BOA VISTA (AFP) – The Yanomami Indigenous group are again facing a severe humanitarian crisis blamed on illegal gold miners, despite Brazil’s president deploying the military to wrest back control of their territory.
A year after Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva declared a state of emergency over the isolated group’s plight, images emerging from their Amazon rainforest reservation remain desolate: severely malnourished children being fed through IV tubes in hospital and their staple food source, fish, decimated by the toxic mercury used in the mines.
At least 308 Yanomami died from January to November 2023, half of them were children under five, according to health officials.
Cases of malaria among the Yanomami increased by 61 per cent last year, and influenza by 640 per cent compared to 2022.
Those bleak figures are a problem for Lula, who came to office in January 2023 vowing to do a far better job protecting Brazil’s Indigenous peoples than far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro.
One of the veteran leftist’s first actions in office was to deploy the military to expel an estimated 20,000 illegal miners from the Yanomami reservation, a sprawling northern territory bigger than Portugal.
Indigenous leaders and rights activists accuse miners of raping and killing Yanomami inhabitants, poisoning their water with mercury, spreading disease, tearing down virgin rainforest and triggering a food crisis.
Lula ordered the air force to impose a no-fly zone to cut off supplies to the mines, and sent hundreds of police and soldiers to evict the invaders.
Thousands of miners fled as the authorities carried out a total of 400 operations last year, seizing BRL600 million (USD120 million) from criminal groups involved with the mines, according to official figures.
