Just before the opening of the Biarritz G7, an intense disinformation campaign was launched in the international press with the complicity of French President, Emmanuel Macron and the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk. It aims to allow Europeans to control the Amazon, its minerals, its pharmaceutical treasures and its precious woods.

Its purpose is to distort the problem before providing a false solution.

In the first place, the campaigners reiterated that the Amazon is “the green lung of the planet,” a fallacious formula that suggests that this forest would absorb most of the CO2 produced on Earth, which is absurd.

Second, they have consistently claimed that the Amazon rainforest is burning so fast that it will disappear. The media amplify by giving absurd figures on devastated surfaces. However, the Amazonian forest is a wetland, extremely slow to burn. The devastated areas are not in the forest itself, but in deforested areas. In a few months after the felling of the trees, the tropical flora grows back. These areas are then covered with fallen trunks and new trees that burn rapidly.

President Emmanuel Macron has claimed that he will act through the G7 to save this forest. However, the G7 is not a decision-making body, but only a place of exchange for Western leaders to better understand each other. Since 1978, the only international body in charge of this issue is the ACTO (Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization), which France did not wish to be part of, although its department of Guyana is in the Amazon.

From the beginning of this controversy, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro denounced the colonialist nature of this approach to the problem by a G7 where no leader of the ACTO is invited. Then Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro called for a consultation within the framework of the ACTO, but those who opposed his government refused. Bolivian President Evo Morales has taken up this proposal, which should now be accepted.

It does not matter whether one appreciates or not one of these presidents. They are in charge of the Amazon rainforest and its inhabitants. They have no interest in destroying it.

The problem is not the burning of deforested areas, nor deforestation, but the anarchic way in which it is conducted. The lies knowingly uttered, in a coordinated manner, by several European leaders, foremost among them the French president, suggest that everything will be done to divert international attention from the real economic and political stakes of this tragedy.