How the Brazilian military sabotaged protection of Indigenous people in the Amazon

How the Brazilian military sabotaged protection of Indigenous people in the Amazon

André Schröder
16 Sep 2024

The Brazilian military has been involved in a series of controversial episodes that have undermined emergency efforts to tackle the humanitarian crisis in the Yanomami Indigenous Territory.

Reports show it failed (or sabotaged) airspace control and food deliveries to the Indigenous people, who suffer from malnutrition as a result of mercury contamination from illegal mining.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has spent millions trying to evict the illegal miners and provide care to the Yanomami, but some 7,000 miners remain in the territory, while malnutrition, malaria and other diseases continue to afflict the Yanomami.

Experts blame the military's inaction of action against the illegal miners on a colonial ideology that was prevalent under Brazil's former military dictatorship, and which was revived under the administration of Lula's predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.

In 1964, the Brazilian military launched a coup d'état, overthrowing the democratically elected government and seizing control of the country. What followed was a 21-year dictatorship, authoritarian rule, censorship, and repression. The generals who took power were driven by their version of McCarthyism, fighting all aspects of civilian life that they accused of being communist or socialist.

The generals were backed by the elite, which had an interest in exploiting Brazil's vast natural resources. Central to this vision was the Amazon Rainforest. They viewed it as a largely untamed and unpopulated wilderness. To the military regime, the Amazon was not a rich ecosystem teeming with life, nor was it the ancestral home of numerous Indigenous communities who had cared for it and made it home for millennia. Instead, it was a frontier to be conquered, a resource to be exploited in the name of progress and national security. Doing so also served their fearmongering narrative that a foreign enemy could invade Brazil through the jungle.

That ideology was (and still is) explicitly anti-Indigenous and anti-environmental, seeing the forest and its inhabitants as obstacles to be removed in the name of so-called development.

The dictatorship launched a series of aggressive policies aimed at integrating the Amazon into the economy. Slogans like "Integrar para não entregar" ("Integrate to avoid surrender") reflected the regime's belief that failing to develop the Amazon would leave it vulnerable to foreign exploitation.

These policies led to widespread deforestation, the displacement of Indigenous peoples, and the opening of the rainforest to mining, logging and large-scale agriculture. The military's relentless drive to reshape the Amazon in its image would leave deep scars, not only on the environment but also on the cultural fabric of Brazil.

When Brazilians restored democracy to their country in 1985, many believed that this ideology was over. In 1988, a new Constitution was promulgated, one that enshrined Indigenous and environmental protections.

Then, 30 years later, Jair Bolsonaro was elected president.

The former Army officer brought into his cabinet several former military top brass who had worked in or supported the dictatorship. With them came the anti-Indigenous and anti-environmental policies and rhetoric. Deforestation and invasion of protected territories soared during the Bolsonaro administration, which ran from 2019-2023.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former two-term president, defeated Bolsonaro's bid for reelection in late 2022 and took office in early 2023, pledging to protect Indigenous people and the environment. Soon, reports of a humanitarian crisis in Indigenous territories grabbed the headlines, especially in the Yanomami Indigenous Territory, one of the country's largest. Disease and hunger had spread throughout the land as at least 20,000 illegal gold miners invaded during the Bolsonaro years, emboldened by the administration's support. They left a trail of mercury contamination in the Yanomami rivers, wreaked violence on Indigenous communities, and ushered in deadly infectious diseases like malaria.

Lula promised to evict all the illegal miners, declared a public health emergency in the Yanomami Indigenous Territory, and spent more than 1 billion reais ($182 million) on police raids. The president also ordered the military to help environmental and Federal Police agents in the crackdown. With bases in the Amazon and centuries-long knowledge of monitoring Brazil's borders in the rainforest, the Army could provide the support needed to defend the Yanomami. Thousands of garimpeiros, as the miners are known in Brazil, fled, and some were arrested.

But a year and a half later, thousands of Indigenous people continue to suffer from malnutrition, malaria and other diseases that caused at least 363 deaths in 2023. The number of gold miners has increased again in recent months.

One crucial obstacle to enforcing Lula's pledge has been the apparent lack of commitment from the military, which has been involved in a series of controversial incidents undermining the federal emergency relief efforts in the Yanomami land.

Investigative reporting by Rubens Valente in news outlet Agência Pública has revealed that the Brazilian Armed Forces have refused to repair airstrips that could speed up aid deliveries to the Yanomami, and have been unwilling to deliver thousands of food baskets to the Indigenous people. The military also unilaterally closed a fuel supply station, affecting the work of emergency health services and protection agencies.

Another issue is the poor control of the airspace over the Yanomami territory, which covers an area larger than Portugal, the former colonial power in Brazil. The Brazilian Air Force has failed to stop the intensive air traffic taking off and landing on clandestine airstrips in illegal mining areas, yet has also barred surveillance flights by organizations trying to document the invaders' return.

Despite having platoons on Yanomami land, the military has done little to combat the illegal mining, according to experts, and didn't even protect federal agents from gunfire attacks. In some situations, Indigenous groups have had to act on their own to stop invaders.

"We have no confidence in the military," Maurício Ye'kwana, director of the Hutukara Yanomami Association, one of the main Indigenous organizations in the territory, told Mongabay by phone. "We thought the measures against illegal mining would work, but there are no effective actions to remove the invaders."

"The military neglected the crisis on Yanomami land," Elaine Moreira, a professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Brasília, who has worked with the Ye'kwana people in the Yanomami territory for 30 years, told Mongabay by phone. "At no time was there any resumption of the territory in areas dominated by miners. The reports were that illegal operations would soon resume."

In January, the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), one of the country's main Indigenous advocacy groups, informed Brazil's Supreme Federal Court that the Ministry of Defense, which coordinates the three branches of the military, was hampering enforcement actions against illegal miners in the Yanomami land. In February, federal officials from environmental and Indigenous protection agencies expressed indignation and disgust at the military's stance on the Yanomami crisis.

"The military is very resistant to fighting mining in Yanomami territory," Estêvão Senra, senior analyst at Instituto Socioambiental, a nonprofit that advocates for environmental and Indigenous rights, told Mongabay by phone. "There are border platoons with men and equipment on the land, but there have been no patrols or crackdowns in recent years. This attitude suggests a certain connivance on the part of the Brazilian Armed Forces."

In a statement emailed to Mongabay, the Ministry of Defense said that in 2023 the Brazilian Armed Forces deployed 1,500 personnel to provide humanitarian assistance and combat illegal mining on Yanomami land. Currently, 800 military personnel are mobilized to confront the invaders.

Pro-mining ideology
Experts say the ideological bias that reigned during the dictatorship years fuels the military sabotage in fighting illegal mining today. The Brazilian military has long advocated for occupation as the best way to protect the country's Amazonian region against foreign enemies. Under this ideology, illegal gold miners - as well as land invaders, illegal loggers and other newcomers - are seen as allies by the military because they cooperate with the occupation plan. "There are different reports of military personnel saying they are fighting 'a war that is not theirs'," Senra said.

The Yanomami Indigenous Territory lies in the northern Amazon, straddling the states of Roraima and Amazonas and forming much of Brazil's border with Venezuela. Most miners arrived here from other parts of Brazil over the course of decades and have little or no links to the forest, rivers or Amazonian culture. This colonial approach helps to explain the environmental devastation and social impacts wrought by the garimpeiros. Still, according to experts, the military considers them "authentic Brazilians," an ideology that erases the millennia-old presence of native populations.

"The military has no interest in preserving Brazil's diversity," Luís Gustavo Guerreiro Moreira, an Indigenous peoples expert at Funai, the federal agency for Indigenous affairs, told Mongabay. "There is a colonialist legacy that sees Indigenous peoples, quilombolas [Afro-Brazilians descended from formerly enslaved people] and traditional populations as an obstacle to national development," said Moreira, who is also a researcher at the Nationalities Observatory at Ceará State University. "Not defending these populations is a cultural attitude of the Brazilian military."

The military doesn't recognize the sovereignty of Indigenous lands when it's the Indigenous inhabitants who struggle to achieve demarcation, according to Adriana Marques, a professor with the International Relations and Defense Institute at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, as quoted by Brazilian news outlet Sumaúma. As far as the military is concerned, according to her, Indigenous people are "instruments of malicious foreigners, and not subjects of their own claims."

During the Bolsonaro presidency, secret reports showed little support from the government for cracking down on the invasions, despite many warnings and official letters about the crisis. Indigenous activists have since gone before the International Criminal Court in The Hague to denounce Bolsonaro's anti-Indigenous policies.

The Ministry of Indigenous Peoples estimates that 7,000 illegal miners are still active in the Yanomami territory. In June, a report showed that 70% of the alerts raised by the Yanomami about threats in their territory revolve around the presence of miners.

A new military role
In February this year, as part of a new strategy to tackle the Yanomami crisis, Lula created a Government House in Roraima's capital, Boa Vista, responsible for coordinating the actions of 31 federal agencies, including the Armed Forces. Its mission is to oversee measures to assist Indigenous people and fight illegal mining, but this new approach hasn't made any significant dents yet.

"The Government House is an attempt to minimize the illegal miners' activity. But it's not yet a centralized effort," Maurício Ye'kwana said. "The resources were distributed among the several ministries, which announced isolated measures without effect."

According to Elaine Moreira, the role of the Brazilian military in this new phase of action is unclear. "We still don't know the government's plan to remove the miners or the role of the Armed Forces in this plan. Without control of the airspace and actions to disrupt the transportation logistics to remove the minerals and bring in supplies, we won't solve the problem," she said.

In March, the Lula administration released an additional 1 billion reais for actions on Yanomami land. Despite its recent history of sabotage, the Ministry of Defense got almost a third of the funds. According to the military, the money will be used to reinforce the structure of existing border platoons and to set up new bases in the middle of the Indigenous land, a measure criticized by Yanomami organizations.

A recent study by Brazilian researchers shows that the military's actions during the Bolsonaro years reduced enforcement measures in the Amazonian region, signaling increasing inaction. This was accompanied by a significant increase in enforcement costs, suggesting a massive efficiency loss.

"The experience of recent years has shown that the Brazilian Armed Forces do not have the know-how to control environmental crimes in the Amazon," Senra said. "Military operations under the Bolsonaro government were much more expensive and inefficient, with increased deforestation and organized crime. We need to strengthen civilian environmental protection agencies as a public policy."

In a statement emailed to Mongabay, the Government House said the Brazilian Armed Forces will continue to mobilize personnel to combat the mining operations in the Yanomami territory. However, Defense Minister José Múcio has called for deploying private security forces in the Yanomami land, acknowledging that the military's operations against the invaders are ineffective.

Experts also point to the tense relationship between President Lula and the military after Bolsonaro supporters stormed Brazil's Congress on Jan. 8, 2023, a week after Lula's inauguration, in an unsuccessful bid to overturn the election results. The move, a coup d'etat attempt, according to a Congress inquiry, was believed to have been orchestrated by Bolsonaro and his supporters, some of whom are linked to the Brazilian Armed Forces. "The new government's relationship with the military is very delicate. This may also have gotten in the way," Senra said.

Luís Moreira, the Indigenous peoples expert, said the military has failed to follow orders, collaborate with other agencies, and accept civilian command. "Ideally, the Armed Forces shouldn't take part in anything. If they do, they should respect the real authority in Indigenous and environmental affairs. Civilian entities have to give the last word."

With or without the involvement of the military, the only way to end the Yanomami crisis is to remove the illegal miners, Elaine Moreira said. "Nothing will improve without removing the miners from the Yanomami land. If there is no firm action, we will spend another year with this crisis, with more deaths," she said.

Maurício Ye'kwana agreed. "The plan against gold miners is not being presented by the government, which doesn't know how to go about it. We want effective surveillance bases to combat mining. The Indigenous land is immense, and there are many prospectors. It's a very difficult situation."

In July, the Government House announced that it had carried out 1,000 operations in the Yanomami Indigenous Territory in the first five months of 2024. The Lula administration says its goal is to end illegal mining in the territory by September.

https://news.mongabay.com/2024/09/how-the-brazilian-military-sabotaged-protection-of-indigenous-people-in-the-amazon/

Related Protected Areas:

• TI Yanomami

 

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