Narco-miners challenge government in Yanomami territory
In a single week, at least 14 people were murdered inside the indigenous territory, including a member of Brazil’s largest criminal organization – First Capital Command (PCC). In retaliation, the faction has sent out a message telling its members to target police and federal agents.
SUMAÚMA receives an honorable mention in human rights journalism award for the story ‘Forest defenders demand more protection’
Flooded homes, food insecurity, restricted access to health care, and no prospects for the future—this is the undignified situation for people who defend the Amazon from powerful enemies while enduring death threats and receiving insufficient protection from official programs
Ribeirinho Territory under attack from far right
A joint campaign by Altamira’s ruralists and Bolsonaro-supporting senators has helped Norte Energia to delay resettlement of traditional populations expelled by Belo Monte
‘With each passing year, climate events grow more extreme.’
A Rio Branco--based journalist who covers the impact of global heating, reports on his personal distress when the São Francisco, a tributary of the Acre River, flooded his street and home last month
The doctors punished for an indigenous health revolution
Deise Alves and Cláudio Esteves created a healthcare model that saved the Yanomami in the 1990s and early 2000s. But because they denounced illegal miners, their reputations have been destroyed and they are being asked to pay millions of reais to the government
Exclusive: Bolsonaro government knew of Yanomami crisis in 2020
A document sent to the Ministry of Health reported violence, illness, drugs and alcohol in the village of Kayanau. The government failed to respond.
Pro-mining mayor defies government and reality
The Amazonian municipality of Itaituba is a centre of illegal gold prospecting, which puts it firmly in the sights of the federal government's crackdown on polluting activity inside indigenous territory. The pro-mining mayor Valmir Climaco response has been to deny the existence of indigenous lands, despite hundreds of years of evidence to the contrary.
“Our lives are over”: The Yanomami villages devastated by mining
Residents of three regions invaded by criminal gold prospectors reveal how their communities have been destroyed by contamination, violence and prostitution. Their accounts highlight the disruption caused by the state's failure of care.
The struggle to retake Yanomami territory from criminal control
After four years of malign negligence by the Bolsonaro government, the territory is experiencing a continual removal of dead, or extremely sick, Indigenous people, and a still uncertain plan to expel thousands of illegal, heavily armed, miners
‘Everybody has mercury poisoning—children, old people, pregnant women.’
This is life in Katõ Village, in the Munduruku Indigenous Territory, one of the lands hardest hit by illegal mining. If such mercury contamination were detected in a wealthy neighborhood in an urban area of Brazil, how would the State and the press react?
