The Road To Chaos - Illegal 75-Mile Dirt Track Driven Into The Largest Indigenous Reserve On Earth

[hatrack]

EDIT

“We found it, people!” the navigator celebrated, while the pilot performed a series of stomach-churning manoeuvres over the canopy to get a clearer view of the dirt track. “That’s the Road to Chaos,” Aguiar announced through the plane’s internal communication system. “And this is the chaos,” he added, pointing to a gaping hole in the rainforest where three yellow excavators had clawed a goldmine out of the banks of the coffee-coloured Catrimani River.

In a nearby clearing, a fourth digger could be seen wrecking a territory home to about 27,000 members of the Yanomami and Ye’kwana peoples, including several communities that do not have contact with the outside world. Worryingly, one of those isolated villages is just 10 miles away from the illegal road, Aguiar said.

Sônia Guajajara, a prominent Indigenous leader who was also on the plane, suspected the criminals had benefited from Brazil’s recent presidential election to sneak their equipment deep into Yanomami lands. “Everyone was focused on other things, and they took advantage,” Guajajara said.

The arrival of excavators – witnessed for the first time by journalists from the Guardian and Brazilian broadcaster TV Globo – is the latest chapter in a half-century assault by powerful and politically connected mining gangs. Wildcat prospectors known as garimpeiros began flocking to Yanomami land in search of tin ore and gold in the 1970s and 80s, after the military dictatorship urged poor Brazilians to occupy a region it called “a land without men for men without land”. Huge fortunes were made – and often lost. But for the Yanomami it was a catastrophe. Lives and traditions were upended. Villages were decimated by influenza and measles epidemics. About 20% of the tribe died in just seven years, according to the rights group Survival International.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/12/brazil-goldminers-carve-road-to-chaos-amazon-reserve

[SergeStorms]

1. Gold mining will kill their river.

The Catrimani will become a toxic stew of arsenic and other chemicals associated with gold mining, and the indigenous people will either die or be displaced. Every living creature in the river will die.

What great stewards of the planet we've become.

All because of greed.