Brazil’s health ministry has declared a medical emergency in Yanomami territory, the country’s largest indigenous reserve bordering Venezuela, following reports of children dying of malnutrition and other diseases caused by illegal gold mining. A decree released Friday by the incoming government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said the declaration aimed to restore health services for the Yanomami people that had been dismantled by his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.
In the four years of Bolsonaro’s presidency, 570 Yanomam children have died from treatable diseases, mainly malnutrition, but also malaria, diarrhea and malformations caused by mercury used by wild gold miners, Amazonian journalism platform Sumauma reported, citing FOIA data.
Lula visited a Yanomami health center in Boa Vista, Roraima state on Saturday after the publication of photographs showing children and elderly men and women so thin that their ribs were visible.
Lula said on Twitter “More than a humanitarian crisis, I saw genocide in Roraima: a premeditated crime against the Yanomami, committed by a government insensitive to suffering”.
The government has announced food parcels will be airlifted to the reserve, home to about 26,000 Yanomamis in an area of rainforest and tropical savanna the size of Portugal.
The reservation has been under attack by illegal gold miners for decades, but raids have multiplied since Bolsonaro took office in 2018 when he promised to allow mining in previously protected areas and offered to legalize wildcat mining.
There are also signs that organized crime is involved. In recent violent incidents, men on speedboats on rivers have fired automatic weapons at indigenous villages whose communities oppose the entry of gold miners.
Some gold miners have started leaving because they fear enforcement operations by Lula’s government and appear to be heading across the border to neighboring Guyana and Suriname, said Estevao Senra, a researcher at the Instituto Socioambiental, an NGO that defends indigenous rights.
Lula said the new government would end illegal gold mining as it tackled illegal deforestation in the Amazon, which has reached a 15-year high under Bolsonaro.
“We must hold the previous government accountable for allowing this situation to deteriorate to the point where we find adults weighing like children and children reduced to skin and bones,” said Sonia Guajajara, the first indigenous woman to become a cabinet minister the new Department of Aboriginal Affairs.
