The Genocide We're Allowing in Amazonia
JUNE 4, 2021
BY J.P. LINSTROTH
The fact of the matter is that genocide against indigenous peoples in Brazil is widespread and affects all tribes in some way. Moreover, because of the animosity of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro toward Amerindians, stating they have too much land, has allowed for illegal mining and illegal logging on Native lands and all sorts of other atrocities, inclusive of indigenous murders. Nowhere is this worse than the Yanomami territory on the borderlands between Brazil and Venezuela, a tribal reserve park the size of Portugal (9.6 million hectares or 24 million acres) in which about 27,000 Yanomami live in approximately 360 villages.
The Yanomami are facing a humanitarian crisis, not known to them since the 1990s when these Natives were devastated by miner invasions on their lands. Now, again, there are at least 20,000 illegal gold miners (garimpeiros) on Yanomami lands bringing with them disease, malaria and COVID-19, and polluting the riverways of the Yanomami territory with mercury and other poisons from illicit mining operations.
“Brazil has 566 indigenous areas, which occupy a territory of 1.17 million square kilometers – equivalent to the [Brazilian] states of Mato Grosso and Tocantins put together. According to data from the 2010 Census, the last one made by IBGE, 517.4 thousand out of the 817.9 thousand Brazilian Indians live in these reserves.”
In a recent report published by the Brazilian Instituto Socioambiental, “Xawara: Tracing the Deadly Path of COVID-19 and Government Negligence in the Yanomami Territory” (2020), outlines how unjust the Brazilian government’s response to COVID-19 and the gold miner incursions on Yanomami lands have been over the last couple of years since Bolsonaro took office.
More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/06/04/the-genocide-were-allowing-in-amazonia/