The Brazilian federal government under President Luiz Da Silva is using special forces to drive out illegal miners who are destroying large swathes of the Amazon rainforest. Ibama, the Brazilian environmental protection agency, is attempting to halt the destruction that occurred under former playboy populist Jair Bolsonaro.
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| credit: T. Phillips/Guardian |
The onslaught was particularly harmful to the Yanomami, an indigenous tribe that inhabits the Xitei, a region in the far northwest of the Amazon Basin, bordering on Venezuela. The miners occupied villages, poisoned rivers and banished health workers while creating ugly, denuded scars on the landscape. Da Silva has called their destruction, "premeditated genocide". The Special Inspection Group (SIG) using helicopters have swooped down on fleeing miners starting in February to evict them from indigenous territory, which is about the size of Portugal. About 30,000 Yanomami live in 300 villages there. Gunfights have occurred with casualties among the miners. The government has given miners until April 6th to vacate.
A Yanomami leaders described his land that was once pristine rainforest in which his people lived in harmony with Nature as, “so sick. Our rivers are sick. The forest’s sick … the air we breathe is sick, I would describe it as onokãe Yanomami word for genocide. Miners captured by SIG are unrepentant of their destruction of the rainforest and indigenous culture. They say that the raids will eventually taper off, and they will return to the forest to resume their multimillion dollar illegal industry. Indeed, there is evidence of previous enforcement efforts in the form of abandoned airfields scattered around the territory. These airfields were closed in the 1990's. This time the environment minister Marina Silva has said the government plans to stay to protect indigenous people, calling the havoc unleashed by Bolsonaro a crime.
An anthropologist who has worked with the Yanomami since the 70's said that Bolsonaro attempted to annihilate the Yanomami through intentional neglect citing evidence of severe malnutrition amongst the children and poisoning of the water by the use of toxic mercury to extract gold from the cassiterite ore dug out of the pits. [photo above} Brazil's former president is in hiding in Florida where he has petitioned for a visa to stay in the US. Bolsonaro called Lula's accusation of genocide a "leftist farce". The US has an extradition treaty with Brazil, which was signed in 1961.