No respite for Brazil’s Yanomami group facing illegal mining linked crisis
- January 19, 2024
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
No respite for Brazil’s Yanomami group facing illegal mining linked crisis
Subject: IR
Section: Places in news
Context: The Yanomami Indigenous group is 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.
Who are Yanomami Indigenous people?
The indigenous people live in a reserve in Brazil’s northern state of Roraima.
An estimated 28,000 indigenous people live in the Yanomami reserve.
The Yanomami are the largest relatively isolated tribe in South America. They live in the rainforests and mountains of northern Brazil and southern Venezuela.
They hunt, practise small-scale slash-and-burn agriculture and live in small, scattered, semi-permanent villages.
Details:
- President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has accused his predecessor, far-right Jair Bolsonaro, of committing genocide against the rainforest tribe.
- The government declared a medical emergency after hundreds of Yanomami children died from malnutrition.
- In his four years in power, Mr Bolsonaro often criticised the size of the indigenous reserves and promised to open some of them to agriculture and mining. His government weakened environmental protections, and critics said his rhetoric emboldened illegal activity in the region.
- Today, some 20,000 illegal miners are estimated to operate inside the Yanomami reserve, which is rich in gold, diamonds and minerals.
What has been the impact of illegal mining in Yanomami territory?
- The spread of illegal mines and the arrival of thousands of miners has caused a spike in reported cases of diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria. In a 2022 study published in BioMed Central’s Malaria Journal, researchers wrote that between 2016 and 2020, the number of malaria cases rose by 1,090 per cent in Indigenous areas and 75,576 per cent in mining areas.