More than two million votes separated Flávio Bolsonaro from President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil's first-round election last Sunday, a gap wide enough to make the 45-year-old senator the favourite heading into the 25 October runoff. For Marina Silva, Brazil's former environment minister and one of the world's most recognised conservationists, that number carries a specific warning: a return of the political machine that gutted environmental enforcement across the Amazon between 2019 and 2022, when Jair Bolsonaro, now imprisoned, sat in the presidential palace. Silva, who left Lula's cabinet in April, does not mince words about what she expects from the son. "I've no doubt that this time they will try to finish the perverse project they started with Jair Bolsonaro," she says, describing a strategy built on dismantling Indigenous protection agencies, emboldening illegal miners, and treating the forest as an obstacle to economic growth rather than a planetary asset.

During his father's term, deforestation rates climbed sharply and violence against Indigenous and Quilombola communities in states like Pará and Rondônia intensified, according to monitoring groups that tracked the period. What worries Silva beyond Brazil's borders is timing. She points to Donald Trump's recent moves in Venezuela, where US forces took control of oil fields after the capture of Nicolás Maduro, as a preview of what aggressive foreign resource interests might attempt in a Bolsonaro-led Brazil, given the family's longstanding alliance with Trump. "Brazil cannot be governed by a political group that wants to turn itself into an American protectorate, as is the case with Venezuela today," she warns.

With the runoff three weeks away, the fate of roughly 60% of the world's largest rainforest, spanning Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and beyond, now hinges on an electorate exhausted by incumbency and drawn toward the right.