Barely a month after taking office, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva launched his first major environmental crackdown, targeting illegal gold mining in the Brazilian territory of the Yanomami people—an area larger than the U.S. state of Maine. In contrast to predecessor Jair Bolsonaro’s laissez-faire attitude toward trespassing miners, Lula on Feb. 6 dispatched 700 enforcement personnel to the northern Brazilian Amazon in aircraft, speedboats, and four-wheel-drive vehicles to oust thousands of miners from Yanomami lands.

The operation was prompted not only by concerns about extensive damage that rampant riverine gold mining is doing to the vast area’s rainforest environment, but in particular by health impacts that this destruction is having on the Yanomami people themselves. Those impacts range from malnutrition and mercury exposure due to contamination and depletion of the region’s fish stocks to diseases that are brought in by miners and to which the largely isolated Yanomami have little or no natural defenses.

On Jan. 20, less than three weeks before the operation began, the Brazilian Health Ministry declared a public health emergency, calling for stepped-up care and nutritional aid for the Yanomami. The next day, Lula flew to Roraima state, where part of the Yanomami territory is located, to visit a health center and draw public attention to the problem. Shortly after his visit to the clinic in the Roraima capital of Boa Vista, he posted on Twitter that “more than a humanitarian crisis, what I saw in Roraima was a genocide, a premeditated crime against the Yanomami.” Referring to the Bolsonaro administration, he blamed “a government insensitive to the suffering of the Brazilian people.”

Then on Jan. 30, Lula set the stage for what would be called “Operation Liberation” by issuing a decree intended to address “a public health emergency of national importance” and combat the illegal gold mining contributing to it. These steps included reopening or adding health clinics and indigenous-affairs offices where tribal members can, among other things, report encroachment by miners, loggers and others engaged in illegal activity on tribal lands. Numerous such centers and clinics had been closed under the Bolsonaro administration.

The decree also ordered emergency deliveries of medical supplies, food, and potable water to tribal communities. Over 100 tons of these stocks, including 5,200 basic food baskets, were distributed to the Yanomami in the first two weeks of February, in some cases by parachute. Meanwhile, a makeshift hospital that the Brazilian Air Force set up in Boa Vista treated some 1,300 Yanomami in the first half of February. Many of the patients were flown there in planes used in the enforcement operation.

Perhaps most importantly, the decree called on the Defense Ministry, the Federal Police and Ibama, the environmental-enforcement arm of Brazil’s Environment and Climate Change Ministry, to carry out the coordinated anti-mining operations that ultimately were launched on Feb. 6.

Over nine days, personnel from these entities set up checkpoints on major rivers running through Yanomami land and restricted the region’s airspace to cut off supplies to the miners. They destroyed four planes found on illegal airstrips, 40 barges the miners used to pump gold-bearing sediment from river bottoms as well as a speedboat, a bulldozer and a mining-supply depot—in most cases by setting them ablaze. And task force personnel seized large quantities of mining-camp equipment including chainsaws, power generators, mobile phones and even weapons.

Authorities detained an unspecified number of miners. The arrest total, however, was not expected to be high, given the operation’s strategy: to force miners to leave Yanomami territory by plane, speedboat, or on foot, João Paulo Correia, a Federal Police officer stationed in Roraima state, told EcoAméricas on Feb. 16.

By mid-February, Correia says, thousands of miners had left Yanomami land. To encourage them to do so, the Brazilian Air Force on Feb. 6 created three aerial corridors for miners to use to leave the region, announcing that these exit routes will remain open until May 6.

On Feb. 20, task force personnel strung a steel cable across the Uraricoera River, the main waterway running through Yanomami land, to prevent miners from leaving the region in speedboats before being searched for contraband gold and mining equipment. In addition, Ibama fined four companies in Roraima state that have supplied aviation fuel for aircraft used by miners. Before the crackdown, illegal mining operations were being served by an estimated 40 flights a day to and from 86 clandestine landing strips on or near Yanomami land.

“The first phase of ‘Operation Liberation,’ an attack phase, was meant to destroy the miners’ logistical operations, not just by burning barges and airplanes and seizing equipment, but mainly by putting a stranglehold on miners’ supply lines with our river checkpoints and control of airspace above Yanomami land, to force miners to leave it,” Correia says. “During the next phase of this operation, we will maintain these river checkpoints, as well as continue to control airspace above Yanomami land, for an indefinite period of time to prevent the miners from returning.”

The Yanomamis’ Brazilian territory, home to 28,000 tribal members, constitutes the nation’s largest indigenous reserve. It covers 94,191 square kilometers (37,367 square miles) in the state of Amazonas and the neighboring state of Roraima, where the bulk of illegal mining on the reserve has occurred. Some 11,000 Yanomami live in an adjacent, 82,000-square-kilometer (31,660-square-mile) swath of Venezuela, an area that also has become a magnet for wildcat miners.

The Yanomami have been calling on Brazilian authorities for decades to remove the miners, who converged on the region en masse in a 1980s gold rush and have remained a presence. The miners’ numbers have waxed and waned with fluctuations in international gold prices, but a rise in those prices since 2019 has caused a major influx in recent years—and urgent tribal calls for action. As this month’s crackdown began, an estimated 20,000 miners occupied Yanomami land in Brazil.

The tribe’s complaints focus in large part on the extensive damage miners do to the riverine ecosystems that the Yanomami depend on for their survival. Aside from suctioning sediment from river bottoms, mining crews also use high-pressure hoses to blast sediment from riverbanks. Their operations leave riverbanks denuded and pocked with polluted, water-filled craters.

As in other parts of South America’s Amazon region, health impacts are a major concern due to extensive pollution from the mercury miners use to separate gold from ore. (See "Soil-mercury findings startle Amazon researchers" —EcoAméricas, February 2022.) Mercury enters water and soil in mining waste and also by way of vapor that can carry particles of the neurotoxin long distances after it is heated in the gold-extraction process used by the miners.

Collectively, small-scale gold miners are the world’s largest source of atmospheric mercury, producing over 2,000 tons a year with South America accounting for over half that amount, according to the United Nations. (See "Call for ban on mercury use in small-scale mining" —EcoAméricas, October 2022, and "Blowback against Bolivia’s agreement with miners" —EcoAméricas, December 2022.) In the Amazon region, a key concern is the bioaccumulation of mercury in fish, an important component in the diet of many indigenous communities.

Brazilian authorities estimate that over half of the Yanomami in the country have elevated mercury in their blood. That problem loomed large in the government’s decision to crack down on illegal mining on the tribe’s lands. In particular, officials cite rising rates of malnutrition among tribal members. Not only are many tribal members refusing to eat fish out of concern about exposure to mercury from the gold operations, but fish populations are declining because the region’s rampant mining has increased water turbidity, authorities say.

Heightened worry about mercury from illegal gold operations add to longstanding concern about miners spreading other diseases to which the indigenous Yanomami have little or no natural resistance. Since tribal members live communally—in large, oval dwellings called shabonos—the spread of such diseases can be rapid. Brazil’s Indigenous Peoples Ministry claims that last year, nearly 100 Yanomami children from one to four years old died due mainly to malnutrition, pneumonia, and diarrhea linked to the presence of wildcat gold miners on their land.

Bolsonaro’s role spotlighted

Alberto Terena, coordinator of the Brazilian Indigenous Peoples’ Liaison (APIB), the country’s largest indigenous association, claims that in the last four years, preventable conditions linked to mining have claimed over 500 tribal members, most of them young children. Terena blames Bolsonaro, the right-wing president Lula replaced on Jan. 1 of this year.

Bolsonaro, the son of a legal miner in the Amazon in the 1980s, proposed legislation while he was president to legalize mining on indigenous lands. He also issued decrees to facilitate such mining, and drew wide criticism for taking little action to prevent Covid-19 from spreading among indigenous peoples, including the Yanomami.

“Bolsonaro did nothing to protect the Yanomami and other indigenous peoples from illegal gold miners because he didn’t see them as having the same human rights as non-indigenous peoples,” Terena told EcoAméricas.

Two days after Lula’s Jan. 21 tweet describing the Yanomamis’ plight as genocide, Flavio Dino, Brazil’s Minister of Justice and Public Security, ordered the Federal Police to investigate whether the crime of genocide had been committed against the Yanomami. The order, citing the deaths of 99 Yanomami children from illnesses linked to mining impacts, said 21 documented appeals to the previous government to help the Yanomami went ignored.

Authorities believe the problem will only grow if Yanomami territory continues to be an expanding Amazon hotspot of illegal mining. This mining destroyed or degraded over 3,272 hectares (8,085 acres) of forest in the Brazilian portion of Yanomami territory in 2021, an increase of 46% compared to 2020. The 2020 figure, in turn, was 30% greater than that of 2019. So says a 2022 study issued by the Hutukara Yanomami Association (HAY), a group that represents the Yanomami, with technical support from the Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA), a Brazilian nonprofit. The report says illegal mining directly impacts over 56% of the Yanomami in Brazil.

Region-wide challenge

Still, experts point out that other indigenous peoples in Brazil are struggling with incursions by illegal miners—and might now come under even more pressure. As in Yanomami territory, gold extraction in other indigenous reserves has been backed by city-based accomplices who provide miners logistical support, finance the purchase of aircraft, barges, pumps and other equipment, and help launder funds from sales of trafficked gold.

“Lula’s government must make it a priority to go after the gold miners’ financiers,” says Luiz Pecora, an ISA attorney based in Boa Vista, “because many of those who flee Yanomami land and don’t return to Boa Vista, where their families live, will migrate to [other indigenous] lands with the help of their financiers.”

Authorities say they are indeed working to track down those who bankroll the miners as well as those who launder money gained from gold sales. And on Feb. 18, the administration announced it will broaden the geographic scope of its enforcement effort by launching an initiative called “More Secure Amazon” to curb criminal activity throughout the region.

But command-and-control steps will fail unless they are accompanied by economic incentives, say conservation advocates Danicley de Aguiar, Amazon campaigner for Greenpeace Brasil, and Martha Fellows, coordinator of the indigenous program at Brazil’s nonprofit Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM).

“The government must create a bio-economy of sustainable activities on non-indigenous federal lands in the Amazon,” Fellows says. “That could provide the gold miners with other lines of work ranging from ecotourism or harvesting and processing Brazil nuts to producing medicines and natural cosmetics from rainforest flora. It could encourage them to give up making a living by destroying indigenous lands.”