Video: at an agro fair, RO’s Environment Secretary says it is ‘inhumane’ to create UCs and defends support for ruralists

Iury Lima – From Cenarium Magazine

VILHENA (RO) – In a video that outraged civil society organizations, environmentalists, and that, in addition, will still yield investigation by the Public Ministry of the State of Rondônia (MPRO), as informed by the institution, exclusively to CENARIUM MAGAZINE, the holder of the State Secretariat of Environmental Development (Sedam), secretary Marco Antonio Lagos, took advantage of the largest agribusiness fair in the North Region to attack the environmental agendas in the Amazon, affirming, loudly and clearly, the political interest of governor Coronel Marcos Rocha (PSL) in opening up advantages for ruralists – even if at the cost of destroying ecosystems.

The video was led by a man who appears next to Lagos, inciting the secretary to speech, while asking about what he called a ‘supposed’ creation of a new Conservation Unit (UC), in the region of Guajará-Mirim, a municipality 329 kilometers from Porto Velho.

“That’s a lie,” he blurted out, in response. “There is no reserve being created in the region of Guajará. It would be impossible to create, it would be inhumane. The governor is connected to agro, to development. This is a lie! I guarantee: we are not creating any reserve area,” continued Antonio Lagos.

Excited, the man who introduces himself at the beginning of the video as a friend of the secretary, plays the rumor that “they are saying that the governor is an environmentalist, when, in fact, he is reducing reserve areas, precisely to improve the situation of farmers. “Isn’t that true?” he adds.

“No doubt about it,” replies the head of Sedam. “We are even trying to undo mistakes of areas created, without any study, where there were people living. We are trying and we will fight for this. Rondônia is agro. It will preserve where it has to preserve, but it will cultivate, it will fight where it needs to!”, concluded the secretary.

Watch the video with the secretary in full:

‘Inhumane is to destroy’

Experts interviewed by CENARIUM evaluate as ‘inhumane’ the position of the environmental manager of Rondonia, and classify him as unprepared for the job.

“This statement by the Sedam secretary is regrettable, because it shows his lack of knowledge about his own function. It is the State’s obligation, through this agency, to create and maintain the Conservation Units and Protected Areas”, said Edjales Benício, a technologist in Environmental Management and Counselor of the Association for the Ethnoenvironmental Defense Kanindé, from Rondônia.

For Benício, besides being a sample of ‘unpreparedness’, the secretary’s posture is a pure ‘manifestation of environmental racism’.

“When we create preservation areas, besides protecting the fauna and flora, it also means giving quality of life to the traditional communities, as well as the indigenous people and quilombolas. I don’t see anything inhumane in the creation of Conservation Units. On the contrary, I see a humanistic policy that aims to preserve natural resources and, above all, human life. Inhumane is to promote land grabbing. Inhumane is the massacre that these people suffer because of greed over natural resources,” added the expert.

‘Wrong person, in the wrong office”

Indigenist, environmentalist and president of the Kanindé Association, Ivaneide Bandeira Cardozo (Neidinha Suruí), says she was frightened by the words she heard coming from the mouth of the head of Sedam. “It is quite the portrait of a government, that is, of a misgovernment that does not respect environmental norms: the person who should be the main person to defend these issues in the state is, in fact, the one who makes a statement of exacerbated environmental racism,” she declared, indignant.

“He is in the wrong portfolio, for sure. He couldn’t be Secretary of the Environment, with a speech like that. What I can only say is that, in Rondonia, the environment is in the hands of a person who has no respect for environmental issues,” concluded the environmentalist.

The secretary’s speech is controversial

Marco Antonio Lagos says that the government aims to “correct mistakes” of the past, which would be the creation of UCS “without technical study”, but he forgot that it was the governor of Rondonia, Colonel Marcos Rocha, who made a “canetada” without understanding about environmental preservation, when he tried to reduce 220 thousand hectares of two large Protected Areas: the Jaci-Paraná Extractive Reserve and the Guajará-Mirim State Park.

The law was even sanctioned, last year, but fell by judicial decision, as Edjales Benício recalls: “it is important that he [Lagos] clarify, also, which is the Conservation Unit created that had no studies. What happened was exactly the opposite: the State tried to reduce UCs without any technical justification. So much so that the TJ, unanimously, declared unconstitutional the law created by the government”, he said.

Public Ministry follows up

Sought by the report, the MPRO informed, first hand, that it passed on the situation to the Environmental Prosecutor and that the agency “has diligently followed all proposals to alter the reserve areas, changing or reducing them, and has even proposed unconstitutionality actions”.

“The MPRO will always seek to enforce the constitutional and legal rules of environmental protection,” the note concluded.

What the government says

In response to CENARIUM, the Government of Rondônia sent a note, through Sedam. However, the document does not answer the questions and minimizes the speeches of the secretary. It also states that, contrary to what Lagos said, the agency “works to promote” environmental preservation in the state.

“The State Secretariat of Environmental Development (Sedam) clarifies that the video deals with rumors of the creation of new reserves in the region of the municipality of Guajará-Mirim. There are no technical studies, in the scope of the state environmental agency, aiming at the creation of new Conservation Units in the municipality of Guajará-Mirim, which already has more than 90% of its territory composed of protected areas. Thus, Sedam reaffirms its commitment to continue working for environmental sustainability in respect of all the laws in force and the economic and social order of the State of Rondônia,” says the note.