When President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in January 2023, illegal gold mining in the Brazilian Amazon was out of control. According to the research collective MapBiomas, illegal miners — garimpeiros, as they are known in Brazil — almost doubled the area they occupied during the administration of former President Jair Bolsonaro’s (2019-22), who openly defended the activity. The most severe situation occurred in Indigenous territories, particularly among the Yanomami, whose heartbreaking images of sick children shocked the world. Humanitarian tragedies also affect other communities, such as the Kayapós and the Mundurukus in Pará state, where contamination from the mercury used by miners has dire consequences for Indigenous health. Things changed when Lula’s environment minister, Marina Silva, resumed on-the-ground operations. According to Brazil’s environmental agency, IBAMA, in 2023, agents destroyed 150 backhoes and 600 dredgers, machines that churned up the riverbed searching for gold. As a result, deforestation linked to garimpos in the Amazon plummeted by 30% compared with 2022. “We believe that when we have an institutional presence and work on several fronts, we reduce the number of deforestation and degradation alerts due to illegal mining,” Ronilson Vasconcelos told Mongabay from Itaituba, where he coordinates a special advanced unit of ICMBio, the agency responsible for federal conservation units. Data are crystal clear in showing the effects of the environmental agents’ offensive. However, they also show that garimpos keep expanding across the Amazon, albeit at a slower pace. Indigenous territories, where any kind of mining is illegal, lost…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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