the organization stated “that the greatest crime that damages our homeland is the government’s omission in the face of the destruction of our biomes, protected areas, illegal burning, shackling, deforestation and invasion of our lands and the theft of our wealth”.