Activists condemn president Jair Bolsonaro’s failure to defend the forest as his supporters condemn ‘global left’

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Protesters have laid siege to Brazilian embassies around the world as international outrage over Jair Bolsonaro’s failure to protect the Amazon intensified and supporters maligned critics of the Brazilian president as leftist conspirators.

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside Brazil’s embassy in central London on Friday with placards reading: “The planet deserves better” and “Our house is on fire”.

“Bolsonaro wants to destroy the forest … and we do not want this,” one indigenous leader from Brazil told the crowd.

There were also rallies outside Brazil’s embassies in Mexico City and Paris, where demonstrators reportedly carried banners reading: “Fora Bolsonaro!” or “Bolsonaro, out!”

Protesters also surrounded the Brazilian consulate in Geneva while further marches were planned in cities including Adelaide, Lisbon, Stockholm, Boston and Florida.

Amazon fires: what is happening and is there anything we can do? Read more

Brazil’s far-right president has rejected the international outcry over the fires raging in the Amazon and his stance on the environment.

Bolsonaro on Thursday painted the barrage of criticism as part of a foreign conspiracy that might eventually be used to justify a foreign “intervention” in the Amazon.

“This happens all over the world, it’s not just in Brazil,” he said of the fires decimating the world’s largest tropical rainforest.

Bolsonaro’s politician son, Eduardo, claimed criticism of his father was part of an international intrigue designed to damage his government.

“The GLOBAL left has come together in a clear attack against president Jair Bolsonaro,” he tweeted.

Rômulo Batista, a Greenpeace campaigner in the Amazon, said such claims – and Bolsonaro’s baseless insinuation that NGOs were behind the fires – were merely an attempt to deflect from Bolsonaro’s own responsibility for the environment calamity. “He is trying to hide behind a smokescreen,” Batista said.

Play Video 1:58 Amazon fires: the tribes fighting to save their dying rainforest – video

In Brazil, demonstrators were preparing to mobilize for a weekend of protests in cities including Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Curitiba, Recife and the Amazon city of Manaus.

“Almost everyone I know will go,” said Frederico Svoboda, 18, a history student from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

“I believe that if there is not international pressure to force the government to deal with the fires and guarantee the protection of biodiversity and indigenous peoples there could be climate disasters in Brazil and maybe South America.”

People around the world should “pressure the Brazilian government to act”, Svoboda added.

Anna Mello, a 24-year-old biologist, said she would march in the north-eastern city of Recife.

“For me this is surreal, I can’t believe it is happening. It is absurd that … people can support this as if it were totally normal rather than a crime and something that might affect the whole of humanity.”

Writing in the O Globo newspaper, the columnist Bernando Mello Franco said that thanks to Bolsonaro, “Brazil is on track to go back to being seen as an environmental pariah”.