New York () — Davi Kopenawa Yanomami shaman frowned as he looked out the window of his oak-paneled New York City hotel room at the skyscrapers and buildings. “I am here, in the city of stone, mirrors and glass… but in my heart, I am in mourning,” he told .
Davi has been an activist of the Yanomami people of Brazil, one of the largest relatively isolated indigenous groups in South America, for nearly 40 years and has faced death threats for their work. Last week, he was invited to Manhattan for the opening of a group exhibition of Yanomami artists and Brazilian photographer Claudia Andujar at The Shed cultural center, which included United Nations Secretary General António Guterres among its guests.
Despite the glamorous surroundings, Davi’s mind was more than 2,000 miles away, deep in the forests of Brazil, where a health crisis has gripped his village.
“I am in mourning…for my people, whom I have lost,” he said, referring to recent images emerging from the territory showing emaciated Yanomami adults and children, some with bellies swollen from hunger.
Disease and malnutrition have ravaged Yanomami villages in the past four years, a crisis experts attribute to dozens of illegal miners setting up camps across their sprawling territory, spurred on by the high price of gold.
Davi Kopenawa Yanomami in New York before an exhibition opening at The Shed.
Yanomami children die at a disproportionate rate from preventable diseases such as malaria and malnutrition. At least 570 Yanomami children have died of preventable causes since 2018, Brazil’s Ministry of Health told .
Fiona Watson, director of research and advocacy for the indigenous group of human rights Survival InternationalHe said high rates of malaria, spread by miners, have left many Yanomami adults too sick to hunt or fish, as they are entirely dependent on forests and rivers for food. “That means that food does not arrive, so there is so much malnutrition (which) has led to this terrible catastrophe,” said the researcher.
Their situation is aggravated by water pollution and environmental destruction from mines, and sometimes by violent encounters with trespassers. In January, Ariel Castro Alves, the Brazilian government’s national secretary for the Rights of the Child and Adolescent, said that a delegation of the federal government was informed in January that at least 30 Yanomami girls and adolescents had been abused and made pregnant by miners.
Government health workers, who could have mitigated the crisis, have been intimidated and even driven out of the area by miners who have seized health facilities and airstrips, Junior Hekurari Yanomami, president of the Urihi Yanomami Association, told .
A nurse talks to a Yanomami mother, whose son is being treated for malnutrition in Boa Vista. (Credit: Amanda Perobelli/Reuters)
The emergency is the latest test for Brazil’s newly inaugurated president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has made environmental protection a priority for his term. In January, he launched a crackdown on illegal mines in Yanomami territory, and the country’s armed, environmental, and police forces are currently sweeping the area to clear it of miners.
Lula’s administration has brought hope, says Davi, especially through his appointment of the country’s first minister for indigenous peoples, Sonia Guajajara.
“But he’s going to need a lot of support,” the activist said of Brazil’s bitterly polarized political landscape.
A gold rush emboldened by Bolsonaro
The Yanomami territory, which spans the Brazilian states of Roraima and Amazonas, is supposed to be a protected reserve where mining is illegal. But miners have flooded into the area in recent years as gold prices have risen, stripping the natural environment and, in some cases, driving away vital health workers.
While it is difficult to obtain an exact number of mines in the vast territory, which is equivalent to the size of Portugal, a report by the Brazilian NGO Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), based on satellite imagery, found that mines on Yanomami land had increased from four in 2015 to 1,556 by the end of 2021.
Speaking from Boa Vista in late January, Lula vowed to eliminate illegal mining, saying he was “shocked” by the poor health of the Yanomami. (Credit: Ricardo Stuckert/Handout/Reuters)
As hunter-farmers, the Yanomami maintain a symbiotic relationship with their environment. Some 30,400 Yanomami live in the territory, and because they are largely cut off from the outside world, they are more vulnerable to common viruses. The exploitation and encroachment of the forest by extractive industries has proven to be fatal for the indigenous group and their traditional way of life.
Construction of the Trans-Amazon highway, begun in the 1970s by the Brazilian military dictatorship that was interested in developing the Amazon basin, introduced measles, malaria and flu that decimated Yanomami communities, Watson said.
A gold rush in 1986 later saw an estimated 20% of the Yanomami community die in a seven-year period, according to Watson. Many of those miners were expelled in 1992, when the area was demarcated by the government of then-President Fernando Collor de Mello.
A military transport plane drops food at the Surucucu military base on January 26, which will be delivered to the Yanomami. (Credit: Edmar Barros/AP)
Davi says he noticed a change when former President Jair Bolsonaro was in power. The miners were encouraged to enter the territory armed “with a lot of heavy equipment, mechanized dredges, and they were using gasoline, mercury, and then…they used planes and small airstrips and helicopters,” Davi said.
The arrival of new miners brought misery, Davi said, including reports of threats and attacks against Yanomami communities. In May 2021, a half-hour firefight with miners left four people dead, including two Yanomami children; a video of the incident showed women and children running for cover as a boat passed the banks of their village’s river.
“It’s his fault. He let in the mining disease,” Davi says of Bolsonaro.
An illegal mining area in Yanomami indigenous territory, Roraima state, Brazil, on February 3, 2023. (Credit: Amanda Perobelli/Reuters)
Bolsonaro has called accusations that he turned a blind eye to the plight of the Yanomami a “leftist hoax” on his official Telegram channel on January 21. Having visited the region before, she shared photos of him with indigenous people on her Twitter account. Telegramas well as government press releases from his presidency, including one that said the World Health Organization praised the vaccination rate of Brazil’s indigenous people under his rule in 2021.
During his term from 2019 to 2022, Bolsonaro signed an environmental protection decree to increase fines for illegal logging, fishing, burning, hunting, and deforestation. Your administration it also saw the Brazilian National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), a government agency that oversees policies related to indigenous communities, invest $16 million in policing indigenous lands to combat illegal activities there.
However, the far-right leader has also supported legislation to open indigenous protected areas to mining, reduced funding or dismantled agencies tasked with monitoring and enforcing environmental regulations, and repeatedly asserted that indigenous territories are “too big”. , all of which emboldened the intruders, say experts.
The Supreme Court of Brazil ordered an investigation to determine if the actions of the Bolsonaro government amount to a “genocide” of the Yanomami. Before Lula’s meeting with President Joe Biden last Friday, he reiterated to that Bolsonaro could be “punished” by the courts for “the genocide against the Yanomami indigenous people.”
On January 30, the Brazilian Ministry of Human Rights and Citizenship (MDHC) also released a report alleging that its previous administration ignored numerous alerts about the deteriorating situation of the Yanomami.
reached out to Damares Alves, who was running MDHC at the time. When asked about the claims by a Brazilian reporter on February 1, Alves replied: “The Yanomami have been living in a dire situation for decades. It is time for the people (the Senate) to change the union budget so that we can better care for the indigenous Yanomami. As for the accusations, I will only speak when subpoenaed by a court.”
Brazil cracks down on illegal mining
There has been momentum since Lula’s intervention in the territory. Speaking from Boa Vista in late January, Lula vowed to eliminate illegal mining, saying he was “shocked” by the poor health of the Yanomami.
More than 1,000 sick indigenous people have been evacuated from Yanomami territory, and The Ministry of Justice announced a major offensive against the miners and closed the territory’s airspace to address their supply routes.
this mondays, the Brazilian security forces began their repressive operation to expel the miners, many of whom had already left the area. Videos have surfaced on social media of miners fleeing the territory or imploring the government to help them leave the area. Last week, Justice Minister Flavio Dino said he expected 80% of the illegal miners to be gone by the first week of February.
A miner, who was seen leaving the area, told Reuters that the Yanomami were desperate for the food packages dropped by Air Force planes. “The day the packages arrived, they were gone,” Joao Batista Costa, 65, told Reuters, holding up a food parcel.
But resolving the crisis will go a long way, and Lula is likely to face resistance from some of the sizable number of Brazilians who support Bolsonaro’s policies. Nor are all politicians at the regional level as enthusiastic about indigenous protections. The governor of the state of Roraima, Antonio Denarium, a Bolsonaro ally, for example, seemed to downplay the Yanomami crisis. in an interview with the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo in January, saying it was time for them to adjust to urban life and “leave the bush.”
In a subsequent statement to , Denarium’s office said the quotes were “taken out of context,” adding that “the desire for people’s lives to improve is the desire of anyone who values the dignity of indigenous people or non-indigenous”.
For Davi, there has been little evidence that authorities value Yanomami dignity in recent years.
“We, the indigenous people, are mistreated, as are our rivers, the animals, but it is not only the indigenous people who are dying, the people of the city are also suffering,” Davi said from his hotel room. “These two worlds really need to come together in a big hug and not let our world go to ruin.”
— ‘s Marcia Reverdosa contributed to this report.
