The Amazon’s Largest Isolated Tribe Is Dying

YANOMAMI INDIGENOUS TERRITORY, Brazil — The illegal tin mine was so remote that, for three years, the massive gash it cut into the Amazon rainforest had gone largely ignored.

So when three mysterious helicopters suddenly hovered overhead, unannounced, the miners living there scrambled into the forest.

By the time Brazil’s environmental special forces team piled out, the miners were out of sight, but the mine’s two large pumps were still vibrating in the mud. The federal agents began dousing the machines in diesel fuel.

As they were set to ignite them, about two-dozen Indigenous people came jogging out of the forest, carrying bows and arrows taller than them. They were from the Yanomami tribe, and the miners had been destroying their land — and their tribe — for years.

But as the Yanomami arrived, they realized these new visitors were there to help. The agents were dismantling the mine and then promised to give the Yanomamis the miners’ supplies.

“Friends are not miners, no,” said the only Yanomami man who spoke basic Portuguese, with other men crowding around.

An explosion of illegal mining in this vast swath of the Amazon has created a humanitarian crisis for the Yanomami people, cutting their food supplies, spreading malaria and, in some cases, threatening the Yanomamis with violence, according to government scientists and officials.

The miners use mercury to separate gold from mud, and recent analyses show that Yanomami rivers contain mercury levels 8,600 percent higher than what is considered safe. Mercury poisoning can cause birth defects and neurological damage.

The infant mortality rate among the 31,000 Yanomamis in Brazil now exceeds those of war-torn and famine-stricken countries, with one in 10 infants dying, compared with about one in 100 in the rest of the country, according to government data. Many of those deaths are avoidable, caused by malnutrition, malaria, pneumonia, and other illnesses.

“Lots of diarrhea, vomiting,” said the Yanomami man at the mine, who would not give a name. “No health, no help, nothing.”

But now Brazil’s new leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has made saving the Yanomamis his top priority in his push to halt the Amazon’s destruction. The government declared a state of emergency in January and has airlifted severely malnourished people out of villages, set up a checkpoint at a major waterway into the territory and hunted and destroyed active mines.

While the miners began arriving in 2016, the crisis erupted under the right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro, who after being elected in 2018, cut staffing and funding for the agencies tasked with protecting the forest.

The area illegally mined in the lush Yanomami territory quadrupled during his tenure to nearly 20 square miles, or roughly the size of Manhattan, according to satellite data.

“On the one hand, you’re happy because you’re fighting environmental crimes again,” said Felipe Finger, the head of Brazil’s environmental special forces team, who led the operation at the tin mine. “On the other hand, it’s sad, because it’s been four years since the forest began bleeding — and it bled a lot.”

The government is fighting a literal gold rush. Thousands of prospectors have invaded the land for gold and other precious metals, with a productive dig site yielding roughly 11 pounds of pure gold a week, or about $300,000 on the local black market. Researchers estimate that there are hundreds of active mines in Yanomami land.

For their part, the Yanomamis at the mine had never heard of Mr. Lula or Mr. Bolsonaro, but they were clear that the miners had brought hardship. “People is hungry,” the Yanomami man said, as Mr. Finger lit the rumbling pumps on fire.

At the cabin, they also discovered a miner who had lingered too long.

Edmilson Dias said he had been working at the mine for two months, originally arriving via helicopter, and made $1,000 a week. Now he was sitting on a stump, his hands behind his back, two camouflaged agents with long rifles at his side.

Yet he remained defiant.

“To tell you the truth, I’ll leave here and go to another mine,” he said, saying the money was too good to stop.

It underscored that the government and Yanomamis’ fight against the miners had only just begun.

“Mining is a fever,” he said. “You can’t end it.”

‘Worse Than It Ever Was’

Instead of months, the Yanomamis count moons, and instead of years, they track the harvests of the pupunha fruit. Evidence suggests they have lived in the Amazon for thousands of harvests. And unlike many other Indigenous groups, their way of life still bears some resemblance to that of their ancestors.

Across 370 remote forest villages, multiple families share large domed huts, but tend their own plots of cassava, bananas and papaya. The men hunt and the women farm. And they do not interact much with the outside world.

Their first sustained contact with white people, American missionaries, came in the 1960s. Shortly after, more Brazilians arrived, carried deeper into the Amazon by new roads and an appetite for gold. With contact came new diseases, and thousands of Yanomamis died.

Things got worse in the 1980s when a gold rush brought more illness and violence. In response, in 1992, the Brazilian government protected about 37,000 square miles of the forest along the border with Venezuela for the Yanomamis, creating Brazil’s largest Indigenous territory, an expanse larger than Portugal.

But by 2018, as Mr. Bolsonaro ran for president, prospectors were already rushing in again, driven by rising gold prices. Illegal mining soared — and Mr. Bolsonaro’s administration largely watched.

“In the last four years, we have seen apathy, perhaps intentional,” said Alisson Marugal, a federal prosecutor investigating the Bolsonaro administration’s handling of the Yanomami territory. “They failed to act, aware that they were allowing a humanitarian crisis to happen.”

Mr. Marugal’s office accuses Mr. Bolsonaro’s government of weakening the Indigenous health care system, exacerbating the crisis. Health workers were sometimes blocked from buying food for the Yanomamis, his office said in a complaint in November 2021. The government had previously decided it should provide 23 doctors for the Yanomamis, but by late 2021, there were 12.

Mr. Bolsonaro has said his government carried out 20 operations to aid Indigenous groups, helping 449,000 people. “Never has a government given so much attention and means to the Indigenous people as Jair Bolsonaro,” he wrote on Twitter in January.

Today, the plight of many Yanomami children is unmistakable: They are starving. Their skeletons are visible through their skin, their faces gaunt and their bellies swollen, a telltale sign of malnourishment. A recent government study found that 80 percent of Yanomami children were below average height and 50 percent were underweight.

Dr. Paulo Basta, a government physician who has studied the Yanomamis for 25 years, said malnutrition among Yanomami children “is worse than it ever was.’’

During the Bolsonaro administration, 570 Yanomami children died of avoidable causes, such as malnutrition, diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria, up from 441 in the previous four years, according to data compiled by a Brazilian environmental-news site, Sumaúma. (The government has not kept consistent, accurate records.)

Scientists and researchers say the health crisis has a clear cause. The mining clears trees, disrupts waterways and transforms the landscape, scaring away prey and hurting crops. The mines’ standing water breeds mosquitoes, which help spread malaria that the miners bring in from the cities. The disease had once been largely rooted out among the Yanomamis. In recent years, virtually every member of the tribe has had it. And then there is the mercury seeping into the ground and the rivers.

At a children’s hospital in Boa Vista, Brazil, a city outside the Yanomami territory, Yanomami families crowded into a room with 12 hammocks strung from the ceiling. Some children were being treated for severe malnourishment, others for malaria.

A young mother in a hammock breastfed her 8-month-old daughter, who weighed just six pounds. The girl was receiving a blood transfusion and a feeding tube. Crops in the village were failing, her father said. “It’s difficult to get them to sprout,” a translator relayed. “He said he doesn’t know why.”

‘I Sell It to Whomever’

At a nearby restaurant, Eric Silva reached over a table with a nearly half-pound chunk of solid gold. Mr. Silva, a gold trader, had bought it that day for roughly $10,000. The government, he said, would never be able to stop the hunt for such wealth.

“It’s a cultural thing,” he said. “Since Brazil’s founding, ore has been extracted.”

Mr. Silva spent 22 years as a miner, until the government burned his machinery, costing him $115,000. But now he has reinvented himself, and buys and sells about nine pounds of gold a month, or about $230,000 on the black market.

“I sell it to whomever arrives and pays the best price,” he said. “I’ve sold gold to the Americans, to the French. I don’t know where they take it, but I know I sell it.”

While Yanomamis are dying, the gold industry is thriving. All mining is illegal in Roraima, the state that includes much of the Yanomami land, but the streets of Boa Vista are lined with gold shops.

At the start of the government’s operation against miners in January, officials estimated there were up to 20,000 people connected to illegal mining inside the Yanomami territory, including miners, cooks, pilots and prostitutes. During the gold rush in the same land 30 years ago, it took the government years to extract all the miners.

Mr. Finger’s special forces team now leads the battle to run illegal miners off Indigenous land. On the recent trip into the forest, they found a recently abandoned gold mine and the active mine harvesting cassiterite, the main ore to make tin. At both, the main goal was to destroy the expensive machinery.

They also were looking for mercury, and at the miners’ cabin, Mr. Finger found it. He emerged angry, holding a small bottle of the shiny liquid. Mr. Dias, the miner who had lingered, was nonchalant. “That’s not much, sir,” he said.

The agents instructed the Yanomami people, who had been watching, to help clear the cabin. They piled bags of flour, rice and beans alongside clothes, pillows and cookware. Then they carried everything, including a large speaker, back to their huts.

The agents lit the cabin on fire, boarded the helicopters and took off. Mr. Dias was left behind, without supplies.

On the ride out, spirals of smoke rose from below. It then quickly became clear that the mine was part of a much longer string of destruction, open pit after open pit. On each side was thick forest — cleared in some spots to make room for a Yanomami shelter.

André Spigariol contributed reporting from Brasília.