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Brazil agencies launch raid against illegal gold miners in Yanomami lands

An agent of the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources looks on as a plane and a house belonging to miners are destroyed during an operation conducted jointly within Brazil's National Indian Foundation and Brazilian National Public Security Force against illegal mining in Yanomami indigenous land in Roraima state, Brazil February 6, 2023.

Boa Vista, Brazil Reuters Brazil’s environmental and Indigenous agencies have launched an enforcement operation in the Amazon rainforest to expel thousands of illegal gold miners blamed for causing a humanitarian crisis among the Yanomami people, officials said on Wednesday. Armed agents of the government’s environmental protection agency Ibama, deployed by helicopter and motor boat since […]

Brazil renews protection of little-seen Amazon tribe for six months

Brazil Piripkura tribe

Brasilia, BrazilReuters The only two known male members of the Piripkura tribe in Brazil live in isolation on ancestral lands the size of Luxembourg in the Amazon rainforest, resisting decades of invasion by loggers and cattle ranchers. Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency Funai renewed a protection order on Friday for the 242,500-hectare area in western Mato […]

“We are being squeezed”, says prize-winning Amazon Indigenous activist

Alessandra Munduruku

Sao Paulo, BrazilThomson Reuters Foundation Alessandra Munduruku, a leader of Brazil’s Munduruku Indigenous community, has seen her home broken into and been threatened over her work defending her people and their Amazon land from illegal miners and loggers, hydropower plants and other threats. On Thursday, the 36-year-old received the Robert F Kennedy 2020 Human Rights Award for “her work […]

US missionary exposed tribe in Brazil to risk of death, government says

Thomson Reuters Foundation An American missionary operating in Brazil has exposed an isolated indigenous tribe to disease and possibly death, the Brazilian government’s Indigenous Affairs Department (FUNAI) said on Wednesday. Steve Campbell, an American Christian missionary, entered the area occupied by the Hi-Merimã tribe last month, one of the few dozen tribes in Brazil that […]