Two internationally known Amazon defenders, Marina Silva and Sônia Guajajara, have been named ministers in Brazil’s new government in an attempt to contain the intensifying assault on indigenous territories and the environment.
The announcement was made by new president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who will take office on Sunday after four years of destruction of the country’s rainforest under his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.
Silva, 64, will return to his job as environment minister, which he held from 2003 to 2008, a period in which Brazil managed to drastically reduce deforestation in the Amazon.
Guajajara, 48, will head Brazil’s first ministry for indigenous peoples, created in response to a wave of violence and land invasions spurred by Bolsonaro’s dismantling of indigenous and environmental protections.
“[This is] a milestone in our history of struggle and resistance”, said Guajajara. “The creation of the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples is proof of President Lula’s commitment to safeguarding our autonomy and the space to make decisions about our territories, our bodies and our ways of life.”
Bolsonaro’s anti-indigenous and anti-environmental policies were exposed earlier this year by the murders of indigenous expert Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips in the Amazon, where deforestation has increased by 60% since 2019.
Marina Silva with the new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has appointed her Minister of the Environment. Photograph: Adriano Machado/Reuters
Speaking after Lula’s October election, Silva said the new government would fight to honor the memory of these rainforest martyrs by building “a new democratic ecosystem” in which conservation, sustainability and the climate emergency.
Silva was born in 1958 in a remote rubber gum community in the western Amazon and became Brazil’s youngest female senator and an internationally respected environmentalist. He joined Lula’s cabinet after the 2002 elections, but resigned in 2008 after a series of political battles linked to environmental policy.
Guajajara was born in the Araribóia territory of eastern Amazonia and became one of the leading lights of Brazil’s burgeoning indigenous rights movement, as well as a prominent left-wing politician. In 2018, Guajajara became the first indigenous woman to run for the vice presidency of Brazil. In October’s election, she won a seat in Brazil’s overwhelmingly white and male Congress.
During a recent trip to the Amazon, Guajajara said the new ministry, which will represent Brazil’s 307 indigenous groups, illustrated Lula’s genuine commitment to protecting the environment and defending indigenous communities that Bolsonaro had left “threatened, weakened and vulnerable”.
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However, experts say the incoming government will face major challenges in its battle to rebuild indigenous and environmental protections, given the deliberate dismantling of the environment ministry that took place under Bolsonaro.
“The ministry has been destroyed. It no longer exists. It will have to be rebuilt almost from scratch,” said Marcio Astrini, the head of an NGO umbrella group called the Climate Observatory.
Astrini welcomed the return of experienced and knowledgeable environmental figures like Silva, but warned that the powerful politicians and criminal gangs pushing the rainforest to a catastrophic tipping point would not suddenly disappear. “Amazon deforestation will not be liquidated overnight,” he said.