Brazil says it has nearly cleared gold miners from Amazon Yanomami reservation
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Brazil says it has nearly cleared gold miners from Amazon Yanomami reservation
SURUCUCU, Brazil, (Reuters) - Brazil has almost squashed the illegal gold rush that led thousands of wildcat miners into the Yanomami reservation in the Amazon rainforest and caused a humanitarian crisis of disease and malnutrition, the man in charge of operations said.
The Yanomami, South America's largest Indigenous group living in isolation, have returned to a normal way of life, cultivating crops and hunting game, Nilton Tubino told Reuters in an interview on Friday.
Tubino runs the government office set up by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to coordinate action by police and military forces, environmental agents and health workers on the reservation the size of Portugal in the remote Amazon, where 27,000 Yanomami live.
"We are seeing many of them bathing in the rivers and out hunting again, and clearings being planted for food," he said.
In hundreds of operations since March, army and navy troops, backed up by environmental and Indigenous protection agencies, have destroyed mining camps and gold prospects.
They have dynamited 42 clandestine airstrips used by the miners in the rainforest, set fire to 18 aircraft, seized 92,000 liters of diesel, sunk 45 dredging barges, destroyed 700 pumps, and dismantled 90 Starlink dishes that allowed the miners to warn each other about enforcement teams, Tubino said. A radar has been set up in the reservation to monitor clandestine planes.
Tubino said deaths from malaria brought by the miners were down, and malnutrition had been controlled with government food parcels. The government has reopened medical outposts and is planning to build a hospital in Surucucu, a remote village near the border with Venezuela.
