Six months into his government, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro held a rare press conference in Brasília for foreign journalists. Asked by one reporter about the country’s rising deforestation rates and decreasing oversight from federal protection agencies, the far-right leader replied curtly. “The first thing you have to understand is that the Amazon belongs to Brazil, not to you.”
The journalist in question was British reporter Dom Phillips, murdered three years later in a remote corner of the Amazon rainforest alongside his travel companion and renowned indigenous expert Bruno Pereira — who had been sacked from his role as regional…