Thousands of illegal miners are resisting government attempts to evict them from Brazil’s largest Indigenous territory, the renowned activist and shaman Davi Kopenawa has said, nearly a year after operations to displace them began.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made expelling an estimated 20,000 illegal gold and tin ore miners from the Yanomami Indigenous territory one of his top tasks after taking power last January.
Lula visited the region to denounce what he called a premeditated “genocide” committed by the government of his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, and ordered an offensive to force miners from the Portugal-sized Amazon enclave.
“Illegal mining on Yanomami land is finished,” a special forces commander for the environmental agency Ibama told the Guardian when it joined his airborne troops on the frontline of that fight.
Those perilous missions have yielded fruit. By July, Brazil’s top federal police chief for the Amazon claimed 90% of the miners had been uprooted, leaving perhaps 1,500 to 2,000 behind. But Kopenawa, who has spent four decades campaigning against the destruction of Yanomami lands, believes many are returning after eviction operations were scaled back.
