Far-right politics has become an explosive phenomenon in Brazil since the presidential election of Jair M. Bolsonaro in 2018. In his reactionary political platform – based, among other things, on a neoliberal political economy set to destroy social security and an educational policy which aims to legalize persecution of teachers deemed ‘leftists’ – lies a promise to deregulate environmental norms that currently constrain deforestation and guarantees natives the right to land demarcation. In this chapter, we analyse how conspiracy theories about environmentalism in Brazil have found space in the far-right government and impacted the country's current environmental policy.

Conspiracy theories have played a central role in Bolsonaro's strategy of ‘organized chaos’ which, much like Trump's communication strategy, ‘feeds on, and fosters, a climate of confrontation and uncertainty that helps him secure the loyalty of his base’ (Nunes et al. 2020). ¹ As a result, fascist groups such as the ‘300 do Brasil’ and the green-shirts ‘Integralistas’ have directly threatened Parliament and the Supreme Federal Court with outright support from Bolsonaro and top government officials, echoing a long and much-alive tradition of coup plotting that involves large sectors of the military, intellectuals and businessmen. ²

The tragedy of Brazil's post-transitional period – which after 21 years of military rule chose to reconcile with its past instead of seeking both justice for the crimes of the dictatorship and ways to curb military influence over politics – is that it has allowed a proliferation of conspiracy theories, similar to those that created the breeding ground for the 1964 military coup (dos Santos, 1994), to spread and find political representation in mass democracy. Thus, there is a move away from enclosed conspiracy circles such as the ‘Clube Militar’ – a reactionary association of retired military men – and the ‘Philosophy Seminar’ of Olavo de Carvalho – the ‘intellectual Guru’ of Bolsonarism – to organized political parties, security forces, religious institutions and even armed militias in urban as well as in rural areas (Pinheiro-Machado and de Freixo, 2019; Webber, 2020). In this context, neoliberal subjectivity has found resonance in far-right ideology where market fundamentalism, anti-statism and radical Christian family moralism have spurred bizarre and well-articulated conspiracies of a globalist communist strategy involving billionaire elites and the Chinese government attempting to impose ‘cultural Marxism’ in schools and universities. These alleged conspiracies would ultimately destroy the traditional patriarchal family, promote generalized abortion, stimulate the transmission of transgender ideas to children, and give away lands with valuable natural resources to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that hide behind the façade of promoting Indigenous people's rights (Gallego, 2018; de Almeida, 2019; Alves Cepêda, 2018).

While far-right conspiracy theories in Brazil have been analysed in relation to their impact on the 2018 elections (Recuero, 2020), educational policies (Severo et al., 2019), gender debates (Messenberg, 2019; Miguel, 2021) and scientific denialism (Oliveira, 2020), there is still a considerable gap of knowledge in how the conspiracy theories of cultural Marxism are affecting the current environmental situation in Brazil. In order to explore this issue, we first provide some contextual background to the inquiry by highlighting the main threads of Bolsonaro's environmental policy. Secondly, we offer a theoretical account of far-right conspiracy theories and introduce the main conspiracy animating the Brazilian far right: cultural Marxism. Thirdly, we provide an overview of the Brazilian far right under Bolsonaro and explore the main conspiracy thinkers and their theories related to the environment and show how this has been instrumentalized in the government to advance deregulation of environmental policies. We conclude by reflecting on the impact of the far-right government in environmental activism and struggle for land and recognition in rural Brazil.

The state of depletion

Since colonial times, the agricultural exports sector has been the dominant thrust of capital accumulation and exploitation in Brazil (Marini, 2000). In today's international division of labour, Brazil sits as one of the major exporters of primary resources such as wood, cereals, oil and minerals. A broad, structural dynamic is currently at play in the territoriality of Brazilian capitalism. First, the increased concentration of control over natural resources by fewer actors, which demands ever-larger scales of production and intensified integration into new social spaces. Secondly, the privatization of public spaces that are rich in natural resources, in particular water and minerals, combined with the intensification of labour productivity in the environment (Acselrad, 2004, 2010). This context points to the re-primarization of the Brazilian economy, which can be understood as a combination of deindustrialization with the outgrowth of commodity exports vis-à-vis manufactured or semi-manufactured exports since 2010 (Lamoso, 2020).

Historically, the large landowning elites or ruralistas have been linked to reactionary forces in the country, and were one of the main backers of the military dictatorship that spanned from 1964 to 1985 (Dreifus, 1989). The structural power of ruralistas can be seen both in terms of their capacity to mobilize financial resources and in constructing majority coalitions in representative institutions and regulatory agencies within the state (Bruno, 2016). Ruralistas constitute the most powerful elite supporting Bolsonaro's government, alongside the arms industry and Evangelicals (Firmiano, 2020). ³ Far-right ideology in Brazil can be said to have one of its most important roots in a ruralist worldview, blending a nostalgia for settler colonial expansion and monocultural plantations with anti-Indigenous activism. Below we explore the main threads of Bolsonaro's environmental policy.

Bolsonaro's agribusiness agenda arrived even before he was sworn into office, when the powerful Brazilian Rural Society and the Ruralist Caucus in Congress declared support for his campaign. In the run-up to the 2018 election, he had already announced his intentions to shut down the Ministry of the Environment and merge it with the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply. Once in office, strong domestic and international criticism, coming even from international markets, forced Bolsonaro to abandon the project, although changes were still programmed inside the ministry to benefit sectors that defended a more intensive exploitation of natural resources. Ricardo Salles, the appointed Minister in charge of this dismantling project, had been previously condemned by a Justice Court in São Paulo on grounds of contractual fraud when he was State Secretary of the Environment in the state of São Paulo.

The first expression of this process of change was the ministerial restructuring defined by Decree no. 9672 of January 2019, which extinguished the Environmental Education Directorate. The effect was to limit all environmental education initiatives to the Secretary of Ecotourism. The National Agency of Waters was also moved to the Ministry of Regional Development, and the Brazilian Forestry Service to the Ministry of Agriculture, to be under the command of well-known ruralist politicians and lobbyists.

In May, Minister Salles announced the revision of all Conservation Units in the country, from the Itatiaia National Park (created in 1934) to the Refúgio da Vida Silvestre Ararinha Azul (created in 2018), on the grounds that they had been created without meeting technical criteria. In the same month, the ministry disregarded a technical report from the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) which pledged to veto oil exploitation near the Abrolhos National Park. The Executive Secretary of the ministry, Ana Pellini, rejected the report alleging ‘strategic relevance of the subject matter’, and then authorized a public auction offering seven oil blocs to be exploited in the region (Metrópoles, 2019).

Another similar reversal was the change of categorization of the Lagoa do Peixe Park, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, to an Environmental Protection Area, which will allow varied sorts of private exploitation in the region. The Park hosts around 270 animal species throughout all seasons of the year, including species threatened by extinction and migratory birds coming from different parts of the world such as Canada, the US, Chile and Argentina. But perhaps the most astounding U-turn of the dismantling of the protective apparatus has been a legislative bill (191/2020) sent by the government to the Chamber of Deputies, which aims to liberalize intensive mining and other environmentally damaging activities within Indigenous lands of the country.

A process of militarization of environmental policies followed the first year of Bolsonaro's presidency. In the Amazon Council, all representatives from IBAMA, the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio) and the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) were sacked and substituted by 19 army representatives and 4 sheriffs from the Federal Police. In ICMBio, its President, Adalberto Eberhard, a well-known conservationist, was sacked alongside other directors, opening the way for the appointment of a colonel, a tenant and a major of the Military Police to the Board of Directors. Further, Bolsonaro published Decree 10342/2020, which authorized the deployment of the Armed Forces for missions under the Guarantee of Law and Order (GLO) ⁴ statute in border regions, Indigenous lands, environmental conservation units and other federal areas comprising the states of the so-called Legal Amazon. The same decree subordinates all environmental agencies to the Ministry of Defence.

In line with the new policy, the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply liberated 290 new pesticides in the first 205 days of government. Of these, 41 per cent are classified as either highly or extremely toxic, while at least 4 products have been banned in other countries (DW, 2019). In 2020 alone, 405 new pesticides had been registered, and another 241 new requests will likely follow the same path. In all, the speed of pesticide permission is record breaking if compared with the rate of the previous ten years.

Environmental surveillance mandates have also suffered drastic setbacks under Bolsonaro. Up to May 2020, there had been a decrease of 34 per cent in the number of environmental fines related to illegal deforestation applied by IBAMA – the lowest rate in 11 years. The peak of this was when Minister Salles publicly reproached environmental inspectors who had destroyed equipment used for illegal deforestation in a Conservation Unit in the state of Pará, although their action had been sanctioned by force of a federal decree. Towards the end of August, Minister Salles announced the halt of all surveillance and deforestation-fighting operations. As a result, catastrophic fires occurred in the Pantanal natural region – in the states of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul – affecting a staggering 30 per cent of the biome, its biodiversity and local communities. There was also a delay in the appointment of fire brigades, as well as frequent interruptions in the fire-fighting activities. The number of fires from 1 January to 22 October 2020 reached 89,604 (Fante, 2020).

According to the National Institute for Spatial Research (INPE), the number of deforestation and environmental degradation alerts increased 88 per cent in comparison to the same month in the previous year. In the first semester, alerts of deforestation in Indigenous lands increased 38 per cent, and by a staggering 85 per cent inside Federal Conservation Units (INPE, 2021). In response, Bolsonaro claimed that the data from INPE had been manipulated, and accused its Director, Ricardo Galvão, who was later sacked from the institute, of working ‘at the service of NGOs’. ‘We understand the importance of the Amazon for the world, but the Amazon is ours. We will not accept the type of politics that used to be done in the past’, Bolsonaro further added (Brasil de Fato, 2019).

In August 2019, farmers and land grabbers who supported Bolsonaro organized ‘fire day’ – a coordinated incineration of pasture. One of the organizers declared that ‘we need to show the president that we want to work, and the only way to do so is by knocking it down. And to form and clean our pasture, we need fire.’ As a result, on 19 August, the skies of São Paulo became dark at 3pm with the black smoke that had travelled all the way from the Amazon. Minister Salles associated the fire with ‘fake news’, and on 21 August Bolsonaro suggested that NGOs could have orchestrated the Amazon fires as a form of retaliation for cuts in federal funding (Brasil de Fato, 2019).

In September, INPE had already registered an increase of 64 per cent of fire occurrences in the country compared with 2018 (DW, 2020a). Deforestation alerts had also risen by 321 per cent in August. In that month, Bolsonaro delivered a speech at the UN, attacking political opponents such as the Indigenous leader Roni Metyktire and the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, who had severely criticized the Brazilian government's mismanagement of the Amazon crisis. At the end of November 2019, Bolsonaro pledged that money donated to NGOs should be halted and went so far as to accuse Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio of paying organizations to spread fires in the Amazon.

On 26 November, massive oil slicks of unknown origin had reached 779 areas in the Brazilian coastline since the end of August. The substance was raw petrol, which can affect the lives of maritime animals and coastal cities. Minister Salles ignored the Contingency Plan for Incidents of Oil Pollution in Waters under National Jurisdiction and insinuated that Greenpeace could have orchestrated the spills. Four and a half thousand tons of oil mixed with sand had been collected in the north-eastern coast by November 2019. According to a survey carried out by Piauí magazine, this amount is enough to fill 27,000 barrels (Mazza et al., 2019).

With this brief outline of the current state of decay of environmental public policies in Brazil, we turn to how the far right was able to ideologically justify such transformations and streamline a more aggressive anti-environmental agenda.

Living in sin with cultural Marxism

Broadly speaking, conspiracy theories are ‘an explanation, either speculative or evidence-based, which attributes the causes of an event to a conspiracy or a plot’ (Byford, 2011: 21). Conspiracy theories can however become politically charged when they are seen to threaten a group's identity and existence, leading it to create narratives that strengthen boundaries of difference with the outside world, whereby the out-group may provide justification for collective fear. When this happens, conspiracy theories can elevate social anxieties to a point of permanent obsession, channelling all frustrated experiences with modern life – economic self-realization, social recognition, cultural authenticity and so on – to marginalized scapegoats who become the bearers of ‘evil’. The victimized ‘we’ identity is incapable of realizing its true moral nature (i.e. gifted by the mythical past of tradition) because the world has become profane, and all the violence, war and greed that exists is reductive to one, or a cluster, of social groups, such as Jews, Palestinians, Feminists, Gays, Blacks, Arabs, Communists, Natives.

The bizarre theories often brought forth about them are conspiratorial because they point to networked actions of corruption, moral degradation, plots of overtaking power and ideas that can lead down the road to violence and criminality. And such conspiracies are theoretical because they cannot ever be proved, or yet, any loose evidence can automatically prove the theory right and cannot be rationally debated without new, sub-theories arising to support them. ⁵ Whichever their contours, conspiracy theories are always about the creation and personalization of the public enemy (Kurz, 2017) through a ‘single overarching plot that supposedly explains everything’ (Byford, 2011: 33).

The far right has historically been the group most prone to embracing conspiracy theories and of articulating ‘politics as conspiracy’ (Saull et al., 2015: 5). Radicalizing the conservative's commitment to preserve, it turns instead to a quest for transformation of society given the emergency to protect, or to further develop, its idealized self-notions of racial supremacy, masculine warrior ethos, religion, patriarchy and domination over nature (Davidson and Saull, 2017). What unites most of the far right today is a shared perception of enmity geared towards a global, pervasive conspiracy branded as ‘cultural Marxism’. Once part of the propaganda repertoire of the German Nazi party in the 1930s to combat ‘cultural Bolshevism’, the obsession with the supposed erosion of traditional values operating swiftly through leftist intellectuals and artists became rebranded as cultural Marxism after the end of the Cold War. This conspiracy asserts that, with the collapse of really-existing-socialism and the failure of socialist revolutions to spread worldwide, the left devised new strategies of cultural domination – inspired by Gramsci and authors of the Frankfurt School – which would in the long term destroy capitalism from its superstructures of representation. As Olavo de Carvalho – Bolsonaro's ‘intellectual Guru’, whom the far-right strategist Steve Bannon believes to be one of the most brilliant minds alive (Teitelbaum, 2020) – suggests in his outlandish caricature:

Themes such as human rights, feminism and reproduction rights, homosexual marriage, and quotas for minorities and historically oppressed populations are, in this depiction, all ‘Gramscist’ strategies aiming to erode the family and traditional hierarchies which are the founding stone of capitalism. This explains the obsession of the far right with a ‘culture war’ or ‘metapolitics’ at all levels, as the communist public enemy is seen to be omnipresent in public education, mainstream media, the entertainment industry and in environmental regulatory institutions (Carapanã, 2019; Teitelbaum, 2020).

The most striking example of ‘metapolitical activism’ against cultural Marxism comes not from an angry intellectual, but from Brazil's former Minister of Foreign Affairs, the diplomat Ernesto de Araújo, who hosts an online blog named Metapolics 17: Against Globalism. ⁶ In a meeting among diplomats held in August 2019, where a report on climate change was presented, Araújo intervened to defend his view: ‘I do not believe in Climate Change. You see, I was in Rome in May and it was very cold. This shows how the theory is wrong. … This the media chooses to ignore.’ (see IG, 2019) This was not a side comment or a silly joke. Araújo was the man personally appointed by Olavo de Carvalho to shape Brazil's foreign policy. However nerve-wracking it may sound, his statement is in fact interwoven into a system of belief to which the Chancellor subscribes and around which similar conspiracies abound, such as that Nazism was a left-wing movement, that the left has an anti-natalist project to keep people from being born, and that ‘globalist cultural Marxism’ began with the French Revolution (see Esquerda Diário, 2018).

Such iterations are not casual or incidental. They are consistently outlined and articulated in philosophical writings linked to a broad tradition of thought. Take, for instance, Araújo's two articles published in Brazil's leading diplomatic journal, Cadernos de Política Exterior. In ‘Trump and the West’ (Araújo, 2017), he hails the victory of Trump as the saviour of Western civilization. In ‘Globalism: A View Based on Nietzche's Thinking’ (Araújo, 2019), he describes how Marxism occupied what he calls the desert of nihilist values and created its own form of religion, ‘Globalism’, a merging of the cultural revolution from the 1960s with Frankfurt School theories and Gramsci's ideas to pave the terrain for a new cultural hegemony of the left.

In these writings we can derive essential topics such as the decay of Western civilization – threatened both by a foreign enemy, Radical Islamic Terrorism, and a domestic one, people's very own loss of self-identity. According to Araújo, ‘Pan-nationalism’ is what defines the spirit of the West, the sense of a ‘birth-culture’  ⁷ as the overarching edifice of world politics which rests on the mutual existence of nations with no claims of sovereignty below or beyond them (Araújo, 2017: 332). By looking at history, he reminds us of the great deeds of Western civilization in fencing off enemies to preserve its self-image, such as when the Greeks defeated the Persians in 480 BC, when the Europeans deterred the Ottomans from invading Vienna in 1683, or when the counterrevolutionaries suppressed the proletariat in the upheavals of 1848 onwards.

By insisting on such ‘Great Restorations’, Araújo believes he is engaged in a moral crusade to restore Christian values. Not by chance, Araújo has been characterized by people both on the left and right in Brazil as a ‘Knight Templar’ in a moral crusade against cultural Marxism. Roberto Freire, a former right-wing Minister, Tweeted prior to Araújo's appointment as Chancellor in November 2018 that ‘unfortunately, Brazil will not have a minister of foreign affairs, but a Templar Knight preaching on Gods, the Devil, and prophets of a new age’. ⁸ This depiction becomes less a caricature when confronting Araújo's claim that what Trump's platform offered to the West was a Jungian geo-psychic, civilizational therapy ‘whose key is to recover the contact with an abandoned collective unconsciousness that has been suffocated by the blows of technocratic liberalism and political correctness’ (Araújo, 2017: 331). In fact, there have been some public displays of Knights Templar symbology by Araújo and other far-right figures in Brazil, which suggests stronger links with its international counterparts like the alt-right (Pachá, 2019; Chade, 2021). This type of civilizational imagery has been termed ‘conspiratorial medievalism’, a form of discourse ‘centred on the existence of a transhistorical, White Christianity that is permanently threatened by a variety of agents’ (Millar and Lopez, 2021: 5).

The moral crusade against the ‘green mafia’

Cultural Marxism played a fundamental role in the election of Jair Bolsonaro in October 2018 and in the ensuing environmental policies of the far-right government. The large-scale dissemination of fake news during the presidential campaign against the candidate of the Worker's Party, Fernando Haddad, provided Bolsonaro with a quasi-religious aura against fears that the left wanted to ‘teach sex in schools’ with the platform of ‘gender ideology’, and that generalized, state-led corruption was to become legalized. ⁹ Winning over the majority of the votes of the Evangelicals – the most morally conservative group in the electorate that voted as a bloc – allowed Bolsonaro to secure a wide margin over his opponent in the second round of the elections. ¹⁰

Running on an internally fragmented far-right platform with declining popular support, Bolsonaro's strength lies in the contingent support he receives from certain state factions such as cultural authoritarians, militarists and neoliberal technocrats – all sharing with him the basic tenets of the conspiracy theories alluded to in the last section (Webber, 2020). The environmental dimension of this could already be felt in his inauguration speech, where he claimed that the agricultural sector – that is, monocultural farming, cattle ranching, extractivism – would have a decisive role in Brazil's development strategy, ‘in perfect harmony with environmental preservation’ (see Veja, 2019) This he said after having spent the campaign complaining that environmental policies and rights of Indigenous people block economic development (see Bragança, 2018). Let us turn to how this ‘harmony’ is understood and interwoven with the tenets of the Brazilian brand of cultural Marxism.

The former Chancellor Ernesto de Araújo is perhaps the most authoritative and articulate voice among conspiracists. In a speech at the Heritage Foundation, he claimed that globalism, that is, ‘economic globalization highjacked by cultural Marxism’, operates through three main threads: the ideology of climate change (or ‘climatism’), gender ideology and ‘oikophobia’ – the opposite of xenophobia, that is, hatred towards one's own nation (FUNAG, 2019). He focuses on climatism as the main pressing issue of the day, pointing to supposedly faulty evidence in the 2018 IPCC report on climate change to conclude that ‘it doesn't seem like a climate catastrophe to me’ (FUNAG, 2019). Climatism, in this view, seeks to end political debate in order to impose exceptional measures that limit countries’ sovereignty and attempt to steal away freedom of speech. Further, climatism is a tactic that seeks to destroy the ‘symbolic order’ of things: whereas classical Marxism reduced men to an economic animal, the ‘new Marxism’ introduces the ‘reductio ad climaticum’, and hence any utterance of a ‘climate crisis’ becomes the rationale for a communist plot to overthrow democratic countries in the West (FUNAG, 2019). Elsewhere, Araújo (2018) specified that

Here, climate change denialism becomes a position of conscious resistance against an alleged communist objective to steal away the fundamental liberties of a market economy.

Araújo is not alone in this crusade. A very influential work among the Latin American moralist crusaders is the Dark Book of the New Left (Marquez and Laje, 2018). According to its authors, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, many leftist groups in Latin America united to create, in 1990, the ‘São Paulo Forum’, having as its main leaders Fidel Castro, Lula from the Worker's Party and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. They claim the Forum gave the opportunity for the left to reinvent its Leninist orientation and invest in a new hegemonic strategy inspired by Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe. Indigenous and environmental movements would play a central role in this new phase, especially from 1992 onwards, ‘when a number of strange, innovative and seemingly disconnected movements began appearing in many different parts of the world and in Latin America in particular’ (Marquez and Laje, 2018: 16). The Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit (Eco-92) and the Indigenous March in Bolivia under the leadership of Evo Morales in the same year, were symbolic of this new era:

Another source of inspiration is an older conspiracy that can be referred to as ‘far-right decolonialism’, which leaves aside the obsession with leftist regimes and focuses instead on a diffuse elite project from the Northern hemisphere that supposedly manipulates progressive social movements in the South. Rejecting any form of social identity based on gender, race and class, it derives the substance of the nation mainly from adherence to Christian values, in particular the principle of man's creation in the image of God, which would justify full domination over nature. To reject this truth is to fall into the traps of ‘green neo-colonialism’, according to the Ibero-American Solidarity Movement, a transnational conservative think-tank that disseminates this conspiracy. Reportedly, this conspiracy has significant resonance among militarists and ruralists in Brazil and has become a guide for Bolsonaro's environmental policy (see BrasilAgro, 2019). Its main ideas come from the book Green Mafia: Environmentalism in Service to the World Government (Carrasco et al., 2017), published in 2001 and currently in its twelfth edition. The authors claim that the ‘green mafia’ is a:

As a consequence, the elites behind this project would be capable of controlling the population and natural resources of those countries, establishing a neo-colonial agenda through a cultural strategy deployed by the ‘environmental apparatus’. The world government elite, or ‘Anglo-American oligarchy’, would be guided by values that make environmentalism a successor to Malthusianism, economic liberalism and the vision of an intrinsic Anglo-Saxon superiority as its model of world domination (Carrasco et al., 2017: 158–164).

In this setting, environmentalism is seen by the conspiracy theorists as a form of ‘hybrid war’ waged for ‘social engineering’, seeking to discredit national identity, the family unit and Christian values. The counterculture of the ‘new left’ became a strategy of this Anglo-American oligarchy, which from the end of the 1960s began investing in cultural tactics at universities with the spread of post-modern theories, the LGBT movement, ‘gender ideology’ and the ‘environmental-indigenous’ apparatus – which operates with the infiltration of scientists and environmental activists in national governments.

In Brazil, the authors claim this was first disseminated with Liberation Theology, a popular theological strand in the 1960s and 1970s that opposed military rule. In the 1980s, it then turned to NGOs promoting ideas such as global warming and ozone depletion. Further, ‘human zoos’ were implemented with the creation of Indigenous reserves, hindering exploration of God-gifted natural resources. For instance, this agenda resulted in the land demarcation of the ‘gigantic and absurd Yanomami indigenous reserve, an area comprising 90.000km ² located at the border with Venezuela and inhabited by a few thousand wandering foresters that have yet to overcome the civilizational phase of the Neolithic’ (Carrasco et al., 2017: 613).

In sum, NGOs, infiltrated institutions – such as the INPE and IBAMA – and social movements – such as the Landless Workers’ Movement and its branches – have allegedly created barriers to sovereign economic development: on the one hand, by denying the use of natural resources according to the ‘national interest’ (which in Brazil is intimately linked to notions of ‘national security’ in the military's mindset) and, on the other, producing a preservationist ideology that discredits national identity and prepares room for the exploitation of the Amazon by the ‘neo-colonialist international consortium’ (Carrasco et al., 2017: 84–90).

Taken together, these conspiracies form a consistent backbone of the ideology of Bolsonaro's government, although here we are only able to present a brief sketch of a much broader and transnationalized conspiracy theory. The main problem is that such views are not just limited to the elected government but have a long spill-over trajectory within the Armed Forces and relate to their ongoing politicization. The military has been a key actor in the process of de-democratization that Brazil has gone through in recent years (Ortega and Marín, 2020), with recurrent blackmail and tutelage on the part of the military against the judiciary. An example was in April 2018, when former Commander of the Army, General Villas-Bôas, threatened on Twitter to intervene in the event of a favourable decision on the Habeas Corpus by the Supreme Court to prevent former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–2010) of the Workers’ Party from being arrested after being sentenced to 12 years in jail on dubious charges of passive corruption and money laundering (see Betim, 2018). In his recently published memoir, Vilas Bôas admits that the Tweet had been not a personal decision but meticulously articulated within the High Command of the army (see DW, 2021). As a result of their ideological affinity, Bolsonaro's government has been completely militarized. He chose four-star General Hamilton Mourão as his Vice-President, appointed (as of February 2021) 11 military officials as ministers (out of 23 ministries), and around 2,900 military personnel have been allocated to other echelons in the public administration (see Monteiro and Fernandes 2020).

According to Leirner (2020: 12), the Brazilian military has been actively engaged, at least since 2007 in ‘full spectrum psychological’, warfare against what the higher chains of command perceived as the new asymmetric threats arising from the post-Cold War era. These threats are pretty much the same as those identified by the far-right conspiracy theories outlined above, ¹¹ the ‘environmental-Indigenous apparatus’ and the greed over the Amazonian forest, of which the left, under the Workers’ Party, had been an international agent. With the demarcation of the Indigenous land ‘Raposa Serra do Sol’ under Lula's presidency in 2008, a widespread rebellion took shape in the army, with Vilas Bôas and General Augusto Heleno – currently a Minister in the far-right government – at the head of the insurgency that ultimately paved the way to Bolsonaro's election. With over 1,700,000 acres of land in the state of Roraima, at the border with Venezuela and Guyana, the Raposa Serra do Sol reserve has been the centre stage of many rural conflicts between Indigenous communities and non-Indigenous rice planters, who were forced to leave the land following the demarcation. With the judicialization of those conflicts, General Heleno claimed that the reserve was on its way to becoming an ‘autonomous state’ with the activities of NGOs and Indigenous movements (Fernandes, 2018). But, as already mentioned, the threats to the Amazon are perceived exclusively from the diffuse activism of environmentalists, and not from the greed of the transnational agricultural and mining sector, for which Bolsonaro lobbied during his campaign. In a video posted on social media, he said he would work to allow exploitation of natural resources in the Raposa Serra do Sol reserve: ‘I dream, who knows one day, that we also have the Niobium Valley’ in that region (Fernandes, 2018).

Perhaps no other event in the Bolsonaro presidency illustrates more the correlation between beliefs in conspiracy theories and its functionality in the interests of ruralistas than the infamous ministerial meeting held in April 2020 that was released to the public by a Supreme Court order. This meeting, which was recorded on video, gives a rare insight into the mentality of far-right politicians in their daily exchanges, and how conspiracy theories are nourished both in a vulgar and a more structured, ideological fashion. For instance, amid an escalating hate speech against the ‘omnipresent’ communist enemy and the glorification of the military dictatorship, the former Minister of Education, Abraham Weintraub, intervened to suggest the forced arrest of all Supreme Court ministers and the radicalization of the government in their ‘struggle for freedom’, to then conclude that ‘I hate the term “indigenous population”, I hate it. … There is only one people in this country. If you like it, you like it. If you don't like it, leave it on reverse gear.’. The Minister for Women, Family and Human Rights, Damares Alves, claimed she had information that the left had a plot to spread coronavirus against Indigenous populations in the Amazon, with the sole aim to ‘blame it on the government’. Bolsonaro himself could not hold his excitement. Echoing Chancellor Araújo's well-articulated conspiracy that state intervention is a communist tactic to steal away one's freedom, the President burst out in fury to say that the imposition of isolation measures during the pandemic – which he always minimized – was equivalent to imposing a dictatorship: ‘what those sons of horses want … is our freedom. Look how easy it is to implement a dictatorship in Brazil. … People are at home. This is why I want … people to be armed!’ (see G1, 2020).

The above remarks highlight the extent to which there is a conspiracist mindset within the far-right government that is conducive to anti-democratic politics. But the ‘horror show’, as the meeting has been called, also reveals the level of sheer pragmatism of the neoliberal agenda in the environmental sector, with conspiracy theories being self-consciously used as a smoke screen for advancing the interests of the rural elite. The then-Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles, perfectly outlined the guide for action, suggesting that ‘in this current moment where media attention is almost exclusively turned to Covid’, it was the perfect time to ‘pass infra-legal reforms to de-regulate, simplify’ the legal structure of environmental protection in Brazil; or, in his words, to ‘let the cattle pass through to change the whole rule’ (see G1, 2020).

To Salles, to ‘let the cattle pass through’ means to facilitate the unimpeded exploitation of natural resources. Meanwhile, all scientific evidence pointing to increases in forest fires, deforestation, irregular cattle ranching, violence against rural communities and the like, is considered an ‘international campaign against Brazil’ – as Bolsonaro claimed in his speech at the UN Biodiversity Summit in September 2020 (DW, 2020b). Thus, cultural Marxism and related environmental conspiracies, as has been shown in this section, sit in perfect harmony with the economic interests of the backward power structure of ruralistas and have therefore facilitated the anti-environmental policies undertaken by Bolsonaro's presidency. The coup plotter General Vilas Bôas could not have made this clearer in his memoir when he stated that Minister Salles, suffering a ‘massacre of accusations’ from foreign audiences, ‘dares to denounce what lies behind international indigenism and environmentalism’ (de Castro, 2021: 221–222).

The intensification of land struggle

In this chapter, we have argued that the ongoing environmental catastrophe in Brazil has been widely facilitated by the use of conspiracy theories by the far right in their moral crusade against so-called cultural Marxism. We claim that the conspiracy theory of cultural Marxism played a fundamental role in agitating not only the more radical base of Bolsonaro's supporters, but more significantly in informing environmental policies that perfectly harmonize with the interests of ruralistas. By way of conclusion, we briefly look at how this situation is currently affecting the state of class struggle in rural Brazil, in particular the unprecedented increase in environmental conflicts in the country.

According to a survey carried out by Project Latentes (2018), there are currently 4,536 areas in Brazil where settlements, quilombos, Indigenous reserves or preservation sites neighbour, or intersect with, active regions of mineral exploitation, which more often than not precipitates land conflict. This reality reflects the escalation of rural violence and land struggle in contemporary Brazil, stretching to disputed territories comprising waters, land and the subsoil (Gonçalves, 2016). According to the Conflict Map Involving Environmental Injustice and Health in Brazil, as of March 2021 around 611 socio-environmental conflicts had been reported by local communities or academics in the country. ¹² Another mapping platform, Ejatlas, shows that, from the 2,840 environmental conflicts that have been registered worldwide by social movements and NGOs, 133 were self-reported in Brazil, making it the country with the third-highest number of environmental conflicts in the world. ¹³ Further, in 2019, about 860,000 people were involved in land conflict, according to the latest Land Conflict Map, which is annually published by the Land Pastoral Commission. Mining companies are responsible for 38.8 per cent of those conflicts in rural Brazil (Land Pastoral Commission, 2019).

Aside from fulfilling his promise of not demarcating any centimetre of Indigenous land, the Bolsonaro government returned 27 demarcation lawsuits to be reviewed by FUNAI in the first session of 2019 alone. This implies larger obstacles, as well as impediments, to the fulfilling of the constitutional rights of the Indigenous population who claim their ancestral territory. In 2019, 113 homicides of Indigenous natives were registered by the Special Secretary of Indigenous Health, a little fewer than in 2018, with 135 homicides. The states of Mato Grosso do Sul and Roraima registered the highest rates, at 40 and 26, respectively. There have been even reports of torture against children in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul (CIMI, 2020). In parallel to this context, the Bolsonaro government is currently pushing to criminalize progressive rural social movements through a punitive turn in the legal apparatus that regulates land occupation, as well as relaxing legislation concerning the right to carry firearms on rural properties (Firmiano, 2020).

In Brazil, there are many movements reacting against and resisting the environmental policies of the far-right government, such as the Landless Workers’ Movement and the Via Campesina. Peasants, local communities, landless populations and social movements are at the forefront of the land struggle, spanning nationwide demonstrations against mining projects from the south to the north of the country, questioning large, multinational fishing industries and standing up to environmental racism, among other pressing issues. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro's base of supporters has shrunk after a disastrous mishandling of the economy and the COVID-19 pandemic, although what remains of it has radicalized even further. Threats to the division of powers and coup plotting against democracy – fuelled by ever-emerging conspiracy theories – also continue under the far-right government as Bolsonaro's chances of winning the 2022 elections for a second term seem all the more distant, as shown by polls throughout the country. Possibly for the first time in Brazil, the environmental issue will become highly politicized during the elections, given the scale of the anti-environmentalist catastrophe represented by Bolsonaro's office.