In fatigues, carrying heavy weapons, agents fly over the Amazon rainforest in helicopters in search of gold miners’ bases in the territory of the Yanomami, the largest indigenous reserve in Brazil.
The aerial view makes it much easier to flush them out, notes an AFP journalist: it is a brown spot in the emerald green, a deforested area where a camp has been set up, with dormitories, kitchens and improvised toilets, and engines machines still in operation.
The punch operations intensified from last week in this reserve as vast as Portugal, where gold panning has caused a serious humanitarian crisis, due in particular to the pollution of rivers with mercury.
“First, we set up checkpoints to tackle the logistics of illegal activities on the main rivers” of Yanomami territory, explains Felipe Finger, coordinator of the special control group of the environmental protection body Ibama.
“Now we have started another phase, to attack gold panning head-on and put an end to these camps,” he said, in the midst of a joint operation by Ibama and the Federal Road Police (PRF ).
The government of left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, in office since January, has deployed significant resources to dislodge gold miners after the publication of official data reporting the death in 2022 of a hundred children under the age of five years in Yanomami Indigenous Territory.
An investigation for “genocide” has been opened, to assess among other things the responsibilities of members of the government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, defeated by Lula in the October election.
“We are suffering from diarrhea, vomiting, and we have nothing to eat,” a native who declined to give his name told AFP when Ibama agents passed through his village.
Seeing government helicopters from afar, the miners fled into the forest, leaving behind sacks full of cassiterite, a tin dioxide also known as “black gold”, which is also illegally mined from the reserve. native.
The helicopter landed on the camp, the agents set fire to bulldozers and interrogate a 36-year-old man who did not have time to escape.
“Illegal gold panning is not going to stop. It has nothing to do with Lula or Bolsonaro. No one can end this activity, anywhere in the world”, says this gold panner, who spoke under cover of anonymity and responds to the fictitious name of Eduardo dos Santos.
“We become addicted: if you come here, you never want to leave. Here, I earn 5,000 reais (about 900 euros) a week. Where could I earn that in town?”, he asks.
According to Yanomami leaders, nearly 20,000 illegal gold diggers have invaded their territory, killing or raping indigenous women and teenage girls, destroying forests and polluting rivers.
A large number of them left the reserve in early February, when part of the airspace was closed, preventing the supply of gold panning bases by plane.
Last week, Justice Minister Flavio Dino said around 1,000 die-hards still refused to leave.
On Thursday, miners aboard seven motorboats attacked with firearms an Ibama checkpoint on the Uraricoera River in the Yanomami reserve.
One of the assailants was injured in the shooting.
This attack “is a reaction to the effectiveness of the operations of reconquest of the territory by the State”, declared Friday the Minister of the Environment Marina Silva.
02/27/2023 16:39:59 – Alto Alegre (Brésil) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
