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Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said French leader Emmanuel Macron had called him a liar and demanded an apology as a condition to accepting the $20 million in aid the G-7 pledged to Amazon rainforest fire relief on Monday.
Bolsonaro said Macron must say sorry, “and then we can speak,” AP reported.
The Brazilian leader visited states most engulfed by the fires and met with governors who argued the current fires are not out of the ordinary.
“International resources are welcome as long as who uses those resources is us,” said Marcos Jose Rocha dos Santos, the governor of Rondonia, which has been at the center of the current fires. “We will determine where the money will be applied, it’s useless if those resources get here and go to international NGOs,” he said, adding that the 77,000 fires this year were nothing out of the ordinary.
Yet the country’s deforestation monitor, the National Space Research Institute, recorded the number of fires this year as an 85% increase in the last year.
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