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 The new Environment minister of Brazil pledged Monday, May 19, to aggressively fight illegal logging and deforestation in the Amazon rain forest. Former Rio de Janeiro state Environment Secretary, Carlos Minc, is expected to take the post on May 27.
Minc replaces renowned rain forest defender Marina Silva, who resigned last week in apparent despair over the obstacles she faced in policing the illegal lumber industry, among other things.
Minc insisted that anti-logging measures "will be maintained and reinforced." He announced plans to use soldiers to protect the environment and vowed to implement a "zero deforestation" program. He gave no further details.
Former minister Silva who was very much respected by environmentalist groups, had criticized Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's administration failure to provide sustainable alternatives to illegal logging. Her resignation left many environmentalists worried that illegal loggers might more often be left to do as they please.
Minc said on Sunday that he would propose President Lula da Silva making Brazil's armed forces play a more active role in protecting national parks, Indian reserves and the Amazon rain forest.
He promised that the Amazon "will not be converted into charcoal" and promised to continue with the "same policies that the former minister Marina Silva had insisted. We will also do many other things that she was unable to accomplish and that we now have the conditions to fulfill."
The appointed minister is co-founder of the Green Party in Brazil and currently Rio de Janeiro state's Environment secretary.
The Amazon rain forest which borders with several South American neighbors and is home to 27 million people out of Brazil's total population of 185 million, has been facing with limited success the risks of excessive deforestation as loggers and farmers keep advancing.
Mercopress
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The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.
This is an interesting turn of events and I am not sure if you are keeping track of them!
It is worth reading about this gentleman in the following link:
http://veja.abril.com.br/blogs/reinaldo/
btw, I already replied to your question in the other thread.