"Lula to visit Amazon amid vow to tackle Yanomami Indigenous crisis", 21 January 2023

...Brazil’s first-ever minister for Indigenous peoples, Sônia Guajajara, has vowed to make tackling the humanitarian crisis plaguing the country’s largest Indigenous territory “an absolute priority”, as she prepared to fly into the region with the new president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Under the former president, Jair Bolsonaro, thousands of illegal gold miners poured into the Yanomami enclave in the Amazon, bringing violence, pollution and a healthcare calamity captured in a recent series of photographs of severely malnourished children and adults.

On Friday, Lula announced that he and Guajajara would make an emergency visit to the Amazon state of Roraima, where the Yanomami territory is located, to lead the government’s response to the “outrageous levels of malnutrition”...

Interviewed last week in Brasília, she said solving the Yanomami crisis – which had exposed Yanomami children to horrifying levels of malaria, verminosis, malnutrition and diarrhoea – was at the top of her in-tray.

“Every 72 hours a child is dying from one of these illnesses, according to the information we’ve received,” said Guajajara, who was born in the Araribóia territory of the Amazon. “Children are dying because of the polluted water and the lack of food caused by the presence of the illegal miners”...

Thousands of tin ore and gold miners were removed from Yanomami lands in the early 1990s after global outrage at their impact on the region’s remote communities. A 9.6m-hectare reserve was created to safeguard Yanomami lives.

But within a decade the prospectors had returned, with the number reaching new heights during Bolsonaro’s 2019-2022 administration as his anti-environmental rhetoric and policies emboldened rainforest wreckers...