Bolsonaro accused of genocide as starving tribe airlifted to safety
BRAZIL has airlifted starving and poisoned indigenous tribesmen from the Amazon as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president, accused his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, of “genocide”.
Sixteen Yanomami Indians needed emergency treatment for malnourishment and poisoning as a result of water contamination from illegal logging and gold mining in a remote jungle region of Roraima, on the Venezuelan border.
Declaring a state of emergency in the Yanomami reserve – Brazil’s largest protected indigenous territory – Mr Lula visited the area by helicopter over the weekend to distance himself from what he and human rights activists regard as Mr Bolsonaro’s racist rhetoric and policies and the impact they have had on native Amazonians.
The president later tweeted: “More than a humanitarian crisis, what I saw in Roraima was genocide: a premeditated crime against the Yanomami, committed by a government insensitive to suffering.
“In addition to neglect and abandonment by the previous government, the main cause of the genocide is the invasion by 20,000 illegal miners, whose presence was encouraged by the former president. Gold miners poison rivers with mercury, causing destruction and death.”
The Yanomami are the largest surviving tribe in the Brazilian Amazon and first came into regular contact with outsiders in the 1950s. Nearly 30,000 now live in the reserve, practising ancestral slash-and-burn agriculture, hunting and fishing.
But they have been repeatedly targeted by violent criminal gangs coveting the timber and gold in the reserve, with reports of massacres perpetrated principally by illegal miners. In 2020, miners were even accused of opening fire with machine guns on one Yanomami community.
Sarah Shenker, head of the Brazil branch of the indigenous rights group Survival, said that Mr Bolsonaro had permitted the criminal activity with his anti-indigenous rhetoric and actively undermined Yanomami communities.
“He dismantled the indigenous health service, cheered on the miners invading indigenous territories, and ignored the desperate pleas for action from indigenous organisations, Survival and many others when the scale of the crisis became clear,” Ms Shenker said in a statement.
“The miners – the diseases they’ve brought in, the mercury they’ve poisoned the rivers and people with, the forests they’ve destroyed and the violence they’ve unleashed – are the clear and obvious cause of this disaster.”
According to Survival, 570 Yanomami
children under five have died of preventable diseases since Mr Bolsonaro took office while eight out of 10 in the two areas most affected by the miners have chronic malnutrition.
During his time in office, the hardright former army officer, nicknamed the “Trump of the Tropics”, was repeatedly
accused of undermining Brazil’s democratic institutions, glorifying Brazil’s 1964-85 military dictatorship, and Covid denialism that unnecessarily cost the lives of thousands of people.
He also pushed to open up the Amazon to ranching, plantations and damming, ignoring concerns. After Mr
Lula’s swearing-in on Jan 1, Mr Bolsonaro’s supporters raided government buildings in events echoing the Jan 6 2021 US Capitol riot. The former president remains in Florida amid growing talk of him facing arrest and prosecution if he returns to Brazil, for allegedly encouraging the rioters.