Brazil has been in shock since the publication in the press, on January 20, of photos of Amerindian children emaciated due to malnutrition. These images have lifted the veil on the unprecedented humanitarian crisis affecting the country’s main indigenous population group: the Yanomami, a “first people” made up of 30,000 souls who live in a territory twice the size of Switzerland. The next day, Lula da Silva went there, declared a “state of health emergency” and accused his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro of “genocide”. “He encouraged gold panning,” says Lula, who promises to combat this widespread illegal practice in Amerindian territories, which have been “sanctuarized” since the 1980s. “We are going to expel gold diggers from these territories, hammered the head of state. The joke has gone on long enough.”
In Roraima, a state bordering Venezuela with a particularly auriferous subsoil, the immense Yanomami reserve (96,500 square kilometers) is historically one of the most affected by gold panning. THE garimpeiros (gold diggers) have been entering it for a long time by the highway opened under the dictatorship or by plane, thanks to the many clandestine tracks. Lula has just placed the airspace of the reserve under surveillance. During the episode of the great gold rush of the 1980s, gold diggers had already entered by the thousands among the Yanomami, razing villages and spreading disease among this people devoid of immune resistance.
In the space of seven years, no less than 20% of the local population disappeared, according to the NGO Survival International. With the creation of the reserve, in 1992, at the end of an international campaign where the singer Sting appears with the traditional chief Raoni, the gold diggers are expelled… to return better. The following year, they massacred 16 Yanomami (including a baby). Because the miners impose themselves by violence. Former President Bolsonaro must know something about it: like his father, he himself was garimpeiro during his youth in the famous open pit mine of Serra Pelada. Having become head of state, he returned to an extraction site – a gesture that the miners interpreted as a green light.
starving children
For indigenous activist Beto Marubo, of the Amerindian association Univaja, Jair Bolsonaro should be tried in court. “Certainly, the situation of the Yanomami has never been taken head-on under the thirteen years of left-wing presidency [NDLR : d’abord avec Lula, puis Dilma Rousseff]. But things got considerably worse under the far right.” In four years, no less than 570 children aged 0 to 5 died of starvation or as a result of contamination with mercury, the metal used to clean gold of its impurities. Today, 5,000 small Yanomami suffer from undernutrition. The cases of malaria have doubled and the deforested areas have tripled. This disaster is explained by the relaxation for four years of the controls supposed to be carried out by the services of the State, because for Bolsonaro, ecology, the protection of the Amazon and the defense of the Amerindians, it was “a communist thing”.
Currently, more than 20,000 garimpeiros squat the yanomami reserve. Their activity compromises the food production of the natives, based on hunting, fishing and gathering. Mercury kills fish. The malaria-carrying mosquito proliferates in stagnant water, as cavities are dug to find the precious metal. And the din of the gold washers’ electrical equipment scares the animals away. The scandal does not end there. Already very precarious, the health system based on a network of dispensaries has been dismantled. “Despite the injunctions of the Supreme Court, the Bolsonaro government has done nothing to restore these care services, accuses an association source. garimpeiros ordered by the courts, they yielded nothing: the miners were warned of the arrival of the police to allow them to escape.”
Faced with the accusations, Bolsonaro denounces a “farce forged by the left”. “The ex-president, who was a captain in the army, aligns himself with the conspiracy theories in vogue among the military, takes up the activist Beto Marubo. Many of them oppose the territorial rights of the Amerindians on the grounds that the latter would be manipulated by foreign interests.” When he was a deputy, Bolsonaro had also tabled a text aimed at abolishing the Yanomami reserve, which he considers to be the result of a usurpation. “According to him, the Indians are Brazilians like the others. They should therefore be assimilated.”