Brazil’s mass gold-mining eviction less straightforward than it seems

When Brazil’s federal government recently launched its long-awaited “mega-operation” to expel illegal gold miners from the Yanomami indigenous territory in the Amazonian state of Roraima at the start of this month, local officials released footage of lines of people, presumably miners, leaving the protected area in canoes.

In the days since, similar reports and videos have flooded in, showing miners and other manual laborers trying to cobble together enough gold to get spots on rafts, boats, or clandestine airplanes to transport them off the indigenous land.

“The people understand they have to leave,” says Jailson Mesquita, coordinator of Movimento Garimpo é Legal, a pro-wildcat mining organization. “The majority are leaving voluntarily,” he tells The Brazilian Report, “though there are still about 10,000 of them there.”

The Roraima state government agreed, saying that the garimpeiros (as wildcat miners are known in Brazil) are “spontaneously” leaving the vast Yanomami territory to “avoid potential problems with the justice system.”

“Good, that means less work for us,” retorted Brazil’s Indigenous Peoples Minister Sônia Guajajara, speaking at a press conference.

Led by the Federal Police in conjunction with environmental protection agency Ibama, indigenous peoples’ foundation Funai, the National Public Security Force, and the Defense Ministry, the so-called Operation Liberation aims to eradicate illegal gold mining from Yanomami indigenous lands in Roraima by evicting non-indigenous garimpeiros and dismantling their mining infrastructure.

The operation began two weeks after Brazil’s center-left president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, visited Yanomami territory and declared a public health emergency.

At the operation’s launch, the government estimated that some 15,000 garimpeiros were working illegally in the Yanomami territory, a number that went through the roof during the administration of far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro.

According to the Hutukara Yanomami Association, the area of the indigenous reservation affected by illegal mining ventures increased by 46 percent in 2021 alone.

However, there are suggestions that Operation Liberation is simply moving the problem around, with other nearby indigenous territories denouncing increased threats of invasion from garimpeiros.

“The operation isn’t meeting the demands of indigenous communities yet,” says Ivo Aureliano, legal advisor of the Roraima Indigenous Council (CIR). “There’s no effective plan to protect indigenous communities, be it in the Yanomami territory or elsewhere.”

“We hope the federal government will present a plan to ensure the protection of indigenous peoples, to ensure that this invasion of garimpeiros doesn’t just repeat itself,” he tells The Brazilian Report.

The Yanomami disaster

The Yanomami indigenous territory straddles the northern Brazilian states of Amazonas and Roraima, the latter of...