Federal police have raided the ministry supposedly tasked with protecting the Brazilian environment and the environment minister’s home as part of an investigation into the illegal export of Amazon timber.
The early-morning operation – the most prominent targets of which were the environment minister, Ricardo Salles, and his environmental chief, Eduardo Bim – was celebrated by activists, who accuse Jair Bolsonaro’s rightwing government of systematically dismantling environmental protections.
Amazon deforestation has soared to a 12-year high under Bolsonaro. An area seven times larger than Greater London was destroyed last year alone.
“It’s time to put this gang of devastators in jail,” Marcelo Freixo, a prominent leftist leader, tweeted as details of the raid emerged on Wednesday morning.
Greenpeace Brazil demanded Salles’s dismissal, tweeting: “We Brazilians are proud of our environmental heritage and do not deserve to be internationally humiliated by these disastrous anti-environmental policies.”
Federal police said they had launched their investigation – named after the indigenous deity Akuanduba – in January after receiving information “from foreign authorities suggesting the possible misconduct of Brazilian civil servants in the export of timber”.
Police said about 160 officers had raided addresses in the capital, Brasília, São Paulo, and the Amazon state of Pará with search warrants as part of the inquiry into suspected acts of corruption involving government employees and loggers.
The news website G1 said police were investigating wood exported to the US and Europe. The magazine Veja said police had been acting on information passed to them by the US Fish and Wildlife Service after a January 2020 seizure of Brazilian wood at the port of Savannah in the state of Georgia.
Ten officials from the environment ministry and Brazil’s environmental agency Ibama were removed from their posts by order of the supreme court judge Alexandre de Moraes. They included Bim, the president of Ibama, and Leopoldo Penteado Butkiewicz, a special adviser to the environment minister.
Salles, one of Bolsonaro’s most committed allies, was reportedly answering questions at the federal police headquarters in Brasília on Wednesday morning.
The 45-year-old conservative, whom critics call Brazil’s “anti-environment minister”, is a hate figure among environmental activists and a hero for some on the far right. Salles had reportedly never visited the Brazilian Amazon before being made environment minister shortly after Bolsonaro’s 2018 election.
In office, Salles has presided over what conservationists and indigenous activists call one of the most damaging periods in Brazil’s recent environmental history, stripping back protections and allegedly encouraging environmental criminals by reducing monitoring and inspection operations.
The newspaper O Globo said residences used by Salles in Brasília and São Paulo and an office in the Amazon were among the addresses raided by police.
The indigenous god after which the operation is named is venerated by the Arara people who live along the Iriri River in Pará, one of the Amazon states worst affected by illegal deforestation. The Arara believe that by playing a small flute, Akuanduba brought tranquility and order to an unstable world.
Salles told reporters he believed the operation was “over the top and unnecessary” and had told president Bolsonaro that, in his opinion, there was no substance to the allegations.
