Every September, by tradition, Brazil gets the first word at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. This is because “in very early times, when no one wanted to speak first, Brazil always . . . offered to speak first. And so they have earned the right to speak first at the General Assembly,” as Desmond Parker, chief of protocol for the United Nations, told NPR in 2010. This practice, in place since 1955, does not always make intuitive sense. As Brazil’s standing on the world stage has waxed and waned over the decades, it might seem more or less surprising to see the Brazilian head of state on the dais before, say, the Secretary-General or the president of the United States. (As leader of the host country, the US president speaks second).

This year, however, it seemed entirely appropriate that Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian far-right extremist who took office in January, should speak first. With a governing strategy dependent on gratuitously needling opponents to galvanize his rabid base of online support, Bolsonaro personifies the vacuous ferocity that defines so much political debate in 2019. He has also been at the center of a storm of global condemnation for weeks. Like an obstreperous child summoned to the principal’s office, Bolsonaro had a lot of explaining to do before the international community.

Over the summer, massive fires in the Amazon rainforest, almost two-thirds of which is in Brazilian territory, provoked global outrage against Bolsonaro’s government. For years, Bolsonaro has lamented Brazil’s stringent environmental protections and its stewardship of indigenous peoples’ lands. That deforestation would spike dramatically during his first few months in office surprised no one. As Tyler James Olsen and Brian Dorman note, “most of these fires are started by smallholder farmers or ranchers who are either clearing new tracts of jungle for pasture or re-clearing their previously deforested plots for continued use, employing slash-and-burn agricultural techniques.” Robust environmental laws are only as good as their enforcement, and enforcement is seemingly nowhere on Bolsonaro’s agenda. Elected leaders, journalists, and ordinary people around the world wondered why Brazil’s president wasn’t doing more to put out the flames.