State of emergency in Brazil after children die of malnutrition, other diseases

Brazil:

Brazil’s health ministry has declared a medical emergency in the Yanomami region, the country’s largest indigenous reservation bordering Venezuela, after reports of children dying of malnutrition and other diseases caused by illegal gold mining.

A decree published on Friday by the incoming government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said the declaration was aimed at restoring health services for the Yanomami people, which had been dismantled by his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro.

In the four years of Bolsonaro’s presidency, 570 Yanomami children died from preventable diseases, mainly from malnutrition as well as malaria, diarrhea and maladies caused by mercury used by wildcat gold miners, Amazon Journalism platform Sumouma reported, citing data obtained through a FOIA.

Lula visited a Yanomami health center in Boa Vista in Roraima state on Saturday after the publication of photographs showing children and elderly men and women with their ribs appearing so thin.

Lula said on Twitter, “More than a humanitarian crisis, what I saw in Roraima was genocide: a premeditated crime against the Yanomami, perpetrated by a government insensitive to suffering.”

The government announced food packages that would be taken to the reservation where some 26,000 Yanomami live in an area of ​​rainforest and tropical savanna the size of Portugal.

The reservation has been invaded by illegal gold miners for decades, but has increased manifold since Bolsonaro won office in 2018, promising to allow mining on previously protected land and offering to legalize wildcat mining. does.

There are also indications that organized crime has become involved. In recent violent incidents, men on speed boats on rivers have shot with automatic weapons at indigenous villages whose communities resist the entry of gold miners.

Estevao Cenara, a researcher at Instituto Socioambiental, an NGO that protects indigenous rights, said some gold miners have begun leaving in fear of enforcement actions by Lula’s government, moving across the border to Guyana and Suriname.

Lula said the new government would end illegal gold mining as it moves to crack down on illegal deforestation in the Amazon, which reached a 15-year high under Bolsonaro.

Sonia Guajazara, the first indigenous woman to become a cabinet minister, said, “We must hold the previous government accountable for allowing this situation to worsen to the point where we find adults weighing children, and children being skin and bones.” are reduced to.” A new Ministry of Indigenous Affairs.

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