Green Party leader Caroline Lucas has warmly welcomed the decision of Marina Silva, perhaps Brazil's best known defender of the Amazon rainforest, to leave the governing Workers Party in preparation for standing as the Green Party's Presidential candidate in next year's election.
Lucas said: "For over two decades, Marina Silva has led grassroots resistance to wholesale environmental destruction. She would be a strong candidate who would push for change on a number of causes which we have in common -- human rights, direct democracy, welfare, civil liberties, and peace."
Born in 1958, Silva was the child of rubber-tappers from the Amazonian state of Acre (near Brazil's border with Bolivia). She helped to create the first workers union in her home state. She worked with the rainforest activist Chico Mendes, who was murdered nearly 20 years ago. Silva and Mendes led a campaign to halt the eviction of forest communities and deforestation in the Amazon. In 1994, she was elected as the youngest female (and as the first rubber-tapper) to the federal Senate in Brazil's history.
For six years (2002 to 2008), she was Brazil's Environment minister. She resigned in May 2008 after unsuccessfully opposing several government infrastructure projects in the Amazon rainforest, including two hydroelectric dams on the River Madeira. She had also been opposed to the construction of a new nuclear power plant in Brazil, and the Brazilian government's decision to authorise genetically-modified grain.