Brazil's air force began deploying on Wednesday (February 1st) for aerial control of the Yanomami indigenous territory, ahead of a large-scale operation against gold miners scheduled for next week.
An investigation into "
genocide
" was opened last week after the publication of official data showing the death in 2022 of around 100 children under the age of five in the country's largest reserve, where some 30,400 indigenous people live. .
Illegal gold panning
Many serious cases of undernutrition have been recorded and images of children with skeletal bodies have shocked the whole world.
"
We know what the origin of the problem is: illegal gold panning is very present (in the Yanomami territory) and it will be dismantled (...) We will confront them and cut the evil at the root
", assured late Tuesday January 31 the Minister of Defence, José Mucio, during an interview with the Bandnews channel.
"
I will go there next Wednesday, with the commanders of the army, the air and the navy, as well as the chief of the Federal Police
", he added, announcing a "
coordinated effort of all the institutions
" to dislodge the miners.
The airspace control operation began on Wednesday, with in particular the deployment of fighter planes and detection planes equipped with powerful radars.
“
Any suspicious flight will be diverted and the plane will have to land to be identified
,” warned the minister.
A decree issued Monday, January 30 by the left-wing president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva provides for the prohibition of overflights of certain areas, and even authorizes the air force to fire to force suspicious planes to land.
The Yanomani in danger
The artisanal miners often use planes to get to the heart of indigenous lands that are difficult to access by road.
The populations of these territories, supposed to be inviolable and where all mining is prohibited, are struggling to feed themselves due to the destruction of the tropical forest where they normally find their means of subsistence.
Beyond the operation against gold diggers, air force planes have flown more than 265 hours since last week to drop 61 tons of food and medicine in Yanomami lands.
According to Yanomami chiefs, some 20,000 illegal gold diggers have invaded their territory, killing natives, sexually abusing women and teenage girls and contaminating their rivers with the mercury that separates gold from sediment.
Read alsoMore than a third of the already very degraded Amazonian forest
Monday, January 30, a judge of the Supreme Court asked for the inclusion of members of the government of ex-president Jair Bolsonaro in the investigation for "
genocide
" of the Yanomami people.
Jair Bolsonaro, whose father was a gold digger at the famous Serra Pelada open-pit mine in the 1980s, has always defended mining activities in indigenous lands and his tenure has been marked by record deforestation in the Amazon.
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