Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro has sparked widespread dismay with his pick to be the country's new chief federal prosecutor, a sensitive post that comes with wide-ranging powers, including the right to investigate him.
Dispensing with established precedent, the far-right leader ignored the list of three candidates drawn up by a vote among all the country's federal prosecutors, announcing instead little-known prosecutor Augusto Aras for the role. The nomination must be confirmed by the senate.
Explaining his choice on Thursday evening, Mr Bolsonaro said Mr Aras agreed with him that environmental objections should not hold up growth. The president is a long-standing critic of Brazil’s environmental protection regime, which he has attempted to gut during his first eight months in office.
His administration has in recent weeks attracted widespread international criticism for a spike in fires in the Amazon rainforest.
The federal prosecution service is one of the state organs with the power to prosecute environmental crimes and suspend infrastructure works if it believes these will have a negative environmental impact.
National colours
Mr Bolsonaro called on Brazilians to wear the national colours for the Independence Day holiday on Saturday in order to show foreigners “the Amazon is ours”.
Mr Aras has little support within the prosecution service and did not even bother to run in the election for a place on the three-name list it presented to the president. Instead he intensively lobbied Mr Bolsonaro in a series of private meetings. He also gave a number of interviews in which he sought to align himself with Mr Bolsonaro’s agenda.
He has attacked “gender ideology” and implied that minority rights, including those of the country’s indigenous peoples, are subject to manipulation by foreign economic interests.
Mr Aras is also a critic of how prosecutors have conducted the historic Car Wash anti-corruption investigation which has seen billions in looted public funds recovered and led to the jailing of many once-powerful politicians including former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
This has sparked fears he will be a willing ally in the president’s recent campaign to undermine various state organs responsible for investigating corruption. Many leading federal prosecutors took to social media to lament the appointment of Mr Aras.
Anti-corruption
While he ran last year on an anti-corruption platform, in office Mr Bolsonaro has attacked anti-corruption organs as part of a campaign to undermine efforts to investigate his son Flávio for wrongdoing. The probe has already highlighted Flávio's close links to people connected to organised crime in Rio de Janeiro, the Bolsonaro family's political base.
The president is also locked in a dispute with the hierarchy of the federal police and is expected to fire its head in the next few days. That would mark the latest humiliation for his justice minister, Sérgio Moro, the former judge who led the Car Wash investigation before agreeing to join the Bolsonaro administration.
He has sought to defend the police under his command from interference by the president.
