RIO DE JANEIRO, Sept 11, 2020 (BSS/AFP) – Brazil’s environment minister
challenged Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio Thursday to “put your money where
your mouth is,” after the actor and environmentalist criticized far-right
President Jair Bolsonaro’s policies on the Amazon rainforest.
DiCaprio had shared a video on Twitter Wednesday from a campaign called
DefundBolsonaro.org, which claims that “Bolsonaro’s government has taken the
destruction of the Amazon to unbearable levels,” and calls on investors to
pressure the president to take steps to protect the world’s biggest
rainforest.
Environment Minister Ricardo Salles fired back with a taunt.
“Dear @LeoDiCaprio, Brazil is launching ‘Adopt1Park’ preservation project
which allows you or any other company or individual to pick one of the 132
parks in the Amazon and directly sponsor it at 10 euros per hectare per year.
Are you going to put your money where your mouth is?” Salles wrote on
Twitter.
Bolsonaro retweeted the message.
The president, who took office in January 2019, has presided over a surge
in fires and deforestation in the Amazon, which scientists say is a vital
resource for curbing climate change.
DiCaprio, who has called for stronger action to protect the rainforest, has
become a favorite target of the Bolsonaro administration.
Last month, Vice President Hamilton Mourao challenged the “Once Upon a
Time… in Hollywood” star to an eight-hour hike in the Amazon, saying he
wanted to show him the rainforest was not actually burning.
Salles, for his part, has shown a knack for stirring up controversy.
The environment minister faced intense criticism in April when a video
recording was made public of a Bolsonaro cabinet meeting at which he said the
coronavirus pandemic was an opportunity to roll back regulations “now that
the media’s only talking about Covid.”
He landed in a new row Thursday when he tweeted a video by a Brazilian
agricultural lobby group that claims, “The Amazon is not burning,” with
images of verdant forest, smiling indigenous people and cute animals.
However, it soon emerged the video featured animals that do not actually
live in the Amazon.
Though Bolsonaro has called reports on the Amazon fires “a lie,” figures
from his own government show there were 29,307 fires in the rainforest last
month, just slightly shy of the crisis levels that triggered international
condemnation last year.