The displacement of the Yanomami: a struggle for human and natural diversity 

Written By Lucrezia Santa Maria
The Displacement of the Yanonami

For centuries, the Yanomami community has lived in a vast area in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest, stretching across Brazil and Venezuela, following their autochthonous cultural practices in harmony with the surrounding environment. Yet, for the past four decades, they have been struggling for their survival and the preservation of  their lands, formally recognized as an indigenous protected land under Brazilian law, that was ruthlessly occupied by gold miners. What was a peaceful co-habitation between the community and the surroundings became both a humanitarian and environmental crisis. In this context, criminal networks, with the full compliance of the Brazilian government (especially during the Bolsonaro administration) are to be held accountable. 

The Gold Rush 

The Yanomami community is now at the centre of Brazil's fourth Gold Rush, after the ones that occurred between the 1970s and 1990s. According to the journalistic report Yanomami Blood Gold series (1), conducted by the two media groups Amazonia Real and Réporter Brazil in 2021, the Gold Rushes were sustained by a criminal network controlled by gangs, colluding with government employees and politicians, that starts from mines operating in the territory and ends in luxurious jewellery stores. In terms of numbers, the Hutukara Yanomami Association registered 20,000 gold miners (known as garimpeiros) in March 2021.

As remarked by the title of a Guardian article, Bolsonaro’s election in 2018  was catastrophic news for Brazilian indigenous tribes. In his populist-neoliberal, anti-environmental and anti-indigenous political discourse, indigenous populations were an impediment for the development of the Brazilian nation. In what is a colonial logic of expropriation, his dehumanising rhetoric was a greenlight to exploit the Yanomami cultural heritage, land, and assets, on which the community relies. According to the Guardian, it also paved the way to the elimination of indigenous land rights and empowerment of mining corporations. 

Brazilian Law is ambiguous in relation to gold mining in the Amazon, especially because there are different land statuses, each presenting its own regulations. The Law gives the government the power to grant permits and conditions to miners, even though these often violate International Law (2). However, the law allegedly limits mining to fifty hectares for five years, and requires the restoration of degraded land. Bolsonaro’s policies resulted in the systematic removal of constraints and facilitation of the authorization process of prospectors’ activities. For example, in February 2022, the former Brazilian president issued two decrees aiming at de-regularising mining operations in the Amazon, by loosening the criterias for analysing permit requests for mining, reducing environmental oversight (3). This led to an increasing deregulation of mining activities, in which illegal miners and criminal networks were free to operate in what was discursively constructed as a ‘no man’s land’.


The Persistence of the Brazilian Colonial legacy 

Bolsonaro’s stance in relation to the indigenous communities of the Brazilian Amazon, far from being new, is the outcome of a long colonial legacy. Indigenous communities and territories have been the target of colonial violence and exploitation since the imperial encounter with the Portuguese in the 1620s. The Amazon was colonised and governed as a separate territory from the rest of the country, while indigenous communities were constructed as inferior subjects of colonial domination. They were deprived of a legal and ethical stance, considered in between barbarism and civilisation and, therefore, made vulnerable to practices of discipline and annihilation. Here is where the struggle of Indigenous communities for land ownership and free existence began (4). The independence of Brazil in 1822 did not result in any substantial changes for these populations. On the contrary, the construction of the Brazilian state largely reflected a form of modern and colonial thinking, reproducing homogeneous accounts of the nation, remarking a differential and violently exclusionary logic towards those that did not conform to the nation’s cultural and ethnic lines. The conscious construction of the nation as a universal entity and model for political development was paralleled by an exclusionary process, in which certain strata of society became a threat to national security and development. This is what the Peruvian philosopher Annibal Quijano referred to as ‘coloniality of power’, describing the idea that the legitimation of hegemonic and unequal power structures are the outcome of a process of anti-historicity in which past episodes of violence and tutelage are consciously ignored (5). 

The military regime, which gained power in 1964, largely reinforced a colonial exclusionary logic towards Indigenous subjectivities. The national security doctrine, stressing the binomial ‘development and security’, underlined  the creation of institutions with the aim to solve the ‘Indian Question’. In 1967 the FUNAI, the National Indigenous People Foundation, was created and Law 6,001/73 was passed, relying on the principle that Indians were “relatively incapable” and, therefore, needed protection by the state (6). This patronising principle underlined Indigenous People as outsiders that had to be assimilated to the Brazilian body politic. What it practically did was to accommodate the interests of non-indigenous people, often granting permissions for illegal mining in the Amazon. Despite the 1988 Constitution being significant in recognising Indigenous rights, Amazonian communities continued to suffer from systematic exploitation and violence. In 2007 the United Nations Declaration on the RIghts of Indigenous Peoples recognised the right of Indigenous communities to determine their own destiny, their political status, and their own economic, social, and cultural development. This was a crucial achievement for the Indigenous resistance against assimilation and neo-colonial economic exploitation. 

It is the very discursive construction of indigenous people and territories as inferior beings and emptied spaces that Bolsonaro embraced from the very beginning of his electoral campaign. The former Brazilian president often referred to Indigenous people with an explicit inferiorizing and racist rhetoric, and accommodated the interests of the three major power institutions of the state: the rurals, the military, and the evangelicals, all interested in violating indigenous properties and having free hands on the indigenous culture and soil. Ruralists, in particular, gained relevant political strength with the constitution of one of the biggest parliamentary lobbying groups, the Parliamentary Agricultural Front (FPA). The group, together with sectors linked to mining companies, has taken a hardline position against the demarcation of indigenous lands and in favour of the revision of the status of already legally demarcated areas to freely exploit the soil for business purposes. It is, therefore, this large interest group that Bolsonaro is supporting in its attempts to dismantle laws that protect the environment and the ethnic integrity of populations living in the Amazon. 

FUNAI itself, coherently with the purpose for which it was constituted, is implicated in making indigenous communities more vulnerable. This was evident especially when, in May 2021, it allowed for deleting a part of the Normative n.01/2021 policy document, leading to the violation of the constitutional principle of exclusive usufruct guaranteed to Indigenous People in the 1988 Federal Constitution. Consequently, non-indigenous organisations and corporations are left free to carry out their mining and agribusiness operations in Indigenous lands. Some of Bolsonaro’s attempts to defend corporations’ interests have been stopped by the strong advocacy of human rights groups and resistance of Indigenous Communities. However, from the moment of his election, it was immediately clear that illegal mining and agribusiness would have become the new accepted reality in the Amazon. The Yanomami community was among the ones that paid the highest price. In fact, according to the journalistic report, 2,430 hectares of land were destroyed by illegal mining. Large areas were deforested, rivers  and air contaminated by mercury, and the indigenous population is currently at risk of extinction due to diseases, hunger, and direct killings perpetrated by garimpeiros. CNN reported 570 deaths due to hunger alone over the past four years (7). Women were raped and social unrest diffused, as attested by the UN (8). Cultural and natural destruction are deeply linked in the case of the Yanomami and other indigenous communities of the Amazon, who are facing the same struggle. 

Therefore, Bosolnaro’s political discourse is explicitly neocolonial as it attempts not only to violate human and land rights in the name of economic development, but is immediately committed in the construction of Indigenous as hierarchically inferior beings, whose social, cultural, and political exclusion and elimination is not only legitimate, but necessary for the prosperity of the dominant group. 


Yanomami ethics 

Yanomami people have a vital bond with the Amazonian habitat. They attribute the forest's spiritual and religious symbolism, as it is not only their source of livelihood, but also intertwined with the creation of their culture and society. Thus, for the Yanomami community, the respect of  biodiversity  has ethical connotations as they owe it to the flourishing of their culture. According to the UN, “nature and life are inseparable for indigenous peoples” and, therefore, the protection of their cultural heritage is interlinked with the protection of the land they live on (9). This is why the Yanomami have been deemed “guardians of the Amazon rainforest”, a title representing their respectful cohabitation with their natural environment. Because of their beliefs, the human rights of the Yanomami people cannot be guaranteed, unless those of the Amazonian rainforest are respected too. 

Bolsonaro administration’s  policies  reveal the essence of a developmentalist paradigm, in which cultural distinctiveness as well as biodiversity are disregarded as an impediment in the path towards economic progress. The government, which should be accountable for the protection of Brazilian  citizens’ rights, became their exploiter, yielding to the power of economic corporations, accumulating money over the rights of indigenous communities and the health of the Amazon rainforest. 


The Lula administration’s attempts to restore harmony 
Lula’s administration has promised that it would act to preserve the Amazon’s natural richness and indigenous rights from what the current president has defined as a ‘genocide’ perpetrated by Bolsonaro against them. Two international indigenous activists were nominated ministers in the new government. Marina Silva was appointed Minister of Environment, while Sonia Guajajara is leading the first ever Ministry for indigenous Peoples. In The World’s view, the new ministry is considered a great step towards the empowerment of Brazil’s indigenous peoples. Also, the call for a ‘new democratic ecosystem’ recognizes both human security and natural preservation as cornerstones (10). The ministry will now have jurisdiction over FUNAI, Brazil’s government indigenous affairs department whose closure was threatened by Bolsonaro, while an executive order was signed to relaunch a billion-dollar Amazon fund. Lula’s government is also in the process of recognising hundreds of Indigenous territories, providing them with legal protection that bans non-indigenous people from engaging in economic activities in these lands. 


The new administration’s agenda was welcomed as, in the words of the activist Ingrid Sateré Mawé, “an historic moment to rewrite the history of the indigenous peoples of Brazil”. It is, in fact, certainly a crucial responsibility assumption by the government on what for now has been a situation of systematic exploitation and violence, protecting a restricted, though, powerful business complex. The new government seems to believe that development does not come out of exploitation, but, following Amartya Sen, greater inclusion is necessary, not only between people but also between humans and the environment they live in (11). 


As argued, the administration’s new right-based agenda necessitates a broad cultural change to achieve its stated purposes, recognising the long colonial legacy that described the violent relation between Indigenous peoples and the Brazilian nation. In fact, if it is, as Quijano argued, a process of historical amnesia that underlies the coloniality of power and the violence that goes with it, a revaluation of Indigenous communities’ historical and cultural dignity is the first step to end the ongoing humanitarian and environmental crisis.


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Lucrezia Santa Maria
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