Word: collor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...years Brazilian authorities viewed ecological concerns with suspicion and scorn, as if they were part of an international plot to thwart the country's development. All that was supposed to change with the March 1990 inauguration of Fernando Collor de Mello, Brazil's first President with a green heart. Collor named Jose Lutzenberger, one of the world's foremost champions of rain-forest preservation, head of a new environment secretariat. The President also vowed to reverse decades of untrammeled development that destroyed 415,000 sq km (160,000 sq. mi.) -- an area the size of Iraq -- of the Amazon rain...
...Collor proclaimed a "change of mentality" in Brazil, and his early measures earned international applause. But now he is under the same fire from environmental critics as his predecessors. "There has been no forward movement," says Fabio Feldmann, the leading environmentalist in Brazil's Congress. "On the contrary, what we have seen is total paralysis...
...Collor's government stands accused of failing to fulfill some of its most important promises. Many conservation areas and national parks exist only on paper. Cattle ranchers, farmers and miners continue to burn, bulldoze and poison the forests. Brazilian environmental agencies still lack the staff and equipment they need to protect endangered flora and fauna. Foreign funds dedicated to Brazilian conservation efforts languish unused because the Collor government, plagued by corruption and staff turnover, has failed to develop projects that would make use of the money...
Even the slowdown in Amazon destruction, critics say, owes less to Collor's policies than to a sagging economy. Says Willem Groenefeld, who runs an environmental institute in the Amazonian state of Rondonia: "Nobody has any money to cut the forest down...
Activists put much of the blame for Brazil's lack of progress on Lutzenberger, the brilliant but eccentric and irascible Environment Secretary. Branded a disaster for his lack of administrative and political skills, he was abruptly fired by Collor in March. The dismissal came a week after Lutzenberger urged World Bank officials in New York City not to lend Brazil money to clean up its environment because the main government agency that would handle the funds was a "nest of corruption." Collor sacked the head of that agency at the same time he fired Lutzenberger...