The age of extinction
'Like a
bomb going off': why Brazil's largest reserve is facing destruction
Gold
prospectors are ravaging the Yanomami indigenous reserve. So why does President
Bolsonaro want to make them legal?
by Dom Phillips,
Yanomami indigenous reserve, Brazil
The age of
extinction is supported by
Band
Foundation and Wyss FoundationAbout this content
Mon 13 Jan
2020 06.00 GMT
Deep in the
Yanomami indigenous reserve on the northern reaches of the Brazilian Amazon,
the ruins of an illegal goldminers’ camp emerge after an hour in a small plane
and two in a boat. No roads reach here.
Wooden
frames alongside the Uraricoera River that once supported shops, bars,
restaurants, a pharmacy, an evangelical church and even brothels are all that
is left of the small town. The army burned and trashed it as part of an
operation aimed at stamping out wildcat mining on the reserve.
The army
may have taken away the town, but they left the garimpeiros, as the miners are
called, who this morning are hunched around a freezer, waiting for the soldiers
camped downriver to leave so they can get back to work. Up to 20,000
garimpeiros are estimated by Brazilian NGO Instituto Socioambienta to have
invaded this reserve, where mining and unauthorised outsiders are currently
prohibited. But the garimpeiros may not remain unauthorised for long: the
Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, has promised to legalise their work with a
bill in Congress.
“I know it is illegal,” says Bernardo Gomes,
59, sitting by the frame of a bar. Formerly a worker at mining giant Vale,
Gomes says his time at the company taught him how to protect the environment.
“Today, unfortunately, I am helping to destroy it,” he says, explaining that a
nearby patch of dead trees was suffocated by mud sucked out of the nearby
mining pit.
Some of his
companions decline to talk, including a young woman who arrives carrying a
bottle of whiskey and a speaker playing pop music. “Want a photo? Naked?” she
jokes.
In eight
days reporting from different locations in the Yanomami reserve, the Guardian
saw numerous mining pits and barges. Camps and bases had been destroyed along
the Uraricoera – but its banks still teemed with outsiders.
With 9.6m
hectares (23.7m acres) of wild forest – an area bigger than Portugal – Yanomami
is Brazil’s largest reserve. A fifth of its indigenous population died from
diseases after 40,000 garimpeiros flooded the reserve in the 1980s, according
to Survival International. The miners were expelled and the area declared a
reserve in 1992 following a campaign by Survival, photographer Claudia Andujar
and Davi Kopenawa, director of the Hutukara Yanomami Association, which invited
the Guardian to visit the reserve.
But the
current garimpeiro invasion worsened after Bolsonaro took office. The president
has said the reserve is too big for its population of around 26,000 indigenous
people, and its mineral riches should be exploited. His ministers have met
garimpo leaders.
But
garimpeiros bring malaria, prostitution and violence, indigenous leaders argue,
while scientists say the mercury the miners use to separate gold particles from
mud and silt enters rivers and the food chain. Their pits and barges upset
ecosystems, scare away wildlife, and fill rivers with mud that distorts fish
behaviour and breeding.
Indigenous
people used to call this upriver region Paixão de Mutum – or Curassow’s Passion
– after the large, pheasant-like bird they hunted here. Now it is known as
Tatuzão – Big Armadillo – for the pits that miners have gouged out of the
forest. Miners have replaced the mutum.
“Somebody
should help us. The government doesn’t care, it wants to finish indigenous
people off,” says Geraldo Magalhães, 42, a Ye’kwana indigenous man and deputy
chief of Waikás village, a two-hour boat-ride away. In November leaders of the
majority Yanomami and much smaller Ye’kwana tribes sent a letter to Bolsonaro.
“We do not want garimpo and mining on our land,” it said. “Garimpo out!”
Funai, the
national agency which works to protect indigenous lands, plans to reopen three
bases in the reserve. But repeated army operations have failed to shift the
miners.
Just a few
minutes upriver from the ruined camp, work has already resumed in an enormous
mining pit, where tarpaulin and scaffolding made of logs and twine hold up a
bank of earth. Three men toil waist-deep in mud with a hose jetting water under
an uprooted tree. Mud pours down a rough wooden sluice, while black smoke
belches from a deafening diesel engine: a hand-operated industrial hell amid
the wild tropical beauty.
“We are
here to get gold. These are our riches,” says garimpeiro Fredson Pedrosa, 40.
“Everyone here is counting on the army leaving so they can work again.”
The men are
from small towns in Brazil’s impoverished north and north-east, where they say
minimum-salary wages of around US$250 a month (£194) are barely enough to live
on. “You do this to keep your family,” says Denilson Nascimento, 33.
Garimpeiros
say they voted for Bolsonaro after he promised to legalise their trade. “We
know it damages the environment,” says Antonio Almeida, 24, who runs a bar
here. “But there is a lot of nature, no way you can kill it all.”
Wildcat
mining is deeply entwined with local life in Waikás. Four villagers work as
boatmen for the miners, others sell food at Tatuzão and two run a smaller
mining site nearby. Tolls on the garimpo boats paid for generators, boat motors
and televisions.
“The
garimpo is a reality and they’re used to it,” says Edmilson Estevão, 33, who
was raised in the village and works for the Ye’kwana association Wanasseduume.
Some villagers work with the mining, others reject it, but the Ye’kwana keep
their differences to themselves. “Same family, same blood,” he says.
The garimpo
has impacted heavily on hunting, fishing and water quality. “The prey is
getting further and further away. Fish are disappearing, and are contaminated
with mercury,” says Júlio Ye’kwana, 39, Wanasseduume’s president. “Wild pigs
used to live around the village. Not anymore.”
When mining
in the Tatuzão area was operating at full pelt, the river where children bathe
and families collect water thickened with mud. “The water was very dirty,” says
Nivaldo Edamya, 34, the village chief. “What garimpo does is bad.
Deforestation, various diseases, that’s why I am against them.”
Academic
research on the impacts of garimpo – or Artisanal and Small Scale Gold Mining
(ASGM) – on biodiversity backs up these complaints.
Marcelo
Oliveira, a conservation specialist at the World Wildlife Fund has found high
mercury levels in fish as far as 150km from ASGM sites in the Amazon. He and
other researchers found mercury in Amazon river dolphins – nearly half of those
studied had dangerously high levels – and other researchers found record
mercury levels in jaguar fur near ASGM sites in the Brazilian Pantanal. “This
is an invisible problem,” he says.
Birds and
larger mammals are sensitive to changes in forest cover and vegetation and flee
garimpo areas, says David Lutz, a US-based research assistant professor in
environmental studies at Dartmouth College who has studied ASGM in the Peruvian
Amazon for a decade. “Massive disturbance. This is like a bomb going off. This
is as drastic as you’ll see,” he says, after viewing photos of Tatuzão.
The mining
causes deforestation as well as changes to water quality and river structure,
say scientists.
A study
carried out by Lutz and colleagues in Peru found water quality was severely
impacted near ASGM sites. Mud and silt thickened rivers, reducing visibility,
which would disturb seasonal behaviour and even the breeding habits of fish and
the life cycles of insects. “There is a handful of species that can handle this
change, so those species become dominant and it lowers the numbers of other
species,” says Lutz.
Near
Waikás, two rough-hewn wooden barges used to dredge for gold are hidden in a
tributary. Banks of sand, stones and mud sucked up by the barges had formed in
the river. “They are reshaping the river structure,” says Lutz. “This will
really change the sediment.”
In the
1980s and 1990s, William Milliken, an ethnobotanist at Kew Gardens documented
the impacts in Yanomami areas degraded by ASGM, such as disappearing caiman and
a reduction in plants such as fish poison vine. “It’s likely to happen again,”
he said.
The mercury
that miners use to separate gold particles from mud and silt is dumped into
rivers and burned off into the air, says Luis Fernandez, a tropical ecologist
and director at the Wake Forest University centre for Amazon Scientific
Innovation in the US.
Mercury
spreads into the aquatic ecosystem via a process called biomagnification and
concentrates rapidly as it passes up the food chain.
“The food
chain acts like a signal amplifier,” he says. “Environmental chemistry in the
tropics is much faster than in temperate regions.”
A recent
study found that 92% of indigenous people in a village near Waikás had higher
than safe levels of mercury in their hair.
A study
published in 2018 found that 92% of indigenous people in a village near Waikás,
where a garimpo site operated, had higher than safe levels of mercury in their
hair. In Waikás, the level was 28%. “Here, all the garimpeiros use it
[mercury],” says one miner.
An hour’s
flight across the rolling hills of jungle from Waikás – passing over a garimpo
pit and camp with its own vegetable garden – brings you to the health post at
Maloca Paapiú. The Yanomami people it serves live in communal houses of extended
families deep in thick forest, reached by muddy, winding trails. Here, men and
women use black and red face and body paint and women wear short skirts of
fronds, bamboo spears in their noses and cheeks; barefoot children skip nimbly
across the slippery logs that serve as bridges across numerous streams and
rivers.
Garimpeiros
overran the region in the late 1980s. Now they are inching closer again.
Noemia
Yanomama, 40, says she saw a garimpo camp near the hills where she hunts. She
worries young indigenous men will bring sexual diseases from prostitutes in the
camps. “Soon they will get close to the community. That makes me very sad,” she
says.
Young men
and teenage boys gather daily at the health post to charge cellphones they
bought working on garimpo sites reached by hours of walking. One site abandoned
this year was just a few hours away.
This is
creating a generational divide with their parents, who still hunt with bows and
arrows. “The garimpo is not our friend. We call it a disease,” says Tibiana
Yanomama, 42.
His son
Oziel, 15, escaped to the nearest garimpo with his friend Marcos, 21. Both
spent three weeks working there, clearing jungle, before Tibiana went and
dragged them back.
“I wanted
shoes, a machete, a sharpening file,” Marcos says. “I wanted a hammock. I
wanted to work.” He was paid five grams of gold (worth around $180). He saw
garimpeiros working with mercury and drank beer and sugar cane rum. “I got very
drunk,” he says, with a nervous laugh.
Tibiana is
furious with Oziel. “The youth don’t listen,” he says. And he is livid with
Bolsonaro’s plans to legalise garimpo. “What does he want for Brazil? This
forest is Brazil,” he says. Oziel caught malaria, a recurrent problem in
garimpo camps, where pools of waste water provide breeding grounds for
mosquitos. The Maloca Paapiú health post handles 15 new cases a week.
For the
Yanomami, nature and spirituality are intrinsically linked: every rock, every
waterfall, every bird, every monkey has a spirit, says Maneose Yanomama, 55,
shaman of the Sikamabi-U community. And the spirits of nature are sounding the
alarm. “The whites are getting closer. They are damaging our land, they are
destroying our rivers, they are ruining our forests,” he said. “Nature is very
scared.”
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