“Maybe these guys were just soldiers who want to learn about science,” says Ribeiro, a researcher at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Natal. He coordinated the analysis on behalf of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC), which hosted the meeting and commissioned the report. But it didn’t look like they were there out of curiosity, Ribeiro says.
The incident is the latest example of the rising tensions between the country’s scientists and President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration. Since Bolsonaro took office in January, Brazil’s researchers have faced funding cuts and repeated attempts by the administration to roll back protections for the environment and Indigenous populations. Government officials blocked the release of a ministry report on drug use in Brazil. And they have questioned other work by government scientists, including most recently, deforestation reports by a national agency. The head of that agency has since been dismissed.
“We are concerned about democracy itself,” says Sérgio Rezende, a physicist at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife, and a member of the commission that wrote the SBPC analysis.
Crisis of confidence
The commission found that total spending by Brazil’s three main science-funding agencies fell by nearly 47%, to 7 billion reais (US$1.8 billion), last year, compared with 2014. The situation has deteriorated further since Bolsonaro took office: in March, his administration announced a freeze on 42% of the budget for the ministry of science and communications, leaving it with just 2.9 billion reais for the rest of the year. The latest estimates suggest that the ministry could run out of scholarship money for undergraduate- and graduate-students and post-doctoral researchers as early as September if the government doesn’t provide more cash.
On 19 July, Bolsonaro accused INPE of lying about the numbers, then later suggested that his administration should have the right to approve the agency’s data before they are released to the public. INPE director Ricardo Galvão accused the president of cowardice for publicly attacking his institute.
No regrets
Galvão met with the minister of science, former astronaut Marcos Pontes, on 2 August to discuss the issue. But Galvão was told during the meeting that he was dismissed. He says that he had a constructive discussion with Pontes, and stressed that there was no indication that INPE’s work on deforestation would be censored moving forward. But Galvão says that it was clear that he would have to leave because of the way he challenged the president.
“I don’t have any regrets,” says Galvão, a physicist formerly at the University of São Paulo who will now return to his academic post. “That was not a proper thing for a president to say.”
Bolsonaro has repeatedly derided environmental laws as being a barrier to progress and has criticized enforcement officials, says Maurício Voivodic, who heads the Brazilian branch of the environmental advocacy group WWF, which is in Brasilia. “That’s why we are seeing illegal miners invading Indigenous lands,” he says. “That’s why we are seeing more deforestation.”
Researchers in Brazil expected to see policy changes when Bolsonaro took office, but not so quickly or to such extremes, says Mercedes Bustamante, an ecologist at the University of Brasilia.
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on August 1, 2019.
