Is kicking out illegal miners enough to save Brazil’s Amazon?
Deep in the Brazilian Amazon in early February, wildcat miners sped down the Uraricoera River slicing through the Yanomami Indigenous reserve in three motorboats packed with barrels of gasoline and plastic foam boxes of meat.
The supplies were meant to fuel an illegal gold mine tucked in the heart of Brazil’s largest Indigenous territory. But their journey was abruptly cut short. “Everyone stop!” shouted an armed officer as police overtook the men’s boat. They raised their arms in surrender.
“There’s so much food here. ... All of these sacks here are full of food,” one officer said later, as he examined the supplies his team seized. “All the while the Yanomami are starving.”
In a high-profile crackdown, Brazilian authorities have raided more than 200 wildcat mines – known as – across the Yanomami reserve in recent months, arresting miners, seizing
