Brazil says it has almost freed gold miners from Amazon’s Yanomami reservation By Reuters

By Amanda Perobelli and Anthony Boadle

SURUCUCU, Brazil (Reuters) – Brazil has all but crushed an illegal gold rush that drove thousands of wild miners into the Yanomami reservation in the Amazon (NASDAQ: ) rainforest and caused a humanitarian crisis of disease and malnutrition, operations chief said. .

The Yanomami, South America’s largest indigenous group living in isolation, have returned to a normal way of life, growing crops and hunting game, Nilton Tubino told Reuters in an interview on Friday.

Tubino heads the government office set up by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to coordinate the actions of police and military forces, environmentalists and health workers in the Portugal-sized reserve in the remote Amazon, home to 27,000 Yanomami.

“We see many of them bathing in rivers and hunting again, and clearings are being planted for food,” he said.

In hundreds of operations since March, army and navy troops, backed by environmental and indigenous agencies, have destroyed mining camps and gold prospects.

They blew up 42 clandestine runways used by miners in the rainforest, set fire to 18 planes, seized 92,000 liters of diesel fuel, sank 45 dredger barges, destroyed 700 pumps and dismantled 90 Starlink antennas that they allowed miners to warn each other. teams, Tubino said. A radar was installed in the reserve to monitor clandestine aircraft.

Tubino said deaths from malaria brought by miners had decreased and malnutrition was controlled with government food parcels. The government has reopened medical outposts and plans to build a hospital in Surucucu, a remote village near the border with Venezuela.

A Reuters photographer in Surucucu earlier this month still saw evidence of illegal miners inside the reserve, but the situation has improved since last year.

Junior Hekurari, head of the Yanomami Condisi health council, said the government had evicted the miners and overcome the health crisis, but that mining had affected their ability to obtain food, with river waters polluted with mercury.

“The waters are poisoned and there are no fish,” he said. “Our people believe that the land has been contaminated and that’s why the crops don’t grow.”

Shortly after taking office, Lula launched a massive law enforcement operation in February 2023 to evict some 25,000 gold miners from Yanomami territory. With the support of the armed forces, the government action succeeded in expelling 80% of the miners.

But once the military withdrew, the miners began to return, joining others who had hidden in the forest.

Tubino said the number of miners remaining is unknown, but this year’s operations have significantly reduced their presence and eliminated more than half of the gold prospecting areas.

Work is still needed to close the supply line that keeps miners in business, from fuel and food to buying their gold nuggets, Tubino added.