“Bolsonaro’s Love Affair With Mining Aims at the Amazon’s Treasures”, 24 october 2018

…[B]olsonaro’s desire to unleash the mining potential of the Amazon, the 1.7 billion-acre rainforest in the heart of South America, has held strong…[“L]ook, we’ve been waiting 30 years,’’ said Elton Rohnelt, who founded a few mining companies during Brazil’s military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, and served with Bolsonaro as a lower-house lawmaker in the 1990s…[B]olsonaro hasn’t yet laid out specifics for the mining sector, and a spokesman didn’t return phone and email requests for comment. But his past statements have activists sounding alarms…[H]e has said, for instance, that he may withdraw from the Paris climate accord if it means sacrificing sovereignty over the Amazon, where the rainforest ecosystem is seen by many as having worldwide ecological importance. And he has criticized the country’s environmental agencies for blocking promising projects. Bolsonaro’s government plan promises to reduce the wait time to license small hydroelectric plants to a maximum three months, rather than the decade it can sometimes take. He’s also said he won’t add even a centimeter to indigenous reserves, and he wants native populations integrated into modern Brazilian society...Bolsonaro’s views tap into the same vein of nationalism that has him leading in the polls. But they also carry underlying complications for both Bolsonaro and Brazil, potentially upsetting indigenous groups, overturning more than a decade of environmental policies and opening a costly building rush into a less-than-welcoming rain forest...industry leaders have complained about overzealous legal officials complicating business since Samarco...'s tailings dam disaster killed 19 people in 2015...[It refers to Belo Sun, BHP Billiton, Glencore, Samarco, Vale, Rio Tinto)...