Under environmental pressure for the second time, Bolsonaro will tell the UN that he did well in the pandemic and that Brazil feeds the world

It should also say that thanks to its resistance in determining the interruption of economic activities and the monthly emergency aid of R $ 600 received by more than 60 million Brazilians, the so-called “coronavoucher”, the Brazilian economy continued to function and the prospects for Las The country’s recessions are not as severe as those in other emerging nations, such as India.

The impact of aid on the pocket of a relevant part of the population is cited by experts as one of the explanations for the current popularity rates of the president, who has even studied ways to make at least part of the program permanent.

“Bolsonaro is going to defend his role in the pandemic and suggest that the criticisms of it were mere political persecution,” says professor of international relations Elaini da Silva, from PUC-SP.

The president must also remember that, even in the face of the crisis, Brazil has fulfilled a role for which it deserves international respect: it has supplied food to various countries around the world. The president has said that if he had continued to demarcate indigenous lands, such production would not be possible.

“The UN wanted us to go from 14% to 20% of the demarcated territory. I said: ‘No’. We cannot repress what we have here that has guaranteed our food security as well as that of more than one billion inhabitants of the world”, Bolsonaro said in a speech on Friday the 18th in Sinop (MT).

Last year, to counter accusations of disrespect for the rights of indigenous peoples, Bolsonaro brought the young indigenous leader Ysani Kalapalo to the plenary session of the General Assembly, who today says he is disappointed with the president. And in his speech he attacked the indigenous leader Caiapó Raoni Metuktire, whom he accused of being manipulated by NGOs and foreign governments with vested interests in the Amazon.

During the pandemic, tension between the government and indigenous people intensified. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), WHO’s arm in the Americas, stated that native populations have been five times more affected than the average Brazilian population. And in a report published in August, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Toxic Substances and Waste, Baskut Tuncak, stated that “in Brazil, Yanomami communities are facing an existential and health crisis due to contact with illegal miners.”

Bolsonaro must also say that fires are natural processes and that it has happened not only in Brazil, but in the United States and Africa. And that the Brazilian agribusiness is efficient and has no responsibility for the devastation. As he did in the UN speech last year, Bolsonaro will accuse critics of being protectionists. The environmental agenda would only be an excuse for European countries to close their markets to Brazilian products.

Five days ago, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium signed an open letter addressed to Vice President Hamilton Mourão in which they claim to be “deeply concerned” about deforestation in the Amazon that “has grown to levels. alarming. ”

Almost 20% of the Pantanal has already been destroyed by fires. In the Amazon, fires grew 12% this year. Mourão has said that Brazil acknowledges that there is a problem, but does not accept “simplistic” interpretations of the fact. Senior Itamaraty members who spoke to BBC News Brazil anticipate at least one moment of Brazilian embarrassment at the event.

Diplomats expect direct attacks on the country during a session of the biodiversity leaders summit. Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo was scheduled to respond, in a 3-minute video, to possible criticism.

For the first time in its 75 years, the UN will not see the speeches of the heads of state live and in person at its headquarters in New York (USA). The first major epicenter of the pandemic on US soil, New York faced an extensive quarantine period that has been gradually easing.

Even so, the UN has kept much of its diplomatic activities at bay. Only one member of each delegation has voted in plenary on resolutions where there is no consensus; the organization even considered voting online, but countries like Russia were opposed to considering the risk of piracy.

And while US President Donald Trump and at least a dozen other foreign leaders have expressed interest in going to give the speech in person, the General Assembly organization has made it clear that no authority would be exempt from complying with strict isolation 14 days before you can stand up. present in the pulpit, which discouraged the representatives.

Usually packed with representatives, this time the plenary session of the UN will have a single representative of the fixed delegation of each country, in charge of presenting the speech of his head of state before the entry of the video.

Itamaraty members believe that the president’s speech will be less aggressive this time than last year, when he broke protocol to nominally confront citizens of his own country, such as Raoni, and said that his election will save Brazil from socialism. Some reasons explain this reading. At that time, a few months after taking office, diplomats argue, Bolsonaro needed to “take a stand,” “reposition Brazil.”

Now it is different. In the past two months, the president has adopted a more moderate and less detailed communication strategy in his public speeches. Furthermore, the very fact that the speech has been recorded presupposes the possibility of rehearsal and editing and avoids last minute changes in tone, as happened in 2019.

“I would bet on a more defensive and less virulent attitude. Let’s say a repetition with less brilliance because nobody should give much importance to his speech, ”said Ambassador Paulo Roberto de Almeida.

For the professor of International Relations Elaini da Silva, the government’s international policy actions in the last year, when Brazil began to show an ideological alignment consistent with the United States, ended up leading to a certain isolation of the country that should make the situation less relevant. . Bolsonaro speech.

“There may even be a certain anthropological curiosity from the other delegations. But due to both the pandemic and the fires, Brazil eroded the authority it would have to speak with other countries because of its experience, it burned a lot of ‘soft power’, ”says Silva. a concept of diplomacy that refers to the capacity of a country’s cultural and ideological influence over others.

Bolsonaro’s speech may still be overshadowed by Donald Trump’s. By running for re-election in less than 50 days, the Republican should not miss the opportunity to address the American electorate directly in his speech at the UN General Assembly.

Critic of multilateralism, Trump has acted to weaken international organizations such as the UN itself and, with greater intensity, the WHO and the World Trade Organization (WTO). In the case of the WHO, the US government initiated the formal withdrawal of the organization’s staff from the country and does not participate in the consortium of more than 70 countries for the development of a vaccine against covid-19.

Trump accuses the WHO, the WTO and the UN itself of having been at least partially kidnapped by Chinese interests. In the case of the WHO, the US government claims that the organization was “lenient” and “corrupt” in the way it conducted the coronavirus crisis, protecting China, which would have concealed the severity of the virus.

Among the different delegations in New York there is tension that in his speech to the Assembly, Trump may threaten to cut funds from the UN or even with some kind of US withdrawal from the organization. This could be a political movement with resonance in your constituency. Trump claims to be an advocate for America in the first place and explores some confusion among the general public about what multilateral bodies are and how they deal with China, whose aversion now prevails among Republicans and Democrats.

The US president has not yet decided whether to deliver his speech in recorded form or live online.

“If it’s live, people can treat it like something said in improvisation and not take it so seriously. But if it is said in recorded video, with a script, it is much more difficult to rewind or ignore,” said Richard Gowan, Director from the UN International Crisis Group to the American Politics website.

It is also uncertain whether in his own Bolsonaro speech he will make any mention of Trump’s reelection bid, which he supports. Privately, a Brazilian ambassador said any mention would be strongly discouraged, especially since Trump appears to be at a disadvantage in electoral polls and could lose to Democrat Joe Biden.

A comment on Trump’s preference at a high-profile event like the General Assembly would leave Brazil ready to establish a relationship with a new US government, if Biden wins.

“But we know what Bolsonaro is like. By supporting Macri, it was until the end, even when it was already clear that he was going to lose the Argentine presidency,” says the ambassador.

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