Lula targets illegal mining as a matter of health

“Operation Liberation” task force personnel seized or destroyed illegal miners’ equipment and vehicles ranging from chainsaws and generators to barges and airplanes. (Photo by Ricardo Campos, Ibama)

Barely a month after taking office, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva launched his first major environmental crackdown, targeting illegal gold mining in the Brazilian territory of the Yanomami people—an area larger than the U.S. state of Maine. In contrast to predecessor Jair Bolsonaro’s laissez-faire attitude toward trespassing miners, Lula on Feb. 6 dispatched 700 enforcement personnel to the northern Brazilian Amazon in aircraft, speedboats, and four-wheel-drive vehicles to oust thousands of miners from Yanomami lands. The operation was prompted not only by concerns about extensive damage that rampant riverine gold mining is doing to the vast area’s rainforest environment, but in particular by health impacts that this destruction is having on the Yanomami people themselves. Those impacts range from malnutrition and mercury exposure due to contamination and depletion of the region’s fish stocks to diseases that are brought in by miners and to which... Read more →