'Hope has returned' Amazon tribe hails Lula's fight

Two years after Brazil's president vowed to help, the Yanomami are reclaiming their land, health and future

-  Tom Phillips

The Yanomami villagers had trekked for days through some of Brazil's most secluded jungles to reach the assembly, their traditional clothing announcing an existence deeply entwined with nature that stretched back thousands of years.

As they filed into a thatched communal hut to share stories of their lives, the forest dwellers wore armlets fashioned from toucan and macaw plumes and monkey-tail headbands. "It's a symbol of unity because these little monkeys never get separated: they always roam together," said local leader Júnior Hekurari as the group gathered in Kori Yauopë, a Yanomami hamlet on a table mountain.

"Today the Yanomami people are no longer crying because our children are no longer dying," Hekurari told the meeting, recalling how his people had been pushed to the brink of destruction in recent years as tens of thousands of illegal miners invaded their lands and Brazil's previous government abandoned them to their fate.

Two years after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva became president and launched an emergency operation to rescue inhabitants of Brazil's largest Indigenous territory, hunger and infant mortality rates were falling and miners had been expelled.

"We are recovering," Hekurari said, thanking Lula for sending health workers and hundreds of troops to kick out the miners.

The optimism during the four-day summit in Kori Yauopë comes after a traumatic spell for the estimated 32,000 Indigenous people who live in about 390 villages in the Yanomami territory, an area of rainforest covering 9.6m hectares along Brazil's Amazon border with Venezuela.