"Complicity in Destruction II: How Northern Consumers and Financiers Enable Bolsonaro's Assault on the Brazilian Amazon," April 2019

As the world’s largest rainforest, the Amazon provides 20% of our oxygen, houses 10% of the planet’s biodiversity, and helps stabilize the global climate... Despite [its] importance, the Brazilian Amazon and its peoples are suffering the worst assault in a generation. Deforestation is mounting dramatically...Indigenous peoples and traditional communities themselves suffer disproportionate violence and repression for defending their rights and forests.

The political and economic power that sustains these retrograde actors is provided in large part by global market actors: commodity traders, financiers and consumers. European and North American businesses that finance and source from Brazilian businesses...enable Brazil’s socio-environmental landscape to be reshaped to our collective detriment... This report examines how some of the worst actors operating in the Brazilian Amazon - which have documented links to illegal deforestation, corruption, slave labor, and other crimes - openly trade with and receive financing from a range of companies in Europe and North America. By analyzing 56 Brazilian companies that were fined for environmental crimes in the Amazon since 2017, and identifying a range of northern commercial interests that do business with them, this report demonstrates the complicity of global actors with this kind of egregious behavior, increasingly becoming the norm under the Bolsonaro regime.