Brazil's air force began deploying on Wednesday for aerial control of Yanomami indigenous territory, ahead of a large-scale operation against miners scheduled for next week.
An investigation for "genocide" was opened last week after the publication of official data reporting the death in 2022 of a hundred children under the age of five in the largest reserve in the country, where some 30,400 indigenous people live. .
Many serious cases of undernutrition have been recorded and images of children with skeletal bodies have shocked the whole world.
"We know what the origin of the problem is: illegal gold panning is very present (in the Yanomami territory) and it will be dismantled (...) We will confront them and cut the evil at the root", assured late Tuesday the Minister of Defense, José Mucio, during an interview with the Bandnews channel.
"I will be going there next Wednesday, with the commanders of the army, the air and the navy, as well as the chief of the Federal Police", he added, announcing a "coordinated effort of all the institutions" to dislodge the miners.
The airspace control operation began on Wednesday, with in particular the deployment of fighter planes and detection planes equipped with powerful radars.
"Any suspicious flight will be diverted and the plane will have to land to be identified", warned the minister.
A decree issued Monday by left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva provides for the prohibition of overflights of certain areas, and even authorizes the air force to fire to force suspicious planes to land.
The artisanal miners often use planes to reach the heart of indigenous lands that are difficult to access by road.
The populations of these territories, supposed to be inviolable and where all mining is prohibited, are struggling to feed themselves due to the destruction of the tropical forest where they normally find their means of subsistence.
Beyond the operation against gold miners, air force planes have flown more than 265 hours since last week to drop 61 tons of food and medicine in Yanomami lands.
In addition, a field hospital set up by the air force to treat Yanomami in Boa Vista, capital of the state of Roraima (north), has already "welcomed more than 300 people, mostly children" , explained in a press conference Juliana Freire Vandesteen, responsible for this provisional structure.
"There are many cases of pneumonia, intestinal problems, malaria and skin diseases," she said.
According to Yanomami chiefs, some 20,000 illegal gold diggers have invaded their territory, killing natives, sexually abusing women and teenage girls and contaminating their rivers with the mercury that separates gold from sediment.
On Monday, a Supreme Court judge called for the inclusion of members of former President Jair Bolsonaro's government in the investigation into "genocide" of the Yanomami people.
Mr Bolsonaro, whose father was a gold digger at the famous Serra Pelada open-pit mine in the 1980s, has always championed mining activities in indigenous lands and his tenure has been marked by record deforestation in the Amazon.
02/01/2023 20:59:25 - Rio de Janeiro (AFP) - © 2023 AFP
