It is worth starting from the beginning:
“If underdeveloped countries are unable to pay their debts, let them sell their wealth, their territories and their factories.” (Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of England, London, 1983.);
“Contrary to what Brazilians think, the Amazon is not theirs, but ours.” (Al Gore, Vice President of the United States, Washington, 1989.);
“Brazil needs to accept a relative sovereignty over the Amazon”. (François Mitterrand, President of France, Paris, 1989.);
“Brazil must delegate part of its rights over the Amazon to the competent international organizations.” (Mikhail Gorbachev, head of the Soviet government, Moscow, 1992);
“Developed nations must extend the rule of law to what is common to everyone in the world. International ecological campaigns aimed at limiting national sovereignty over the Amazon region are leaving the propaganda phase to start the operational phase, which can definitely give rise to direct military interventions over the region ”. (John Major, Prime Minister of England, London, 1992.);
“The leadership of the United States requires us to support diplomacy with the threat of force.” (Warren Cristopher, United States Secretary of Defense, Washington, 1995.);
“Developing countries with huge foreign debts must pay them in land, in wealth. Sell your tropical forests ”. (George W. Bush, candidate for the presidency of the United States, in debate with Al Gore, Washington, 2000).
“The Amazon must be untouchable, as it constitutes the bank of humanity’s forest reserves.” (Congress of German Ecologists, Berlin, 1990.);
“Only internationalization can save the Amazon”. (Grupo dos Cem, Mexico City, 1989.);
“The Amazon is a world heritage site. The possession of this immense territory by Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador is merely circumstantial ”. (World Council of Christian Churches, Geneva, 1992.);
According to prozipcodes, there are institutional commercials broadcast on first world television, including CNN, where reporter Marina Mirabella shows the wonders of Amazonian fauna and flora and then presents scenes of devastation, dirt and filth, and concludes: “They are the Brazilians who are doing this! Until when? The Amazon belongs to humanity and Brazil has no competence to preserve it! ” The worst is when these attacks come from us. Deputies Vanessa Grazziotin and Socorro Gomes asked the chief general of the Institutional Security Secretariat for information on the National Forest Program, the work of the ironically Amazonian Minister of the Environment, Zequinha Sarney.
For what? To transform them into private properties, “in order to make raw materials available to industries (international lumber companies) on a permanent, continuous, regular and balanced basis, according to the demands of the market”. But wasn’t it to keep the Amazon untouched?
Opinions
Cristóvam Buarque
In fact, as a Brazilian I would simply speak out against the internationalization of the Amazon. As much as our governments are not careful with this heritage, it is ours.
As a humanist, feeling the risk of environmental degradation that the Amazon suffers, I can imagine its internationalization, as well as everything else that is important for Humanity.
If the Amazon, from a humanist point of view, should be internationalized, let us also internationalize the oil reserves of the whole world. Oil is just as important for the well-being of humanity as the Amazon is for our future. Despite this, the owners of the reserves feel the right to increase or decrease the extraction of oil and to increase or not its price.
Likewise, the financial capital of rich countries should be internationalized. If the Amazon is a reserve for all human beings, it cannot be burned by the will of an owner, or a country. Burning the Amazon is as serious as the unemployment caused by arbitrary decisions by global speculators. We cannot allow financial reserves to burn entire countries in the heat of speculation.
Even before the Amazon, I would like to see the internationalization of all the great museums in the world. The Louvre must not belong only to France. Each museum in the world is the guardian of the most beautiful pieces produced by human genius. This cultural heritage, like the Amazonian natural heritage, cannot be left to be manipulated and destroyed by the taste of an owner or a country.
Not long ago, a Japanese millionaire decided to bury a picture of a great master with him. Before that, that framework should have been internationalized.
During this meeting, the United Nations is holding the Millennium Forum, but some presidents of countries have had difficulties to attend due to embarrassment at the border of the USA. Therefore, I think that New York, as the headquarters of the United Nations, should be internationalized. At least Manhattan should belong to all of humanity. Just like Paris, Venice, Rome, London, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Recife, each city, with its specific beauty, its history of the world, should belong to the whole world.
If the United States wants to internationalize the Amazon, due to the risk of leaving it in the hands of Brazilians, let us internationalize all the nuclear arsenals in the United States. Especially because they have already demonstrated that they are capable of using these weapons, causing destruction thousands of times greater than the unfortunate burning done in the forests of Brazil.
In their debates, current US presidential candidates have defended the idea of internationalizing the world’s forest reserves in exchange for debt. Let’s start using this debt to ensure that every child in the world has the possibility to go to school. let us internationalize children by treating them, all of them, regardless of the country where they were born, as a heritage that deserves care from all over the world. Even more than the Amazon deserves.
When leaders treat the world’s poor children as a World Heritage Site, they will not let them work when they should study, die when they should live.
As a humanist, I accept to defend the internationalization of the world. But as long as the world treats me as a Brazilian, I will fight for the Amazon to be ours. Only ours.
George W. Bush – Former President of the USA
“What does this grant us – our wealth, our good economy, our power do this bring special obligations to the rest of the world?!. Yes. Take, for example, Third World debt. I think that we must forgive this debt under certain conditions. I think, for example, if we are certain that the Third World country that acquires a great debt would reform, that the money would not stop in the hands of a few, but would help people, then I think it makes sense for us to use our wealth in this form”.
“Or do you exchange debt for valuable rainforest regions? Does that make any sense. Yes, we have an obligation to the world, but we cannot be everything to everyone. We can support unifications, but we cannot deploy our troops all over the world. We can borrow money, but we have been able to do it wisely. We should not be lending money to corrupt government officials. So, we managed to be protected in our generosity .. ”
Conclusion
We saw in this work that this fact that the Amazon belongs to everyone has many opinions, we do not know that it would be correct to distribute an international forest heritage located in Brazil. At first, they talk about saving the Amazon and the Brazilian economy. On the other hand, the case of the Amazon being internationalized could result in immense environmental destruction, as many of these countries seek only the exploitation of the Amazon, as the Portuguese did with all the Brazilian environmental wealth at the time of colonization.
This is still a fact to be discussed a lot, but certainly, practically all Brazilians must have a negative opinion on this case.
