Illegal Amazon mining on the rise despite clampdown, warns Indigenous leader

Thousands of illegal miners are resisting government attempts to evict them from Brazil's largest Indigenous territory, the renowned activist and shaman Davi Kopenawa has said, nearly a year after operations to displace them began

- Tom Phillips

The president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, made expelling an estimated 20,000 illegal gold and tin ore miners from the Yanomami Indigenous territory one of his main tasks after taking power in January.

Lula visited the region to denounce what he called a "genocide" committed by the government of his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, and ordered an offensive to force miners from the Portugal-sized Amazon enclave.

"Illegal mining on Yanomami land is finished," a special forces commander for the environmental agency Ibama told the Guardian when it joined his airborne troops on the frontline of that fight.

Those perilous missions have yielded fruit. By July, Brazil's top federal police chief for the Amazon claimed 90% of the miners had been uprooted, leaving perhaps 1,500 to 2,000 behind. But Kopenawa, the president of the Indigenous association Hutukara who has spent four decades campaigning against the destruction of Yanomami lands, believes many are returning after evictions were scaled back.

"I am growing angry... and Mother Earth is angry," Kopenawa said, estimating that 4,000 miners were operating in a territory where about 30,000 Yanomami and Ye'kwana people live, including groups with little or no contact with outsiders.

"I'm a man of the rainforest, I'm a traditional leader ... and I feel these invaders are determined to ruin the Yanomami territory."