Environmental Policy in Brazil after the 2016 Coup: An Analysis of Government Expenditure

Abstract

An emerging power since the last decade and a participant in BRICS—a bloc composed of Russia, China, India, and South Africa—Brazil would be the weakest link of an opposition to U.S. hegemony in the world order established since 1991 with the end of the Cold War. The 13-year advances of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s reformist and progressive government, continued by his successor Dilma Rousseff, appear to have reached a tolerance limit regarding the retrograde domestic forces and outside interests of the metropolitan center. The coup happened in 2016, following a two-year process of political and economic destabilization of the government. This paper seeks to show, through the exposition of an earlier history and the analyzed narrative of the events, besides the analysis of the federal public expenditures, that this movement of linkage and regression occurred in the ambit of issues related to the environment. The coup government launched in 2016 has abandoned any environmental policy, is interested in dissolving the institutional framework established after 20 years of insertion of Brazil in the global debate on the environment, and does not even supervise and protect the country’s natural resources, in an attitude characteristic of a state of exception.