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Paulo Guedes, here at Alvorada Palace in Brasilia, October 27, 2020.
BRAZIL – Brazil’s Economy Minister Paulo Guedes has claimed France is becoming “insignificant” and has threatened to walk away from the French market if Paris doesn’t stop its criticism of Amazon deforestation.
“You better treat us well, otherwise we’ll send you off,” he began Tuesday in Brasília, during a congress of corporate leaders of the catering sector, excerpts filmed from which were broadcast in the Brazilian press from this Wednesday, August 10.
Paulo Guedes, a key minister in the government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, also equated the fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in 2019 with those that devastated the Amazon rainforest.
“One day a French minister said to me: ‘You are burning the forest’. I answered him, ‘And you, you burned Notre-Dame,'” he said, without specifying which minister he was talking about.
“These are futile accusations! You didn’t burn down Notre-Dame, but you didn’t manage to prevent the small block (where the cathedral is located) from catching fire. Daheim (the Amazon rainforest) is bigger than Europe and they criticize us,” he added.
#VÍDEO – Guedes para França: “É melhor vocês nos tratarem bem porque se não vamos ligar o ‘foda-se’ para vocês”; a… https://t.co/2FauYXKu3a
— Gazeta Brasil (@SigaGazetaBR)
Emmanuel Macron criticized
“After that I gave (the minister) another example: ‘Our trade with you (France) was $2 billion in 2000, the same as China. Today it’s 7 billion for you and 120 billion for China. They become irrelevant to us.
In his speech on Tuesday, Paulo Guedes criticized the fact that French President Emmanuel Macron opposed the ratification of the trade agreement between the European Union and Mercosur (which unites Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay) and questioned Brazil’s willingness to defend the Environment, given the ongoing deforestation and fires in the Amazon.
“Either France opens its market for us, for us and for Mercosur, or it becomes irrelevant for us and we will look elsewhere,” he stressed.
In September 2019, Jair Bolsonaro and Emmanuel Macron fought numerous battles over wildfires in the Amazon, with the Brazilian president accusing his French counterpart of threatening Brazil’s “sovereignty” by criticizing its environmental policies.
Paulo Guedes himself poured oil on the fire and said at the time that First Lady Brigitte Macron was “really ugly”.
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