SAO PAULO, Brazil — Brazil’s president appeared Tuesday to walk back an initial rejection of a $22.2 million package from the Group of Seven nations to help fight fires sweeping through the Amazon rainforest.
But President Jair Bolsonaro said any consideration of the aid remained tied up in his dispute with President Emmanuel Macron — even as officials in the fire-stricken regions spoke of negotiating directly with other countries for help if needed.
Bolsanaro said he would not make a final decision until Macron apologized for remarks that Bolsonaro considered a challenge to his credibility and an attack on Brazil’s sovereignty.
“Before speaking or accepting anything from France, even if it comes from the best possible intentions, he must retract his words. Then we can talk,” he told journalists.
The comments are the latest escalation of the feud between the two presidents while the world’s most precious rainforest burns.
Macron threatened last week to block a free-trade agreement between the European Union and Latin America, saying Bolsonaro lied to him about his commitment to the environment. Over the weekend, Bolsonaro appeared to mock the appearance of French President Emmanuel Macron’s wife.
Brazil had said it would reject the aid offer because it was not involved in the decision-making process, the country’s ambassador to France told national television earlier on Tuesday.
Bolsonaro — a climate change skeptic — has questioned the group’s “colonial mentality.”
“We cannot accept that a President, Macron, issues inappropriate and gratuitous attacks against the Amazon,” he tweeted. “Nor that he disguises his intentions behind an ‘alliance’ of the G-7 countries to ‘save’ the Amazon, as if it were a colony or no man’s land.”
But Bolsonaro’s administration appeared split on whether to accept the money.
On Monday, Brazil’s environmental minister said he welcomed the aid. “I think we need to aggregate as many tools as possible to resolve this,” he said on Brazilian television on Monday. Governors in the Amazon said they were willing to bypass Brazil’s federal government and negotiate directly with Europe if necessary.
“We cannot be without these resources,” state governor Wilson Lima told local newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo on Monday.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo urged European countries to channel aid through the United Nations Climate Convention instead of creating new initiatives.
“It is very clear, that some political channels, are trying to extrapolate real environmental concerns and use them in a fabricated ‘crisis’ as a pretext to introduce mechanisms for foreign control of the Amazon,” he tweeted.
Bolsonaro campaigned on a promise to open the Amazon up for business and development. Since his inauguration in January, deforestation and fires in the rainforest have surged.
Earlier this month, Germany and Norway cut a combined $72 million in funds after Bolsonaro said he would use part of the funds to give money to cattle and soy farmers.
Backlash over the fires has snowballed into Bolsonaro’s largest international and domestic crisis since taking office. Bolsonaro’s personal approval rating fell to 41 percent in August from 57.5 percent in February, according to a recent poll.
Seven Brazilian states have called on the army for help with the fires. On Saturday, the Defense Ministry announced 44,000 soldiers were ready to deploy to fight the fires in the Amazon, an area that spans 61 percent of the country, or over 3.2 million square miles.
McCoy reported from Rio de Janeiro
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