Bolsonaro, like his most fervent supporters in the landowning class—deeply anticommunist, nostalgic for the dictatorship, and disdainful of the country’s Indigenous population—is given to fetishizing the American frontier. In 1998, Bolsonaro, then a federal lawmaker, told the National Congress: “The Brazilian cavalry was truly incompetent. The American cavalry, however, was competent; they decimated their own indigenous population in the past and today don’t have that problem in their own country.”
When he won the presidency twenty years later, it was on a platform that promised to restrict Indigenous land demarcations. In the days and weeks after his inauguration, land-grabbers committed a wave of invasions of Indigenous communities, some citing false reports that the president had given them permission. During Bolsonaro’s mandate, environmental and Indigenous protection agencies were gutted or defanged, or their leadership staffed with stooges. Deforestation surged, as illegal loggers and wildcat miners plundered Brazil, confident the president had their back.
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