In 2021, CENARIUM addressed humanitarian crisis in Yanomami Land

Ana Pastana – from Cenarium Magazine

MANAUS – In June 2021, CENARIUM MAGAZINE published, in its print/digital version, the cover “Genocídio Yanomami” (Yanomami Genocide), which dealt with the invasion of illegal miners that is worsening in the region comprising the states of Roraima and Amazonas, in the North of the country, parallel to the omission of the federal government for the advance of Covid-19 in the communities of the original peoples.

On January 20, the website Sumaúma published that the deaths of children under 5 years of age by preventable causes increased 29% in Yanomami territory and the number of deaths of boys and girls under 4 years of age passed 570. The report did not show documents about the data and informed that it obtained them through the Access to Information Law (LAI).

The conflict between indigenous people and illegal miners has been going on in Roraima for decades. While federal law prohibits mining on indigenous land, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) point to the permanence of 20,000 miners. Last year, former vice-president Hamilton Mourão denied this statistic and speaks of 3 thousand miners.

The reality is that the humanitarian crisis in the Yanomami Indigenous Land (TI) is aggravated by illegal mining and disease. There are reports that the miners prevent the indigenous people from hunting more widely, and there are also reports that malaria makes the men sick, preventing them from searching for food.

The humanitarian crisis has not been prioritized in the federal government. During Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, indigenous leaders such as Dario Kopenawa Yanomami, of the Hutukara Yanomami Association, went to Brasília to expose the situation and ask for the expulsion of the miners.

“They had been talking for some time about the scenario, but they didn’t have the exact data. Access to this information was difficult during the Bolsonaro government“, says Priscilla Oliveira, a researcher and activist with Survival International for DW Agency.

For Joênia Wapichana, who took over the leadership of the National Foundation of Indigenous Peoples (Funai), the situation of the Yanomami people, decried as a humanitarian crisis, threatens the current generation: “It requires urgent action to avoid more deaths, especially of children.”

Visiting Roraima before an international engagement, president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) pledged to remove miners from the Yanomami Indigenous Territory and criticized his predecessor, Bolsonaro.

“If he, instead of doing so many motorcycle rallies, had shame and came here once, maybe these people would not be as abandoned as they are,” he said at a press conference in the capital Boa Vista.

Read also: ‘It is inhuman what I saw’, says Lula after seeing the health conditions of the Yanomami people in Roraima