An illegal gold rush is igniting attacks on Indigenous people in the Amazon
Indigenous communities and isolated tribes in Brazil are under threat as the government moves to legalize mining, logging, and industrial farming in their lands without their consent.
[Image description: Indigenous protesters dance outside the Congressional Palace in Brasilia last month to protest legislation that would roll back protections of Indigenous lands and rights enshrined in Brazil’s constitution.]
As tensions between illegal gold miners and Indigenous communities erupt into open violence in the Brazilian Amazon, legislators allied with right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro are aggressively pursuing measures aimed at curtailing protections of the territories and rights of Indigenous people.
Since mid-May, prospectors have launched a series of brazen attacks against Yanomami and Munduruku communities in the states of Roraima and Pará respectively.
Indigenous leaders believe their communities are facing the most perilous moment since Brazil returned to democracy in the 1980s, after more than 20 years of military dictatorship. Death threats and intimidation are daily occurrences in some areas, and Munduruku leaders say their people are living in a “state of war.”
Miners and their Indigenous collaborators in the Munduruku Indigenous Territory set fire to the homes of several tribal leaders in late May, an apparent reprisal for a police raid on a gold strike.
Recently, at least eight separate attacks have been reported in the Yanomami Indigenous Territory, including a running gun battle between gold miners and villagers, according to the Hutukara Yanomami Association. In one incident, two Indigenous children drowned in the panic that ensued as miners opened fire with automatic weapons from speedboats on the Uraricoera River. In another encounter, miners rammed a canoe with eight children aboard. All of them managed to reach shore safely and hide in the brush.
In both territories, Federal Police agents who arrived to defuse tensions also came under assault by the gold miners, popularly known as garimpeiros.
Meanwhile in Brasilia, hardline conservatives in the lower chamber of Brazil’s Congress cleared a major hurdle last month in their quest to reshape Brazil’s 1988 constitution to allow commercial activity on Indigenous lands.
Law Project 490, known as PL490, would legalize mining, logging, industrial agriculture, and other projects deemed “in the national interest” on Indigenous lands without the consent of local communities. The controversial bill was approved on June 23 by the Constitution and Justice Committee and will now move to the lower house, called the Chamber of Deputies, before heading to the Senate. Conservatives allied with agribusiness—ruralistas—together with evangelical fundamentalists, form the core of the voting block that holds majorities in both houses.
The catchall measure would also open the way for legal challenges to the boundaries of Indigenous territories, threatening to reduce the size of some areas and eliminate others altogether. In Brazil, 441 Indigenous territories have been demarcated and officially recognized, 237 more are in intermediate stages of recognition. The largest of Brazil’s Indigenous territories are in the rainforest, and they cover one-quarter of the country’s Amazon region.
Perhaps most unsettling of all, critics say, the bill would make it possible for the government to review and scale back the boundaries of several territories set aside to protect isolated Indigenous groups, also known as “uncontacted tribes.” Field agents from the Indigenous affairs agency, FUNAI, have confirmed the existence of 28 isolated Indigenous groups in Brazil, and there may be as many as 70 more. The controversial legislation would also clear the way to force contact on these highly vulnerable groups for any overriding national interest, even allowing third parties to participate in organized contact teams.
“And who would these third parties be?” says Fabricio Amorim, a 10-year veteran of FUNAI who now works for the Observatory of Human Rights for Isolated and Recently Contacted Indigenous Peoples, a Brazilian advocacy group. “Missionaries, of course. The PL490 is opening terrain not only for the ruralistas but also for evangelicals who have this extremist view to spread the word of Christ to the isolated tribes.”
