The Amazon is one of the most sparsely inhabited places in the world, in addition to being a region very rich in various natural resources, such as fertile land, trees, water, and gold. A problem now hits Brazilwhich has to fight hand in hand with various groups of illegal miners who enter protected areas and bring with them diseases that forcefully attack the native peoples.
One of the regions of the neighboring nation that suffers the most is Boa Vista in the state of Roraima, near the border with Venezuela. There, thousands of these illegal miners look for gold in a situation similar to what happened in the 1980s and which killed 20% of the local indigenous population. For this reason, during February the government of Brazil decided to send the Army to try to solve this issue, but in the interim several children of the Yanomami ethnic group are affected.
According to information shared by the activists, in 2022 47 children from indigenous peoples died long before they were one year old; in 2021 there were 56 and since 2018, 570 minors have died in that part of Brazil due to a mixture of local corruption, the increase in gangs of miners and government neglect.
“When Yanomami boys are brought by their families, most of the time it is due to malnutrition, dehydration, pneumonia and malaria, and they almost always come with three or four of these pains,” Francinete Rodrigues told The Guardian., director of the San Antônio hospital. “We never thought that what happened in the 1980s would happen again, we thought we were free,” Dário Kopenawa, vice president of the Hutukara association, told the same outlet.
The origin
Similar to the crises of the 1980s, it was the increase in gold and caserita prices in 2016 that attracted these illegal workers to the south american country. In addition, the arrival of Jair Bolsonaro to power in 2019 came with a change in the actions and capacity of the groups that protect the environment and native peoples, which allowed these individuals to manage freely.
Several of these miners are heavily armed and have driven people from their homes, made it difficult for health workers to access the region, scared off prey that is needed for food, and poisoned the water with mercury used for mining.
