Advisors to former President Jair Bolsonaro were arrested this Thursday morning (8) – Douglas Magno/AFP
On Thursday (8), Brazil’s Federal Police (PF) carried out an operation to investigate the involvement of former President Jair Bolsonaro, some of his former ministers and advisers in a criminal organization that allegedly planned a coup d’état in 2023. Two of Bolsonaro’s former advisers were arrested, and multiple search and seizure warrants were executed.
The country’s Federal Police carried out 33 search and seizure warrants, four preventive arrest warrants and 48 additional precautionary measures. These measures included restrictions on contact with other individuals under investigation, travel bans (with an order to surrender Bolsonaro’s passport within 24 hours) and suspension of public functions. Notably, during the 2022 presidential campaign, organized groups allegedly spread misinformation about election fraud, intending to make it easier for military intervention.
The investigation focuses on two main aspects:
Dissemination of falsehoods: The first axis targets the spreading of lies about electronic voting machines, whose supposed “hacking” and “fraud” occurred during the 2022 elections, which Bolsonaro lost.
Acts to undermine democracy: The second axis involves planning actions to overthrow democracy, including the invasion of the National Congress on January 8, 2023, with military support.
The alleged offenses under investigation include criminal organization, the violent undermining of the democratic state and an attempted coup.
A woman cools off with a hose as fans of singer Taylor Swift queue outside the Nilton Santos Olympic Stadium before Taylor Swift’s concert amid a heat wave in Rio de Janeiro on November 18, 2023. (Photo by Tercio Teixeira/AFP via Getty Images)
The heat index—which combines air temperature and humidity—hit an astounding 58.5ºC (137ºF), the highest index ever recorded, in Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday.
Amid a stifling heatwave this week Brazil is experiencing its highest temperatures ever recorded—a milestone that comes alongside global trends and fresh scientific data showing the world is far from meeting stated ambitions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to curb the climate emergency.
According to the National Institute of Meteorology, temperatures in the southeastern city of Araçuaí hit 44.8ºC (112.6ºF) on Sunday, breaking the previous record set in 2005.
It was so hot over the weekend that international pop star Taylor Swift was forced to reschedule concerts nationwide.
Meanwhile, the heat index—which combines air temperature and humidity—hit an astounding 58.5ºC (137ºF), the highest index ever recorded, Tuesday morning in the country’s second-most populous city of Rio de Janeiro.
The extreme heat is having a severe and negative impact on people’s ability to work and live comfortably and putting a crush on the nation’s power grid. As the Associated Pressreports:
Brazilians turned to fans, air conditioners and dehumidifiers to cool down, with utilities reporting record energy demand. Power outages were reported in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
Amid the high heat, wildfires are burning widely in the Pantanal biome, the world’s biggest tropical wetlands spanning parts of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul states. The fires have ravaged an area about the size of Cyprus, or more than 947,000 hectares (about 3,600 square miles), according to the Environmental Satellite Applications Laboratory of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
The wildfires are arriving earlier in some places and with much more intensity. With summer not even at its height, fears are growing of what’s to come:
“The Pantanal is a region that’s used to fires,” biologist Gustavo Figueiroa, head of the environmental group SOS Pantanal, toldAl-Jazeera on Monday. “Normally, it regenerates naturally. But this many fires isn’t normal.”
Attributed in part to the El Niño effect, the historic temperatures in South America’s largest country mirror the trend happening worldwide, with 2023 on track to be the hottest in 125,000 years, the result of burning fossil fuels and release of other heat-trapping gasses since the Industrial Revolution.
In addition to the heatwave and fires, heavy rains and damaging storms have brought severe flooding to other regions of the country, some resulting in the death of local residents and tens of thousands displaced.
Despite global efforts to reduce emissions and transition away from coal, oil, and gas, the latest figures from the United Nations in its 2023 Emissions Gap Report, released Monday, show that humanity is expanding its use of fossil fuels instead.
“The report shows that the emissions gap is more like an emissions canyon,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement. “A canyon littered with broken promises, broken lives, and broken records. All of this is a failure of leadership, a betrayal of the vulnerable, and a massive missed opportunity.”
Indigenous people celebrate a Supreme Court ruling to enshrine Indigenous land rights, in Brasilia, Brazil, Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023.
INDIGENOUS people in Brazil were celebrating this week after the Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit to restrict native people’s rights to reservations on their ancestral lands.
The justices had been evaluating a lawsuit brought by Santa Catarina state, backed by farmers, seeking to block an Indigenous group from expanding the size of its territorial claim.
Nine out of 11 of the high court’s justices voted to support the Xokleng on Thursday.
The group were the victims of one of the most brutal land grabs in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Mercenaries were hired to drive them away from their lands, collecting the ears of those they had killed to claim their reward.
There are some 2,300 Xokleng people living in Santa Catarina, south Brazil, in the Ibirama La-Klano lands alongside two other indigenous groups.
New study published in Nature says period was as destructive as record 2016 El Niño drought and heatwave
The first half of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency was so destructive for the Amazon that it was comparable to the record 2016 El Niño drought and heatwave in terms of carbon emissions, according to scientists.
Annual emissions from the world’s largest rainforest roughly doubled in 2019 and 2020, compared with the 2010 to 2018 average, according to a new study published in Nature, as swaths of forest were deliberately cleared and burned for cattle ranching and farming during the first two years of the far-right leader’s time in office.
While the amount of carbon that the Amazon absorbs and emits changes with weather cycles, generally sucking in more in wet years and less in dry periods, the study found that the rise in emissions under Bolsonaro had little to do with natural processes, but was instead caused by the systematic removal and downgrading of environmental law enforcement in Brazil.
Under Bolsonaro, the number and severity of fines for illegal deforestation by Brazilian authorities fell dramatically while fires and land-clearing soared, the study found. Carbon emissions increased from an annual average of 0.24 gigatonnes from 2010-18 to 0.44GtC in 2019 and 0.55GtC respectively.
