Brazilian Blood Gold

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Brazilian Blood Gold

Leonardo Sakamoto writes about how President Lula is trying to help Brazil's Indigenous Yanomami communities.

3553837313_826293d0d5_c%20%282%29.jpg Morro do Ouro Gold Mine, Paracatu, Brazil. SkyTruth/Flickr

The pictures of sick or dead Yanomami children in the world’s media in early 2023 tell the story of Jair Bolanaro’s time as Brazil’s president.

Bolsonaro’s government did almost nothing to stop illegal miners bringing malaria, contamination by mercury – used to clean gold – and violence to the country’s biggest Indigenous territory in the state of Roraima. In fact, Bolsonaro stopped law enforcement and encouraged mining companies.

At the same time, his government did not organise the very necessary healthcare, vaccination, medicine, or food. He also stopped progress in land rights for Indigenous or Quilombola people, descended from escaped African slaves.

The result was a terrible humanitarian crisis. Data from the Sumaúma journalism platform show that 570 Yanomami children under the age of five died of preventable causes in the last four years. 100 more died in January 2023.

To try and stop this crisis, President Lula da Silva’s government is planning to remove between 20,000 and 40,000 miners and fight the people making a profit from illegal gold.

This began by closing the airspace over Indigenous land and threatening to shoot down aeroplanes carrying miners, food, drinks, fuel, equipment, and gold. The government is stopping the sale of fuel, food, and equipment to miners.

Repórter Brasil shows that people sell illegal gold from Yanomami and Munduruku Indigenous territory. They sell the gold in cities such as Boa Vista, Manaus, and Itaituba, in Pará state. The gold then enters the home and foreign markets. Finally, the gold ends in jewellery stores and the electronics industry.

The new government’s plan is also to remove miners if they refuse to leave. But this all means creating jobs and other ways of making an income. If not, the workers will go elsewhere – perhaps to other Indigenous lands, or return. Finding communities that depend on illegal mining and policies to give them quality of life is necessary to stop the problem. Without this, the lives of the Yanomami will still be in danger, as they were with Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro denied food to the starving Yanomami. Documents from Brazil’s biggest online news portal, UOL, show this. They sent requests to the Ministry of Justice between June 2021 and March 2022, asking for food and warning about starvation but there was no real reply.

And so, with Bolsonaro back in power, the Yanomami could now be on their way to extinction.

NOW TRY THE ORIGINAL:

https://newint.org/features/2023/04/03/view-brazil-yanomami-indigenous-lula

(This article is in easier English so it is possible that we changed the words, the text structure, and the quotes.)