Indigenous man shot dead by miners in Brazil: police

Indigenous man shot dead by miners in Brazil: police
by AFP Staff Writers
Brasilia (AFP) April 30, 2023

Brazilian authorities were investigating Sunday the death of an Indigenous man who they say was shot by miners illegally encroaching on territory belonging to the Yanomami people.

The incident, which occurred Saturday in the northern state of Roraima, also left two people injured, according to the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples (MPI).

"With much regret, we learned of the gun attack by illegal miners on three Indigenous Yanomami," the ministry said on its official Instagram page.

"One dead and two others receiving attention, in critical condition," the statement said.

The federal police, which are investigating the attack, confirmed that "Indigenous people confronted and exchanged fire with miners," with three Yanomami people shot, one fatally.

According to the G1 news outlet, the person who died was a 36-year-old man who had been shot in the head.

"Two Federal Police teams traveled to the scene, in the Indigenous community of Uxiu, early Sunday morning to investigate what happened and to prevent any further potential hostilities," the force said in a statement.

The federal police said Sunday they were working to "identify, locate and capture the perpetrators" and that "the work to expel the invaders from Indigenous landed continues," while the MPI said they were also sending a team to Roraima state as reinforcements.

Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in February launched a police and military operation to force out thousands of miners illegally occupying protected reserves belonging to the Indigenous Yanomami people in the Amazon rainforest along the border with Venezuela, where gold prospectors are accused of sparking a humanitarian crisis.

"The situation of invaders in the Yanomami Indigenous lands goes back many years," the ministry added Sunday, saying the efforts to kick out the "invaders" was ongoing.

Yanomami leaders say some 20,000 clandestine miners have invaded their territory, killing Indigenous people, sexually abusing women and adolescents, and contaminating rivers with the mercury they use to separate gold from sediment.

Federal police are investigating possible acts of "genocide" against the Yanomami people, after Lula's government found earlier this year that at least 99 children under the age of five had died on Brazil's largest Indigenous reservation last year, mainly due to malnutrition, pneumonia and malaria.

And earlier this week, the government decreed six new Indigenous reserves, including a vast Amazon territory, after a freeze in such expansion under leftist Lula's far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro.