NEW YORK ― Far-right Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro blamed the international media and environmental organizations for spreading “lies” about the fires that are ravaging the Amazon rainforest during a nationalist speech that opened the 2019 United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday morning. “The Amazon is not being devastated,” Bolsonaro said, contradicting recent media reports and even scientific data from his own government. Bolsonaro, a former military officer who has praised Brazil’s previous military dictatorship, is facing international scrutiny for his handling of the record outbreak of fires in the Amazon, his gutting of environmental enforcement agencies and his rolling back of forest protections, and his denial of climate change ― the central focus of this year’s annual U.N. summit. He has faced protests throughout the week from environmental groups, Brazilian activists and indigenous tribal leaders, who have warned that Bolsonaro’s policies threaten both the Amazon and the indigenous peoples who live there. But as was largely expected, the Brazilian leader used his first United Nations address to turn that scorn back on an international community that, he said, is threatening Brazil’s “most sacred value: Our sovereignty.” The speech, in which Bolsonaro warned that the United Nations should not become “a globalist organization,” reserved praise for only one of his foreign counterparts: United States President Donald Trump, with whom Bolsonaro has formed a strong alliance based on climate denial and theories that climate change is a “globalist” conspiracy.

Lucas Jackson / Reuters Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro addresses the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York City.

Bolsonaro, 64, blamed “radical extreme environmentalism” for exploiting “the indigenous policy agenda to further the economic interests of foreign countries.” To counter indigenous leaders’ vocal criticism of his administration, he read a letter of support from a group of tribal farmers, who slammed the “lies disseminated and propagated” by international media who still view Brazil as “a colony.” International nonprofit groups, Bolsonaro said, want indigenous Brazilians to remain “cavemen.” (Bolsonaro has previously said that indigenous Brazilians have “no culture” and that it was “a shame” they weren’t exterminated.) Despite his repeated calls to put business over ideology, Bolsonaro steeped his speech in Cold War-era tropes. He defended booting more than 8,000 Cuban doctors, many of whom serviced remote indigenous villages, from the country shortly after taking office, and he blamed legions of Cuban “agents” for instituting the “cruelty of socialism” in crisis-struck Venezuela. “There can be no political freedom without economic freedom,” Bolsonaro said.

There can be no political freedom without economic freedom. Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro