BRASILIA, Feb 6 (Reuters) - Illegal gold miners blamed
for causing a humanitarian crisis on Brazil's largest indigenous
reservation are asking authorities to help them leave, one of
their leaders and a Brazilian senator said on Monday.
Aware of an imminent military enforcement operation to evict
them, Jailson Mesquita, head of the Garimpo é Legal movement
(Wildcat Mining Is Legal) called on the government to airlift
miners from Yanomami territory or lift a no-fly zone to allow
them to fly out on small planes from clandestine airstrips
inside the reservation where mining is banned under Brazil's
Constitution.
In a video he posted on social media, Mesquita asked the
government to unblock rivers for 10-15 days for the miners to
leave the reservation in the northern state of Roraima.
"It is important to protect indigenous people, but we cannot
criminalize the miners who are looking for a living to survive,"
Roraima Senator Chico Rodrigues told Reuters. "What matters is
that the miners leave peacefully and protected," he said.
Mesquita is organizing a demonstration on Thursday in the
main square of Roraima's capital Boa Vista which has a large
monument of a wildcat miner.
More than 20,000 miners have occupied the reservation
bringing disease, sexual abuse and armed violence that has
terrified the Yanomamis, estimated to be about 28,000 in number,
and led to a malnutrition and deaths.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva declared a medical
emergency for the Yanomami and his recently installed government
is planning a task force to expel the miners involving the
military, police and agencies that protect the environment and
Brazil's indigenous peoples.
Some of the miners that are beginning to leave the Yanomami
reservation are expected to head across the border into
neighboring French Guiana, Suriname and Guyana.
The Yanomami have lived in isolation on a vast reservation
the size of Portugal on the border with Venezuela. Their
mineral-rich lands have attracted wildcat miners for decades,
especially after a military government built a road through the
Amazon rainforest in the 1970s.
When the reservation was marked out and recognized by the
government in 1992, authorities mounted an operations to evict
thousands of gold miners.
The miners started to come back in numbers that surged under
Lula's right-wing predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, who advocated
mining on protected indigenous lands and whose government turned
a blind eye to invasions of indigenous reservations by wildcat
miners and illegal loggers.
(Reporting by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
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