While Russian President Vladimir Putin threatens to use atomic bombs and world leaders speak of the risk of nuclear armageddon, the American newspaper The New York Times published a text accompanied by a video in which the authors present what they believe will define the future of the planet: the election in Brazil.
There is a discussion about the threat of the use of nuclear weapons in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine , but the editors of the newspaper endorsed and allowed to hang in their mark the thesis that the future of humanity is conditioned to the election of ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In the style of Zé Carioca, the video shows a Brazil that seems to emerge from Embratur posters from the 1970 years, with women in bikinis on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, mulatto (term out of use, but adequate to the context used by the film) sambando, Pelé and the Brazilian team.
The unusual thing is that, although it is published in an American newspaper, the material is the work of Brazilians. A duck that can’t (or doesn’t want to) describe Brazil beyond the stereotype that, by the way, served (and still serves) as a business card for many sex tourists. This is just the introduction.
The central theme of the message is the Amazon. Or more specifically, the destruction of the Amazon under Jair Bolsonaro. For more than six minutes, the forest is shown in flames, being trampled by oxen and being bitten by chainsaws. Another allusion to Brazil under the bush, which deceives those who have no idea of what Brazil is, let alone the Amazon.
As it could not be missing, there are some archive images of indigenous people. To illustrate the tragedy, the authors did not go to the forest to show Indians who are attacked by prospectors, drug traffickers and land grabbers. The option was to show indigenous marches in Brasília, with posters against genocide and global destruction promoted by the current government. In short, only Lula saves. Despite being the president with the highest average annual deforestation rate in his curriculum, in addition to other blemishes.
The newspaper, activists and everyone and everything that follows the same tune ignore that the Brazil is not a thicket. That the Amazon is not a scrubland. In addition to a complex biome, the region is home to about 30 million people. Contrary to what most people are led to think, the Indians do not just live in a “natural state”, as if they were in paradise. Those closest to the ancestral way of life are at risk. They have life expectancy at pre-Columbian levels and are under the crosshairs of criminals operating in the forest. Whether to steal its resources, or to use its intricate rivers to traffic. Thousands of indigenous people live in cities. Many are slum dwellers. They live piled up in areas without sanitation or treated and piped water.
The towns and cities that spread out along the banks of the Amazon rivers are home to riverside people and caboclos who were born from the miscegenation that activism attempts delete. People who are as or even more unassisted than indigenous peoples, but who are invisible. Small and medium-sized cities and even metropolises, such as Manaus, are complex environments awaiting development.
The development that the Amazon lacks, by the way, is the key to saving the forest and who lives in it or on its fringes. The devastation, the result of predatory exploitation, is a direct reflection of poverty. It’s not worth spending another drop of saliva to demonstrate that, under Lula, the forest suffered. Such sustainable development never arrived.
Besides the nonsense, the video posted by The New York Times is relevant, as it shows very accurately how, after escaping from Lava Jato, Lula and his followers left for Operação Lava-Biografia.
To oppose Jair Bolsonaro, it was necessary to sacralize Lula in such a way that a nuclear threat becomes minor before the sacred act of voting and electing a savior.