Government will extend the presence of the Armed Forces in the Legal Amazon until April 2021, says Mourão | Politics

The decree of Guarantee of Law and Order (GLO), signed by President Jair Bolsonaro, predicted that the operation would end in July this year, but Operation Brazil Verde has been extended and the current deadline is effective until November 6.

The government decided to send military personnel to the region to carry out preventive and repressive actions against environmental crimes. The operation aims to combat illegal deforestation and fires.

“[A operação] it goes until April, we will extend it until April ”, said Mourão this Monday when granting an interview to journalists at the entrance of the Vice Presidency.

According to Mourão, the extension will be agreed with the Minister of Institutional Security, Augusto Heleno. Mourão also said that R $ 400 million were allocated to the operation and that R $ 180 million still remain.

“We have an appeal, and the appeal is enough to go until April,” he said.

Last week, the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama) interrupted the work of the forest fire fighting brigades precisely due to lack of resources. Then, with the release of funds by the federal government, the agency resumed its activities.

Burning in the Amazon in 2020

According to the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe), the fires in the Amazon in 2020 already exceeded the total registered from January to December 2019.

In total, according to Inpe, so far the satellites have detected 89,604 hot spots. Last year 89,176 were detected.

Also according to Inpe, the Legal Amazon registered 964 km² of areas on alert for deforestation in September of this year. The number is the second highest in five years.

The alerts were made by the Real Time Deforestation Detection System (Deter), which produces daily signals of change in forest cover for areas larger than 3 hectares, both for fully deforested areas and for those in the process of forest degradation.

‘Not even a hectare of devastated jungle’

Last week, President Jair Bolsonaro said he would invite foreign diplomats to visit the Amazon rainforest.

According to the president, they will not see “anything burning not even one hectare of devastated forest.”

“We are finishing a Manaus-Boa Vista trip, where we will invite diplomats from other countries to demonstrate in that short trip of an hour and a half, that they will not see anything in our Amazon jungle burning not even one hectare of devastated jungle,” he said at the time Bolsonaro.

However, data from the federal government itself show that the route passes through municipalities with a total of 20,500 deforested hectares.