Mining Poisons an Amazon Tribe

The search for gold in Brazil creates a jungle health crisis.

YANOMAMI INDIGENOUS TERRITORY, Brazil — The illegal tin mine was so remote that, for three years, the giant gash it cut into the Amazon rainforest had gone largely ignored.

So when three mysterious helicopters suddenly hovered overhead, the miners scrambled into the forest. By the time Brazil’s environmental special forces team landed, the miners were out of sight, but the mine’s two large pumps were still vibrating in the mud. The federal agents began dousing the machines with diesel fuel.

As they were set to ignite them, about two dozen Indigenous people came out of the forest, carrying bows and arrows. They were from the Yanomami tribe, and the miners had been destroying their land — and their tribe — for years.

But as the Yanomami arrived, they realized these visitors were there to help. The agents were dismantling the mine and then promised to give the Yanomamis the miners’ supplies. “Friends are not miners, no,” said the only Yanomami man who spoke basic Portuguese.

An explosion of illegal mining in this vast swath of the Amazon has created a humanitarian crisis for the Yanomami people, cutting their food supplies, spreading malaria and, in some cases, threatening violence, according to government officials. The miners use mercury to separate gold from mud, and recent analyses show that Yanomami rivers contain mercury levels 8,600 percent as high as what is considered safe. Mercury poisoning can cause birth defects and neurological damage.

The infant mortality rate among the 31,000 Yanomamis in Brazil now exceeds those of war-torn and famine-stricken countries, with one in 10 infants dying, compared with about one in 100 in the rest of the country, according to government data. Many of those deaths are avoidable, caused by malnutrition, malaria, pneumonia and other illnesses.

“Lots of diarrhea, vomiting,” said the Yanomami man at the mine, who would not give a name. “No health, no help, nothing.”

But now Brazil’s new leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has made saving the Yanomamis the top

priority in his push to halt the Amazon’s destruction. The government declared a state of emergency in January and has airlifted severely malnourished people out, set up a checkpoint at a major waterway into the territory and destroyed mines.

While the miners began arriving in 2016, the crisis erupted under the right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro, who after being elected in 2018, cut funding for the agencies assigned to protect the forest. The area illegally mined in the Yanomami territory quadrupled during his tenure to nearly 52 square kilometers, according to satellite data.

“On the one hand, you’re happy because you’re fighting environmental crimes again,” said Felipe Finger, the head of Brazil’s environmental special forces team, who led the operation at the tin mine. “On the other hand, it’s sad, because it’s been four years since the forest began bleeding — and it bled a lot.”

Thousands of prospectors have invaded the land for gold and other precious metals, with a productive dig site yielding roughly five kilograms of pure gold a week, or about $300,000 on the black market. Researchers estimate that there are hundreds of active mines.

The Yanomamis at the mine had never heard of Mr. Lula or Mr. Bolsonaro, but they were clear that the miners had brought hardship. “People is hungry,” the Yanomami man said.

Nearby, agents were searching the miners’ shelter, a cabin with a refrigerator, stove and two satellite-internet dishes. They also found a miner who had lingered too long. Edmilson Dias said he had worked at the mine for two months and made $1,000 a week. Now he was sitting on a stump, his hands behind his back, two agents at his side. Yet he remained defiant.

“To tell you the truth, I’ll leave here and go to another mine,” he said, saying the money was too good to stop.

It underscored that the fight against the miners had only just begun.

Instead of months, the Yanomamis count moons, and instead of years, they track the harvests of the pupunha fruit. Evidence suggests they have lived in the Amazon for thousands of harvests. And unlike many other Indigenous groups, their way of life still resembles that of their ancestors.

Across 370 remote forest villages, multiple families share large domed huts, but tend their own plots of cassava, bananas and papaya. The men hunt and the women farm.

Their first sustained contact with white people, American missionaries, came in the 1960s. Shortly after, more Brazilians arrived, carried deeper into the Amazon by new roads and an appetite for gold. With contact came diseases, and thousands of Yanomamis died.

Things got worse in the 1980s when a gold rush brought more illness and violence. In 1992, the Brazilian government protected about 96,000 square kilometers of the forest along the border with Venezuela for the Yanomamis, creating Brazil’s largest Indigenous territory, an expanse larger than Portugal. But by 2018, as Mr. Bolsonaro ran for president, prospectors were rushing in again, driven by rising gold prices.

“In the last four years, we have seen apathy, perhaps intentional,” said Alisson Marugal, a federal prosecutor investigating the Bolsonaro administration’s handling of the Yanomami territory. “They failed to act, aware that they were allowing a humanitarian crisis to happen.”

Mr. Bolsonaro has said his government carried out 20 operations to aid Indigenous groups, helping 449,000 people. “Never has a government given so much attention and means to the Indigenous people as Jair Bolsonaro,” he wrote on Twitter in January.

Today, the plight of many Yanomami children is unmistakable: Their skeletons are visible through their skin, their faces gaunt and their bellies swollen, a telltale sign of malnourishment. A recent government study found that 80 percent were below average height and half were underweight.

Dr. Paulo Basta, a government physician who has studied the Yanomamis for 25 years, said malnutrition among Yanomami children “is worse than it ever was.’’

During the Bolsonaro administration, 570 Yanomami children died of avoidable causes, up from 441 in the previous four years, according to data compiled by an environmental news site, Sumaúma.

Scientists say the health crisis has an obvious cause. The mining clears trees, disrupts waterways and transforms the landscape, scaring away prey and hurting crops. The mines’ standing water breeds mosquitoes, which spread malaria that the miners bring in from the cities. The disease had once been largely rooted out among the Yanomamis. In recent years, virtually every member of the tribe has had it. And then there is the mercury seeping into the ground and the rivers.

At a hospital in Boa Vista, outside the territory, Yanomami families crowded into a room. Some children were being treated for severe malnourishment, others for malaria.

A young mother breastfed her 8-month-old daughter, who weighed under three kilograms. The girl was receiving a blood transfusion and had a feeding tube. Crops in the village were failing, her father said. “It’s difficult to get them to sprout,” a translator relayed.

At a nearby restaurant, Eric Silva reached over a table with a chunk of solid gold. He had bought it that day for roughly $10,000. The government, he said, would never be able to stop the hunt for such wealth.

Mr. Silva spent 22 years as a miner, until the government burned his machinery. Now he buys and sells about four kilograms of gold a month, or about $230,000 on the black market.

All mining is illegal in Roraima, the state that includes much of the Yanomami land, but the streets of Boa Vista, its capital, are lined with gold shops. At the start of the government’s operation, officials estimated there were up to 20,000 people connected to illegal mining inside the Yanomami territory, including miners, cooks, pilots and prostitutes.

Mr. Finger’s team now leads the battle to run illegal miners off Indigenous land. On the recent trip into the forest, the agents instructed the Yanomami people to help clear the miners’ cabin. They piled bags of flour, rice and beans alongside clothes, pillows and cookware. Then they carried everything back to their huts. The agents lit the cabin on fire, boarded the helicopters and took off.

On the ride out, spirals of smoke rose from below. The mine was part of a much longer string of destruction, open pit after open pit.

A battle against the destructive lure of money.