Indigenous lands where elite force is targeting mine gangs

A special unit is on a mission to expel the illegal miners who devastated Yanomami territory in Bolsonaro's tenure

- Tom Phillips

For the past four years Brazil’s rainforests bled. “They bled like never before,” said Felipe Finger as he prepared to venture into the jungle with his assault rifle to staunch the environmental carnage inflicted on the Amazon under the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro.

Moments later Finger, a special forces commander for Brazil’s environmental protection agency, Ibama, was airborne in a helicopter, hurtling over the forest canopy towards the front line of a ferocious war on nature and the Indigenous peoples who lived here long before Portuguese explorers arrived more than 500 years ago.

The group’s objective was Xitei, one of the most isolated corners of the Yanomami Indigenous territory on Brazil’s northern border with Venezuela. Tens of thousands of illegal miners devastated the region during Bolsonaro’s environmentally calamitous 2019- 23 presidency, hijacking Indigenous villages, banishing health workers, poisoning rivers with mercury, and prompting what his leftist successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has called a premeditated genocide.

As Finger’s aircraft swooped down beside a Yanomami village, a handful of miners scurried into the forest in an attempt to avoid capture.

The motors fuelling their clandestine cassiterite mining operation were still growling as members of his six strong unit leapt from their helicopters and fanned out across a landscape of sodden craters and fallen trees.

“Illegal mining on Yanomami land is finished,” declared Finger, a camouflage-clad forest engineer turned rainforest warrior whose team has been spearheading efforts to evict the prospectors since early February.