RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Former President Dilma Rousseff today dissented from the prospect raised by the French head of state, Emmanuel Macron, of granting international status to the Amazon.
“I do not agree with President Macron’s proposal on the conservation of the Amazon. I don’t think he’s doing well in French Guyana,” said the former president, referring to France’s overseas territory located on the northeastern coast of South America, within the Amazon region.
Dilma Rousseff spoke at the prestigious Paris campus of ‘Sciences Po’ University, where she addressed the “democratic crisis in Latin America and the world,” applauded both at the beginning and end of her speech.
The rhetoric adopted by the former president, ousted in 2016 due to fiscal irregularities, coincided with the position expressed by former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and with that of the current head of state, Jair Bolsonaro, against a hypothetical shared sovereignty in the region.
After announcing in August that the G7 (group of the most industrialized countries in the world) had agreed to raise US$20 million to fight the fires in the Amazon, Macron stressed that the possibility of defining an “international status” for the Amazon could arise if a “sovereign state” were to adopt specific measures that were “against the planet’s interests”.
However, Rousseff was very critical of Bolsonaro’s policy in the Amazon and his “deregulation” of environmental protection, as well as of the comments made by the Brazilian head of state on the physical appearance of the French first lady, Brigitte Macron.
“Women in Latin America face the same plight as in the rest of the world: we are perceived as objects,” said the former president, adding that “there had been a misogynous component” in her own impeachment proceeding.
“If it had been against a man, it wouldn’t have been so disrespectful. I believe this was a significant factor,” said Dilma Rousseff, the first woman to hold the presidency of Brazil (2011-2016).
In a speech fraught with criticism of the current Brazilian President, Rousseff classified the government as “extreme right-wing” and “neo-fascist,” and made an appeal that social policies place education at the forefront of priorities.