The area, part of the Yanomami Indigenous Territory, is rich in gold, diamonds and minerals – and illegal miners want a piece of it. In all, there are an estimated 20,000 illegal miners on the land.

“It’s got worse in the past few years,” Maurício says, explaining that during the pandemic, the number of planes, helicopters and boats linked to illegal mining increased.

He’s only 35, but it’s the younger generation that concerns him – boys increasingly being lured into illegal work.

“The young people are the best boat drivers,” he says. They can earn as much as 10,000 Brazilian reais ($2,140; £1,645) for a single trip.

Maurício has come to Brasilia to take part in the Free Land Camp, an annual event that brings together indigenous communities looking to defend their land rights.

On Brasilia’s main esplanade, a grand avenue that leads to Congress and the presidential palace, communities from across the country have erected hundreds of tents.

Milling around the camp are indigenous Brazilians, many of them wearing feathered headdresses, intricate beaded jewellery and painted with geometric tattoos identifying their tribe.

This year, the event has taken on an even bigger meaning.

President Jair Bolsonaro has made it his mission to push economic development in the Amazon. In his latest attempt to make inroads into indigenous territories, he has cited the war in Ukraine. Brazil relies heavily on imported fertilisers for its agribusiness industry – more than 90% of its fertilisers come from abroad, and Russia is its most important partner.

“A good opportunity arose for us,” Mr Bolsonaro said of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He has argued that by mining in indigenous territories, Brazil can build more of its own potassium reserves.

It’s an argument questioned by some experts.

“Only 11% of the reserves are inside indigenous lands and other states like São Paulo and Minas have reserves,” says politician Joenia Wapichana, the first indigenous woman voted into Congress in 2018. “It’s a false narrative that tries to confuse the minds of the Brazilians, making them believe it’s important, that people won’t have food on their table.”

Also, it’s not a short-term fix.

“From a technological and environmental perspective, the licences needed and the infrastructure – it all takes time. Being able to offer these products to the Brazilian market would probably take seven to 10 years,” says Suzi Huff, Prof of Geology at the University of Brasilia. “We’re talking about an extremely sensitive area in which care needs to be taken. It’s false to say that it will solve Brazil’s problems.”

In pictures: A glimpse of Yanomami life in the jungle
Illegal gold miners stalk Amazon as authorities look away
The bill has been in the works since 2020. But last month, the lower house voted to consider it under emergency provisions, removing the need for committee debates.

“It’s very clearly blackmail,” says Prof Huff. “Bolsonaro saw an opportunity to continue with this project of allowing mineral exploration including in indigenous lands and used the scarcity of fertilisers in Brazil to move forward with this project.”

It was expected to be voted on in the lower house this week, but that hasn’t happened – and few believe, in this election year, that it will. Not even the big players in the industry agree with it, with the Brazilian Institute of Mining last month saying it was a bill “not suitable for its intended purposes”, and calling for broader debate.

While a delay in voting is seen as a relief by indigenous leaders, it’s still a challenge on the ground.

“A fiery political discourse encourages invasions in indigenous lands,” says Joenia Wapichana. “The fact that Bolsonaro says he supports mining, that he will regulate mining in indigenous lands already exposes the indigenous people and makes them more vulnerable.”

The discourse is, of course, deeply political, especially with elections around the corner. On Tuesday, former president Lula da Silva – and the man leading in the polls to win October’s vote – made a visit to the camp.

“Today the headlines are about a government that doesn’t have scruples when it comes to offending and attacking the indigenous communities who are already on this land,” he said.

The response was huge cheers of “out with Bolsonaro” – but there are still six months until the elections. And this is Brazil – much can change in politics here, and the future of Brazil’s indigenous tribes is more uncertain than ever.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-61093258

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See video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=aixf5IrTh0c&feature=emb_logo

Source: https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20200914-up-in-smoke-brazil-s-pantanal-region-engulfed-by-flames

The post Up in smoke: Brazil’s Pantanal region engulfed by flames first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The fires that burned through the Amazon rainforest last month sparked international outcry and offers of help, but as world leaders meet in New York, the planet’s largest rainforest remains engulfed in flames.

The latest satellite data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) shows 131,600 fires burning since January within the country, where 60 percent of the Amazon lies.

The fires, which are mostly caused by humans with the goal of clearing land for farming and cattle ranching, are having a grievous effect on the forest: the rate of deforestation in the Amazon has nearly doubled since far-right President Jair Bolsonaro came to power on January 1, with the equivalent of 110 football fields of land being cleared every hour.

“It’s sad to see Brazilians attacking me for fires in the Amazon, as if they hadn’t always existed,” Bolsonaro wrote on Facebook Thursday.

We “remain below the average of the last 15 years. But I’m accused of being a Nero, who sets fires everywhere.”

Yet fires are at a seven-year high, according to INPE data, and despite a slight drop at the start of the month, the number of active fires recorded in Brazil from the start of the year to September 19 was up 56 percent over the same period in 2018. Nearly half of the blazes are in the Amazon.

Smokes rise from forest fires in Altamira, in Brazilian the Amazon basin state of Para, in late August 2019

Bolsonaro is a climate change skeptic, but last month he sent soldiers to help put out fires in the Amazon region after Brazil came under criticism at the G7 summit, with the host French President Emmanuel Macron among the most outspoken detractors.

Under that deployment, which was renewed Friday for another month, nearly 7,000 soldiers and 16 aircraft are fighting both the flames and “deforestation and illegal mining,” Brazil’s defense ministry said.

‘I’m going to get hit’

Marcio Astrini, a Greenpeace official in Brazil, said the deployment is making little difference.

“We did a lot of fly-overs. We did not see anything happening on the ground, apart from the deforestation that is progressing. It’s tragic,” he told AFP.

Experts sent by the United States, logistical equipment from Japan, and four aircraft from Chile are all fighting the blazes, while firefighters sent from Israel have departed, the defense ministry said.

A forest wildfire spreads onto a farm in the municipality of Nova Santa Helena, in Brazil’s Mato Grosso state, in the southern Amazon basin region

Bolsonaro, however, has blanched at other international offers to help put out the fires, rejecting $20 million from the G7 and accusing members France and Germany of “buying” Brazil’s sovereignty.

On Monday, Macron will launch a “call for mobilization” on the Amazon together with his counterparts Sebastian Pinera of Chile and Ivan Duque of Colombia during a meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.

Brazil won’t attend the meeting, but Environment Minister Ricardo Salles, also a climate change skeptic, will appear at the UN’s climate summit on Monday, before traveling to Europe.

On Tuesday, Bolsonaro will make the opening speech at the UN General Assembly, in which he is expected to focus on the Amazon.

“I am preparing a rather objective speech, unlike my predecessor,” he wrote on Facebook, adding, “I’m going to get hit, you can be sure. The media always finds something to complain about.”

Loss of forest cover and Co2 emissions in countries that share the Amazon river basin between 2001 and 2018

No end in sight

Environmental groups have little faith that Bolsonaro will change tack.

The government “wants to show that it is doing the best for the forest. In fact, it is doing its utmost for deforestation,” said Greenpeace’s Astrini.

“Brazil is running a campaign to show that it is taking care of the Amazon. It’s a lie,” he said.

And there’s little to suggest that the fires are abating.

Between September 18 and 19, the number of forest fires in Rondonia state jumped to 242 from 12 just the day before, an increase of 1,915 percent, according to the INPE.

Smoke billows from a burning tree trunk near Porto Velho, in the western-central Brazilian Amazon basin state of Rondonia

Fears are also rising over the number of blazes in the Cerrado savanna, which account for a third of all the fires in Brazil.

And on Friday the World Wide Fund for Nature warned of an “emergency situation in the biome” of the Pantanal wetland.

Fires have risen 351 percent since January in the Pantanal region, some 90 percent of which were set illegally.

Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-09-global-leaders-amazon-rainforest.html

The post As global leaders meet, the Amazon rainforest burns first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.