At the end of last month a Brazilian helicopter pilot and a labourer were charged with various offences including disembarking without the consent of an Immigration Officer and breaches of the Civil Aviation Act. Under normal circumstances this might not be considered a particularly riveting item of news were it not for the fact that the two were held at an illegal Brazilian mining camp in Guyana’s New River Triangle, an environmentally protected area.
This development comes in a certain context. Earlier in the month the Brazilian government had sent in agents of the environmental protection and indigenous affairs agencies backed by military personnel to evict more than 20,000 illegal miners from the country’s Yanomami reservation. In the initial phase of the exercise Reuters reported that they had arrested and removed dozens of miners, and had set fire to wooden shacks as well as a hangar housing a plane at a clandestine airstrip. They also destroyed a bulldozer and seized weapons, boats, generators, internet antennas, freezers, a tonne of food and drums containing 1,320 gallons of fuel.
It was not just damage to the environment which was a problem. The miners had also been accused of committing genocide against the Yanomami people who were going hungry and could not get access to healthcare because the well-armed miners scared away medical workers from the health post, and prevented people from bringing in supplies of medicine and food. As a result children were dying from malnutrition and other diseases brought by gold-mining. Among these was mercury poisoning caused by the contamination of the rivers and by extension the fish which the indigenous people ate. One doctor described the area as looking like a “concentration camp”.
Subsequent reports described dozens of Yanomami children being hospitalised in Boa Vista, “with relatives in hammocks holding their emaciated frames in scenes that underscore the gravity of a public health crisis”, as one reporter described it. According to the Director of Survival International, the Yanomami hardly ever suffer from malnutrition in normal circumstances. “Their forests are bountiful,” she said, “and they are experts at growing, gathering and hunting everything they need, and they enjoy excellent health.”
The problem in its current form began with the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro who advocated mining on protected indigenous lands and who ignored the invasions of their reservations not just by miners but also by illegal loggers. It is President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva who has now reversed that policy and begun the process of evicting the wildcat miners. While this is commendable, there may be consequences for neighbouring states. Giving the background to the relationship between the miners and the Yanomami, Reuters said that the minerals on their lands had long attracted the attention of wildcat miners, who were able to gain access after the Brazilian government built a road through the Amazon in the 1970s.
It was in 1992 that Yanomami territory was accorded official recognition and demarcated, following which thousands of gold miners were evicted. At some point after that there was a Brazilian mining invasion of the neighbouring Yanomami territory in Venezuela. Caracas asked Brasilia for help to get their nationals to leave, but the Brazilian government of the time told the Venezuelans in so many words it was not their problem. In the end the Venezuelan government had to send in a large contingent of military to expel them.
It was in the 1990s that Guyanese started to hear about Brazilian wildcat miners, usually referred to here by the Portuguese appellation of garimpeiros, and it is likely there is a connection with the Venezuelan expulsions. It might be noted that they also made their appearance in even greater numbers in French Guiana and Suriname in the same period. And now this time around news agencies are reporting that some of the miners who are leaving the Brazilian Yanomami reservation “are expected to head across the border into neighbouring French Guiana, Suriname and Guyana.”
Which brings us to the New River story, which has echoes on a minuscule scale of what has been described from Yanomami territory. The GDF reported that on February 19 two officers and 27 ranks conducted an “intelligence-led operation” in the Triangle where they found a helicopter which was delivering food, as well as one shotgun, 10 cellphones, a generator, mining equipment, passports, ID cards and a Bank card. The least that can be said is that it was a well-resourced enterprise. The army confiscated the equipment and destroyed the camp and the mining tunnel. It is not the first time, of course, that illegal mining operations have been found in this area, although it has never been a common occurrence.
But the problem of garimpeiro intrusions extends beyond the New River to encompass an area much better traversed. Another operation was conducted at Marudi Mountain involving the Guyana Police Force and a mines officer from GGMC. According to a release the objective was to follow up on the influx of illegal mining by Brazilian nationals as well as the security of miners within the camp, the problem of illegal firearms and narcotics and the maintenance of order.
It did not appear from the release that all the issues the police investigated were associated with the Brazilian presence, and Commander Raphael Rose who led the operation said he saw the need of establishing a security firm on the site so order could be maintained and miners’ production could be protected from illegal miners and other unauthorized people.
There was no mention of any move to evict the Brazilians.
It must be said that Marudi Mountain is in any case a problem mining location, and that last year the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination wrote to Guyana requesting a response to allegations of rights violations relating to two indigenous peoples, one of which was the Wapichan. UNCERD said it had received information that the government had concluded an agreement with a company as well as the Rupununi Miners Association allowing for the expansion of mining activities at Marudi Mountain without first consulting and seeking the consent of the Wapichan. The area is sacred to the indigenous people, and is important because several rivers originate in that region.
Among other things, the Committee said the government should consider suspending the mining project on Marudi Mountain until free, prior and informed consent is granted by the Wapichan. The government was given until July 15 last year to respond, although whether it did so or not or requested an extension is not clear. Whatever the case, considering what is going on at Marudi Mountain, the Wapichan have reason to be extra concerned, especially now there is the added dimension of garimpeiro intrusion, which as said earlier does not appear to have been dealt with. If so it is a dangerous dereliction reflecting badly on the competence of the authorities.
No one knows exactly how many Brazilians are in the country either legally or illegally, although their presence in Georgetown had come to public attention long before the advent of the Cubans and Venezuelans here. Some years ago it had been alleged that garimpeiros in our interior were particularly associated with guns and the distribution of narcotics, although one suspects the situation may be more complicated now. Whatever the case in the past, Guyana is in no position to withstand a garimpeiro invasion now; apart from anything else, it does not have a military the size of the Venezuelan one which could deal with numbers.
As was pointed out earlier, what facilitated the destruction of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and the assault on indigenous lands was the building of the road through the Amazon in the 1970s. Our government does not have a habit of looking at future possibilities and gauging risk, so it too is steaming ahead with the road to Lethem which will serve heavy goods traffic to and from NE Brazil, and which drives right through the Iwokrama Rainforest Reserve. It will attract elements of all kinds, including miners, Brazilian and otherwise, who among other things will penetrate our interior. It might be observed en passant that a railway would have been a safer option, but the government was not prepared to explore that possibility.
That aside, there is a lesson to be learned from the Amazon road, and particularly from the experience of the Yanomami people. Garimpeiros in any number have no respect for the local inhabitants, particularly indigenous ones, of any area they occupy. They are armed, they have resources and they believe they have rights anywhere they settle. Guyana cannot confront them en masse so she has to be particularly vigilant about her southern border, which is virtually an open back door. They may trickle in at first while they explore the possibilities, and they have to be stopped at that stage. Nothing was said by the GDF about how they located the camp in the New River Triangle, except that it was intelligence led, whatever that implies.
The government and the military have to put something in place to secure the frontier in the south, not to mention when the Lethem road goes through. That has not happened yet, however, and in the meantime the security forces have to work out a strategy for preventing garimpeiro incursions. It is a very long border, of course, and government agencies together with the indigenous people cannot monitor all of it. In this age of technology one wonders if the government is exploring the possibility of employing drones, which potentially, one imagines, could oversee some more inaccessible areas. In situations like these the old adage applies: Forewarned is forearmed.
