Amazon Basin's Yanomami People "Utterly Abandoned" By Government Obligated To Protect Them
EDIT
The Yanomami have lived through many epidemics, ever since the Portuguese arrived in the 16th century, bringing measles, smallpox, influenza and tuberculosis. Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomami leader, still has a vivid memory of an epidemic in 1959, brought in by government employees, missionaries, hunters and explorers. He says: “Only the people of Yoyo roopë were able to escape this epidemic, led by my stepfather. […] My stepfather quickly began to encourage people from our home to flee. […] To overcome their indecision, my stepfather burned down our house. He was a great man, very brave! This was how we left the region of Marakana, in a hurry. […] If we had not fled, most of us would have also died from this epidemic.”
Other epidemics erupted during the first gold rush in the 1980s, when 40,000 goldminers invaded the Yanomami territory, at the time not formally recognized federally as their land. The creation in 1992 of the vast Yanomami Territory helped the Indigenous population recover, but there are still communities with few elders, so many having died during past epidemics.
Because of this history, the Yanomami were quick to grasp the risk that COVID-19 represented. In early March 2020, Maurício Ye’kwana, a Ye’kwana leader, spoke at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva: “Our territory is being invaded by over 20,000 miners who bring diseases like malaria, and alcohol, drugs and violence into the communities, and pollute our rivers with mercury. In 2020, two Yanomami were murdered by miners. Also, in the middle of the pandemic, they have brought COVID-19, infecting the communities near the mining operations. We, the leaders, have asked the Brazilian government to fulfill its obligation to remove the illegal miners, but there has been no adequate reply to the problem.”
FUNAI, Brazil’s Indigenous agency, and the Federal Police have undertaken operations to end illegal mining in the territory, including one this year. But, according to the just released report, the miners soon re-invade, once the federal police leave. The report quotes data from the Deforestation Alert System, run by Imazon, a not-for-profit organization, that shows the Yanomami Territory was among the ten areas under most pressure from deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon from August 2019 to July 2020.
EDIT
https://news.mongabay.com/2020/11/the-amazons-yanomami-utterly-abandoned-by-brazilian-authorities-report/
