‘We will keep fighting’, says AM governor after Bolsonaro appeals against Manaus Free Trade Zone

Bruno Pacheco – From Cenarium Magazine

MANAUS – Governor Wilson Lima (União Brasil) said on Tuesday, 24, that will continue fighting to defend the interests of the Manaus Free Trade Zone (MFTZ), after President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) appeal the decision of Minister Alexandre de Moraes, of the Supreme Court (STF), which suspended the effects of the reduction of up to 35% of the Tax on Industrialized Products (IPI) to items manufactured in the Industrial Pole of the capital.

“We will keep fighting, we will keep fighting. I have already said and I repeat: we have no short or medium term model that can replace the Manaus Free Trade Zone model. The way the decrees that were published are, this causes a very big damage to the State of Amazonas. The companies lose competitiveness and my biggest concern is with the generation of jobs and income, of a father and a mother that depend on this to survive”, affirmed Wilson Lima.

The statement happened after the signing of the agreement between the Amazonas Government and the Manaus City Hall to acquire 12 electric buses, with technology so that the vehicles do not emit atmospheric pollutants, which will be implemented in the municipal public transportation.

At the event, Wilson Lima also commented on Bolsonaro’s visit to the capital, scheduled for this Saturday, 28, at the March for Jesus. “I received [Bolsonaro’s] agenda and I am still dealing with it. We are talking and I still need to understand the president’s agenda. In principle, he is coming to the March for Jesus,” commented the governor of Amazonas, without detailing the president’s passage.

Free Trade Zone attacked by Bolsonaro

In the first week of this month, Alexandre de Moraes answered the Direct Unconstitutionality Action (ADI), filed by the Solidarity party, on behalf of the Amazonas bench in the National Congress, to suspend the rate reduction. The federal government’s Advocacia-Geral da União (AGU) filed an appeal on the 20th against the measure with the STF.

The case is another episode of the imbroglio involving Bolsonaro and the Amazon bench, which sees the attacks of the President of the Republic as a “death shot”, since the IPI reduction threatens the competitiveness of the MFTZ, considered the main economic model of the state.

For the AGU, in an excerpt from the appeal against the ZFM, the region “is not a sovereign tax haven, immune to the economic-fiscal context of the rest of Brazil, but a legal regime of exoneration integrated into a Federation that, under the 1988 Constitution, has several Justice and development projects.”

“It makes no sense to sustain a local regime of industrial fomentation at the expense of the inanition [weakening] of the national industry as a whole,” said the Union’s attorney-general, Adler Alves, in the appeal.